Zipadelli: Heat of moment often burns visible Stewart (cont'd)

"I've never really seen Coach fired up quite the way he was this week. For him to come on Saturday the way he did, I knew it was serious. And if we had to miss practice, I knew it was very serious," Hamlin said.

"He told us this is all about a team. He goes through this same thing with [NFL]players who don't like each other. He said, 'Regardless of whether you like each other or not -- you can hate each other outside the racetrack -- but when we're here, we've got to be teammates.' I like Tony as a person. But we have a working relationship, and that's what we're going to continue to build on."

Lap-by-Lap

Tony Stewart got by Matt Kenseth for good on Lap 233 and went on to win the USG Sheetrock 400 at Chicagoland.

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Zipadelli added: "We've put it behind us now. It was a little deal that got blown out of proportion. And when you really stop and think about it and you look back at it, the incident was a racing deal. It was how it was handled after. I think everybody's talked, everybody has hung out, everybody understands where the frustration was. And I think we're all going to work harder to be better teammates, and to be a better team."

Hamlin agreed, chuckling when he was asked if he thought Stewart would come through on Hamlin's earlier challenge to apologize publicly for criticizing him.

"I don't think Tony is going to make any kind of public apology. That's not him," the grinning Hamlin said.

"I think we chose to do it in a different way. Yeah, we talked. I told him that there was no way I was going to be convinced that I was wrong in that whole deal last week. He just vented his frustration, saying that it was many weeks coming, that he felt like I did things that agitated him. So I wanted to know what they were, and he told me -- and I tried to defend myself in those aspects as well. For the most part, I think we're going to be stronger now than what we were -- because we know how to race each other from now on."

Stewart insisted that the media made his spat with Hamlin a bigger deal than it really was, although Hamlin was visibly upset about it Friday and openly chose to vent his feelings to the press.

"It was a bigger drama with the media than it was with the teams, in all reality," Stewart said. "The good thing about Joe is Joe knows how to organize people and keep people motivated and keep them working together."

Although everyone involved declared Saturday's meeting a success, no one should be fooled into thinking that it suddenly will make Stewart a totally changed man. In fact, Zipadelli said that he has no intention of attempting to tame the passion that both fuels Stewart's competitive nature on the track and sometimes haunts him off it when he verbally blasts someone in the spur of the moment.

"I don't think you want to. We've helped him, or tried to in the past," Zipadelli said. "What we've tried to do is just tell him you can say anything you want; it's just all a matter of how you say it. He's gotten a lot better at some things; and at some things, he hasn't. That's part of life and growing up.

"I've got my faults, and I'm sure you've got yours. His just happens to be where the public eye sees them all the time. You and I can hide ours a lot better, because only a few people may pick up on our emotions or what maybe trips our trigger. You know what I mean? With him, the media is always there, they're always looking for it -- and when something happens, I think they make a bigger deal out of it with him than they do with other people because it's happened before. I don't know if that's fair or unfair; I just think that's the world in which we live. And you have to be able to accept that part of responsibility for actions in your life, if you're going to say 'em or do 'em."

David Caraviello contributed to this report.