KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Jeff Gordon never meant to wreck Martin Truex Jr., but on a physical, every-man-for-himself sort of day earlier this season at Infineon Raceway, he did it anyway. Battling for position with Juan Montoya, Gordon inadvertently gave Truex a shove that knocked him off the race course -- and ignited a series of events that concluded with the No. 56 car getting smashed up, the victim of a chain-reaction accident near the rear of the field.

Soon afterward, Gordon left Truex a voice-mail message, hoping to move past the incident. He never heard back. A few weeks ago, the two rode around the track together in the back of a pickup truck as part of driver introductions. They never spoke.

"I didn't expect anything any different," Gordon said at Kansas Speedway, where NASCAR's championship Chase continues Sunday. "I'm not one that goes out of my way to pick up the phone and call other people, and I don't expect people to call me. To me, I leave it at the race track. When something like that happens, I might not be happy about it if it happens toward me. I'll remember it and I just try to move on, run my races, but keep it in the back of my mind. I expect that's probably what most guys do."

Grudges, hurt feelings and occasional animosity are all part of the game in a high-pressure, high-stakes sport where performance is everything and cars sometimes bounce off one another like billiard balls. Reaching some kind of truce can be a delicate act, as Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick showed this week in the wake of their altercation in practice at Dover. The two spoke over the telephone prior to arriving in Kansas, and appear to have put any open hostility behind them.

But have they reached an agreement on the root of the issue between them? That might be going a little too far.

"I don't think there were any games. That was all pretty serious," said Harvick, who tattooed the back of the No. 11 car after Hamlin made some comments about the team of teammate Clint Bowyer. "I think everything was pretty serious as far as where we were coming from as a company and where we were coming from as a team. I think where Denny and I stand is very clear between the two of us as far as off the race track and on the race track. When it comes down to knowing what's right for your company and what's right for your team, those are two different things. Our team is excited and pumped up and we all feel like everything's clear."

It's all a delicate balance. Some drivers like to try and put issues behind them immediately, some like to wait. Sometimes agreements are reached, often times they're not. In many cases drivers just learn to coexist with one another despite their differences, sometimes in stony silence, sometimes keeping a little reminder in the back of their heads. There's no accepted etiquette, no formal process. Among NASCAR drivers, the peacemaking process can often be as tenuous as the peace itself.

"Is there like a 30-day waiting period? I don't know," said Brad Keselowski, who has had very public run-ins during the past two seasons with Hamlin and Carl Edwards. "I don't know if there's like a code of the schoolyard. It would be nice if there was like a handbook. That would make it a lot easier to figure out."

"It's a person-to-person thing," added 17-year veteran Jeff Burton. "Honestly, you deal with everybody and every situation differently. There's not a script that came with an owner's manual that tells you how to handle that situation. You just have to kind of feel your way through it. I think it depends on the personalities, it depends on what the history is, the willingness of the participants to move forward. Sometimes you just don't want to hear it and you don't want to move forward. You've had your opinion set, and you're not willing to change it. Sometimes there's a willingness to agree to disagree, and sometimes there's a willingness just to forget it and move on, and a lot of it is the incident and the personalities involved. It is clear though that once that wound is open, it's real easy to reopen and any little thing opens it back up pretty quickly." (Continued)