RELATED: See a photo timeline of the incident
JOLIET, Ill. — Any diplomacy among at least two of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup driver nations just found its way out the window.
With the dawn of the playoffs raising the competition and its associated pressures to a new level of intensity, Kevin Harvick and Jimmie Johnson provided an element of intrigue and a budding postseason rivalry Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway. Mid-race contact in the first of 10 playoff races stoked the hostilities, leaving Harvick with a wrecked race car, a freshly prodded temper and a 42nd-place finish to open his Sprint Cup title defense with a thud.
The bitterness spilled over into the motorcoach lot after Sunday’s myAFibRisk.com 400, when Harvick confronted Johnson with angry words and a shove. Johnson disengaged from the incident and walked away, while Harvick was restrained by his business manager, Josh Jones, before making his exit.
On pit road before the incident, both drivers spoke in measured tones about the altercation that prompted the mess. After the race’s third caution period, Harvick was lined up on the inside lane for a Lap 135 restart alongside leader Kyle Busch. Johnson, running third with Joey Logano pressing behind him, dove low to the frontstretch apron as the battle for the top spot fanned out three-wide.
As the three neared Turn 1, Johnson forced his way back onto the banking, his No. 48 Chevrolet clanging fenders with Harvick’s No. 4, which soon showed smoke from a tire rub. The smoke subsided, but four laps later, Harvick looped into the Turn 3 wall with severe damage.
“I got a pretty good restart and obviously there was … the 22 (Logano) and 48 got a run and then I just held my line and the 48 just slammed into the side of my door,” said Harvick, who wound up 58 laps down at the checkered flag after extensive repairs. “That’s pretty much it.”
RELATED: Harvick discusses the restart and his day
Johnson — who opened his bid for a record-tying seventh Cup title by finishing where he started Sunday, in 11th place — said his move was borne from necessity.
“He didn’t leave me any space. He was pinning me down, and I’ve got to get back on the track,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t say what he did is different from any other situations I’ve been in like that. When you’re in Kevin’s situation, you want to give the inside car a bad angle so they’ve got to lift. I was fine with lifting, but I had to get back on the race track, so I worked my way back up on the track.”
Logano, the third Chase nation involved in the border skirmish, said he didn’t make contact with Johnson’s car after an initial push at the drop of the green flag.
“I don’t know. I was a little behind it,” said Logano, who finished sixth in the Chase opener. “I just saw the 48 go three-wide bottom, and I was just trying to protect my position and figure out what lane I wanted to go in from there.”
After the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 crew replaced a significant amount of sheet metal in the Chicagoland garage, Harvick returned to the track, gesturing out the driver’s side window at the No. 48 pit box as he inched his way down pit road. He also asked crew chief Rodney Childers and his spotter to indicate if he was close to Johnson’s car during the final stretch, but the two completed the race without further on-track incidents.
Besides the war of words, the aftermath leaves one of the pre-Chase favorites facing a significant deficit — 43 points off the top spot and 22 points behind 12th in the standings — in order to advance from the Challenger Round, the playoffs’ opening three-race segment.
MORE: Chase picture update | Series standings
“It’s pretty simple. You just go win one of the next two and get on with it,” Childers said. “It’s definitely disappointing. We just came to halfway, and honestly I just didn’t think — as much as we work together — Jimmie would’ve done that on the restart. I was expecting him just to push us and move on, but it’s disappointing, for sure. Guys did a good job getting it fixed and getting back out there and Kevin kept his head in the game and at least went out there and finished it out.
“He was just trying to banzai it in there on the restart, but it’s racing. It’s part of it. They’re here to win and we’re here to win, but I think at that point, they knew our car was a lot faster and with it only being halfway, I just assumed that he was going to push us and get us out front, but it’s part of it and we ended up with a torn-up race car.”
Anyone who complained about NASCAR’s regular season lacking fireworks, you’ve got them now. After all the group photos, media sessions and smiling for the camera, the getting-down-to-business end of the Chase’s first weekend lived up to the pre-race hype.
Informed of the Harvick-Johnson confrontation post-race, Childers wasn’t terribly worried about any carry-over of hard feelings for the series’ next race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
“I think you’ve just got to go and race next weekend and at Dover and see how it turns out from there,” Childers said. “It’s hard to say what’ll happen after that. We’ve just got to go concentrate on the next two weeks, try to win one of those and move on.”