Keselowski, Logano wreck early at Bristol

“Don’t know what happened, it just took off on me. Sorry about that,” Keselowski told his team over the radio after the incident.

Just after the wreck, the race was red-flagged at Lap 23 as rain began falling again. The official leaderboard has the No. 22 scored 42nd and the No. 2 in 43rd.

Both drivers returned to race after it resumed with Keselowski finishing in 35th, 22 laps down. Logano finished in 40th, 59 laps down and saw his streak of seven top-10 finishes to open the season end.

While it’s hard to say whether the weather conditions played into the mishap at all, the 2012 Sprint Cup Series champion was reticent to completely, as Milli Vanilli once lip-synced, “Blame It on the Rain.”

“The rain was coming in and out and the car just took off on me. I would like to blame the rain, but I honestly don’t know,” Keselowski said. “Usually when a car gets that far sideways and it’s kind of out of nowhere there’s a reason behind it.

“I hate racing in the rain, but I understand the position that NASCAR is in. They want to get the race going and this is one of those days where it’s gonna just keep raining off and on and we’re trying to get as many laps in at a time as we can to give the fans the best race possible, but we’re racing in the rain to do it and that’s what happens.”

Most of all, he hates “that I took out my teammate in the process.”

As far as the view from the No. 22, Logano mentioned that Keselowski’s car was free “from the beginning” and just got a little too loose. Given that he’s the most recent winner at Bristol, Sunday’s incident has to be all the more frustrating.

“Brad just got loose underneath that lapped car,” Logano said. “You start checking up and it looked like he was gonna have it saved and he checked up more than I expected and the next thing you know I’m in the back of him and we’re both headed towards the fence. The last thing you want to see when you’ve got a rain delay here. It’s just such a bummer for both Penske cars.”

One might think that where both Penske cars are already virtually locked into the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup via wins at Daytona and Auto Club, the sting of Sunday’s early woes might be a little less painful.

But that is not close to the case.

“That doesn’t help anything,” Logano said. “I want to win a race.”

Logano indicated during the delay that the plan was to get back out and run as many laps as possible.

Not what we wanted for @AutoTrader_com. They are a great sponsor with just 1 race a year. We will fix it and ride around. Man this sucks.

— Joey Logano (@joeylogano) April 19, 2015

Keselowski, meanwhile, summed up his thoughts with the following tweet:

Days like today are times when I wish I knew where to find the poop emoji.

— Brad Keselowski (@keselowski) April 19, 2015

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