RELATED: Johnson rolls to Auto Club victory | See photos from Sunday’s race

 

A late run-in between Joey Logano and Martin Truex Jr. led to some pointed post-race discussion Sunday at Auto Club Speedway.

The fallout: A warning from Truex that the two will race against each other on different terms from now on, and a jolting insult from the Twitter account of Truex’s crew chief Cole Pearn, who would later issue an apology.

Truex, who led 21 laps and spent most of the day among the top five, was in a close contest with Logano in the 150th of 205 laps. Both ran the high groove entering Turn 1 on the 2-mile track, and Truex’s Furniture Row Racing No. 78 Toyota wiggled into the outside retaining wall — the driver claiming contact from Logano’s Team Penske No. 22 Ford.

Truex drove on, but faded before making a pit stop four laps later. A caution flag emerged while he was on pit road, catching him out of cycle. After absorbing a pit road-speeding penalty and damage to his No. 78 entry, Truex limped to a 32nd-place finish, one lap down.

“How did the air get taken off if he was behind me? He just ran me over,” Truex told Motor Racing Network in his post-race interview. “It’s ridiculous. We had a great car all day and (I) hate for my guys we’ve got nothing to show for it. I don’t know why he was trying to fake me out. Just pass me. He just screwed up. He knows he screwed up, and I’m going to race him differently from now on.”

Logano finished fourth, leading twice for three laps. During the race, Logano’s spotter apologized to Truex’s spotter; afterward, Logano accepted his share of the blame, though he claimed the two cars did not make contact.

“It was completely my fault,” Logano said. “I was gonna go in on the outside of him and he was gonna go in on the top, as well, and I just ended up being right on him. We never touched each other, but just taking the air off these cars makes them uncontrollable. I didn’t mean to do that. I was gonna try to go to the top and I just got a little bit close to him and got him free, so I’m taking the hit on that one.”

The post-race discussion between the two drivers didn’t escalate further, but the debate took a scalding upturn after a tweet from Pearn, the No. 78 crew chief. Pearn returned to the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series garage this weekend after serving a one-race suspension for technical infractions.

Well I guess you shouldn’t tweet when you’re mad. My apologies for being over the line.

— Cole Pearn (@colepearn) March 21, 2016

RELATED: Complete race results | See photos from Sunday’s race
SHOP: Batman vs. Superman gear

FONTANA, Calif. — Jimmie Johnson won the battle between hometown heroes on Sunday, outdueling Kevin Harvick in overtime at Auto Club Speedway.

 

“Awesome teamwork, boys!” Johnson shouted on his radio after taking the 77th checkered flag of his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series career, breaking a tie with the late Dale Earnhardt for seventh on the all-time victory list. “There’s nothing like winning at home.”

 

The six-time series champion from El Cajon, California, got the chance he needed when Kyle Busch blew a tire and hit the Turn 3 wall on Lap 198 of a scheduled 200 to cause the sixth and final caution of the afternoon. With the race destined for overtime, the lead-lap cars came to pit road for new tires, with Denny Hamlin leading Harvick and Johnson back onto the track.

 

Hamlin chose the outside lane for a restart on Lap 204, leaving Johnson behind Harvick in the inside lane. Johnson pushed Harvick clear of Hamlin into Turn 1 and dived to the inside of the race’s dominant driver, who had led 142 laps to that point.

 

Johnson stayed in the gas off Turn 2, ultimately clearing Harvick and pulling away to win by .772 seconds. The victory was Johnson’s second of the 2016 season and his sixth in 22 starts at the 2-mile track.

 

“I got a great run off of Turn 2, and I thought ‘Man I’ve got a shot at this thing,'” Johnson said of the opening lap of the final restart. “Which I didn’t expect to have. Harvick has been so fast. I cleared him and kind of got away. 

 

“We saved our best for last, for sure. I told everybody Superman kicked Batman’s butt and it happened (teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. was driving the Batman car and finished 11th).”

 

Driving a No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet adorned with a “Superman” logo to plug the movie “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Johnson led 25 laps, but his rival from Bakersfield had dominated the event until the final restart.

 

“That sucks,” said Harvick, who has finished second 20 times in 77 events since joining Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014, his championship season. “Just way too tight right there. Couldn’t put the throttle down. Wouldn’t turn.”

 

Harvick described the late-race caution as a “worst-case scenario.”

 

“We weren’t very good on restarts for four or five laps, unless we were all by ourselves,” said Harvick, who nevertheless retained the series lead by 11 points over Johnson. “The No. 48 was able to hang with us, and we just weren’t able to drive it in like I needed to, just didn’t have the front tires turning and the back wouldn’t grip. 

 

“Still, a good day for us. … We’ll keep at it.”

 

Hamlin ran third, overcoming radio problems that left him mired in traffic early in the race. Joey Logano ran fourth, followed by Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who notched his first top five since last year’s spring race at Bristol.

 

Rookie Chase Elliott, Carl Edwards, AJ Allmendinger, Brad Keselowski and Jamie McMurray completed the top 10. Polesitter Austin Dillon finished 24th, after a loose wheel forced him to return to pit road after stops under caution on Lap 110.

FONTANA, Calif. — Adam Stevens, crew chief for Kyle Busch, said his team hasn’t resolved a left rear tire wear issue that surfaced during Saturday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice sessions at Auto Club Speedway.

“I don’t know what it was,” Stevens said. “We tried multiple things to remedy it and it’s getting better, but it’s not like it’s gone. We still have some concerns after final practice.”

Goodyear officials said the problem was traced to air pressures and camber settings, but Stevens said his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing team was not “out of the box on any one of those things compared to every car that we’re capable of looking at and past history.”

JGR fields four Sprint Cup entries and has a technical alliance with Furniture Row Racing.

“But we’re the only ones that seem to be having a problem,” he said. “I don’t know what to do to fix it because everybody else is quite similar.”

Busch qualified sixth for Sunday’s Auto Club 400 (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM Radio). He was fourth fastest in Saturday’s opening practice under cool conditions and 16th in Happy Hour after track temperatures had increased.

The wear improved in the final practice, according to Stevens, “but you (still) saw excessive wear,” he said.

“When it gets hot and gets slick and slows down, a lot of those problems tend to go away,” he said. “I don’t know that anything that we’ve done has made it any better, other than just the normal rubbering in of the track and the lap times falling off to be honest.”

“It’s a worn surface, guys are searching for grip; one of the ways they’ve attacked that in the past and are doing it still is (by) trying to reduce air pressures, trying to run a little bit more camber,” Goodyear’s Greg Stucker said. “Just trying to push the envelope and get as much as they can.”

Stucker said Goodyear has “gone, in very general terms … softer at every track.”

“One of the goals was increased falloff and we certainly have seen that, significantly more at Atlanta,” he said. “About the same (falloff) at Las Vegas. … More at Phoenix and we’re trending right now at least as much if not more here.”

As for the No. 18 team, Stucker said officials “are over there working with them and trying to make sure they know where they stand … what kind of changes they’re making.

“It’s just one of those levers that they pull,” he said. “(NASCAR) took aero away so they are going to go about getting grip back mechanically and that’s one way they do it.”

Stevens said his team didn’t see the wear issues here last season, but a similar problem did surface at Atlanta earlier this year.

“A lot of times you’ll see (that) when it’s real fast and gripped up,” he said. “It was (at Atlanta); it was a concern the entire race. And it’ll be a concern tomorrow until we get a couple of sets across it tomorrow, too.”