The 2024 Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum witnessed aggression throughout the race. The annually developed short track gave drivers little chance to escape the dirty air and traffic, which created a tense atmosphere. One of the race-defining moments was the tussle between Ty Gibbs and 2022 Cup Series champion Joey Logano.
Ty Gibbs led the highest number of laps in the race with 84, But, right after teammate and winner Denny Hamlin took control of the lead from him, Logano and Gibbs washed up on the outside to give Denny a free pass to the checkered flag. After repeated instances of the two colliding, Gibbs and Joey Logano met in the No.54 trailer to engage in a heated conversation,
Ty Gibbs feels his clash with Joey Logano is a part of racing
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Following the mid-race break, Logano and Gibbs were the frontrunners for the win. However, an untimely Michael McDowell interrupted a long caution-less period with merely ten laps to go. Following the crash, Hamlin used his restart expertise to power through on the inside. With the No. 11 speed behind them, the duo banged doors and washed up. Restarting third, Hamlin took the sole chance to regain his lead beautifully.
Gibbs eventually recovered to P2, but a broken transmission pulled him to the rear of the pack in the final lap. With the white flag right ahead of the grid, it triggered an overtime extension. Gibbs limped to a P18 finish despite being the most dominant driver. Realizing that the Joey Logano incident was the key reason behind his disappointing result, he invited the Team Penske star for a talk in private.
However, before the conversation could reach the trailer, words of anger were already spilled. After a heated altercation, Joey Logano was seen saying, “I will remember,” in what seems like a retaliatory warning to the 2023 Rookie of the Year. However, the war of words didn’t end there as Ty Gibbs shared a piece of his mind soon after.
An exchange of words after the race. pic.twitter.com/Gt3AFy0EER
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) February 4, 2024
“He’s just mad that I ran him up,” claimed Ty Gibbs in a post-race interview. “But if you go back and look at the replay, 12 kind of chucks him out of the way, too. It’s a hard race at the end.“
Emphasizing the compact structure of the grid causing problems, Gibbs added:
“This place is really hard to get your tires warm once the caution comes out, as we all see everyone sliding around. I just got in there deep and washed up into him, and then we were all kind of tangled up after that. So he just came in over and said that to me and a bunch of different words, but I knew what happened.”
Despite Joey Logano’s severe words in the garage, after a composed thought at it, he asserted that racing could often be a give-and-take sport, which includes the evening’s clash with Ty Gibbs.
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Logano feels racing is all about hard choices
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In NASCAR, finishing first is all that matters. Often, drivers are on the receiving end of harsh incidents, whereas on another day, they might be the ones causing it. Having won the inaugural Clash at the Coliseum, Joey Logano understands the difficulty of leading at the short track. He explained his stance on the incident with Gibbs: “The racing is usually an eye for an eye more times than not, or trying to come out with some explanation of what happened.”
“Mistakes are mistakes. Here obviously lends for a lot of things, and I’ve been on both ends of it. I got Kyle last year, so … it’s part of racing here, and you try not to because you know, yeah, there’s bigger races down the line, but sometimes you’re in a bad spot and you just make a mistake. That can happen, too. Or it’s just flat-out aggressive in doing that type of stuff. I don’t know.”
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The No.22 driver eventually finished fourth and showed that he has moved on from last year’s disappointing elimination in the playoffs. While teammate Austin Cindric failed to make the main event, Ryan Blaney finished right ahead of Joey Logano in P3. Banking on the momentum will be necessary if Team Penske wishes to defend the championship again.
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