The Bristol Night Race, over the years, has delivered some of the fiery moments in the history of sport. The 0.533-mile oval short track has witnessed Rusty Wallace slinging a water bottle at Dale Earnhardt in 1995. And then there’s Tony Stewart’s flying Helmet that landed on the front bumper of Matt Kenseth’s car in 2012. Time and again, the Last Great Colosseum has seen tempers flare and eventually spill after the race in dramatic sequence. Even the current star drivers have had their share of flare-ups.

Let us take a trip down memory lane to when Joey Logano was ousted by Joe Gibbs in 2012 and landed at Penske Racing. With just two wins in four years driving the No. 20 car, Coach Gibbs decided to bring in Matt Kenseth and showed Logano the exit door. The very next year, he wanted to prove that JGR had made a wrong call and was trying his best to navigate his way around the half-mile at Bristol. But, with about 150 laps remaining in the race, he was spun out by his former teammate, Denny Hamlin.

Fuming over the way he was raced, Logano decided to vent out his frustration at Hamlin after the race. He made sure to get in Hamlin’s face, leaning into the window of Hamlin’s No. 11 Toyota. A post-show fight broke out between the crews of both teams while Hamlin was trying to unstrap himself from his race car. After pushing and shoving, Logano was headed back to his hauler while the JGR driver made his way out of the car.

Well, Logano didn’t pull any punches when he was asked about the treatment he received from Hamlin. “It’s frustrating. We’ve got a freaking genius behind the wheel of the 11 car. Probably the worst teammate I’ve ever had. So I learn that now. He chose to run into the back of me. So whatever. I have a scorecard. I ain’t putting up with that. What goes around come around.” Here’s the clip of the post-race scuffle between the two teams.

The interesting part about this dispute is that Hamlin did apologize to his former teammate on the radio. He even clarified that his reaction on the racetrack wasn’t related to his antics on Twitter, where he openly called out Logano for his driving style at the Daytona 500. “@keselowski sorry I couldn’t get close to you cuz your genius teammate was too busy messing up the inside line 1 move at a time,” Hamlin replied in a tweet to Brad Keselowski. Well, Logano didn’t let this slide and bounced back with a witty rebuttal, “@DennyHamlin, I Remember when you were MY genius teammate. #LoveYouMeanIt.” 

The social media banter really blew up into a full-fledged rivalry at Bristol, but the driver of the No. 11 car had a different view of it. “No, it didn’t have anything to do with that. I just, you know, I meant to run into him. I didn’t mean to spin him out, but his day was fine.” He also revealed the conversation the two drivers had before the fight broke out. “He said he was coming for me. I usually don’t see him, so it’s usually not a factor.”

Interestingly, Joey Logano was able to make a statement with his win at Michigan International Speedway and finished the 2013 campaign in 8th place. Not only that, he would go on to lead the #22 Penske team to three Cup Series triumphs.

Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin never settled the score 

The incident unleashed a never-ending air of disdain between the drivers. They started to trash-talk each other on Twitter. But the verbal jabs weren’t enough to channel the pent-up frustration. Just a week after the weird fiasco at the Sprint Cup, the duo met again at the Auto Club Speedway.

Heading into turn three, side by side, on the final lap, Logano carelessly ran Hamlin up the track. The messy clash allowed Kyle Busch to win. Hamlin slammed into the inside wall and was left hospitalised with a fractured vertebra. Logano justified his side of the story, saying he was never aware that Hamlin took a tear in his back. But he didn’t pine over, at all. “He probably shouldn’t have done what he did last week (at Bristol), so that’s what he gets,” Logano said after the race.

Although Hamlin didn’t point the finger at Logano for the crash, he questioned his intent. “How is it not intentional, is my thing. It’s not like he got loose because I took air off him or anything like that. I saw him getting closer, I moved up the track. He kept getting closer, I moved up the track. He just was going to keep going until he ran into us.”

Hamlin did receive a text message from his former teammate, but it did little to repair the damage that had already been done. With the Bristol race lined up for this weekend, who knows, we might see the revival of rivalry between the two veterans of the sport.