(FOXSports) Ricky Stenhouse Jr. wasn’t going to allow Danica Patrick to come between him and Brad Keselowski on Sunday night.
Unfortunately, Patrick, his girlfriend, and Keselowski received the worst of it as Stenhouse took his fellow drivers three-wide on the Lap 319 restart in the Coca-Cola 600.
Stenhouse bumped off of Patrick and sent her spinning into Keselowski’s rear quarter panel to ignite the eighth caution of the Sprint Cup race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“I’m all right,” Keselowski said. “I didn’t know we were three-wide, dude.”
“I never said you weren’t,” replied spotter Joey Meier.
“You never said I was,” Keselowski said.
Keselowski, the defending Sprint Cup champion, started the race 20th and was running 21st at the time of the accident. He entered the race seventh in the point standings, and limped to the garage in 32nd position.
Keselowski humbly took responsibility for the wreck even though the replay revealed a different story.
“I was three-wide with Danica and didn’t know it and I cut her off and wrecked her and myself,” Keselowski said. “I feel bad for her and I send my apologies to her. It’s just a long night for the Miller Lite Ford.
“We’ll move on. That’s all you can do.”
Patrick was posted 29th when she retired. Stenhouse continued on in the race.
Even though Keselowski took responsibility for the wreck, Patrick’s team said it looked like Stenhouse was the one who caused the crash. Patrick released this statement: “I felt like we were making real progress and starting to get the car to a place that was really good, and had an accident, which is unfortunate because we were moving up, but nothing we can do about it now.”
On Saturday, the day before the wreck he caused, Stenhouse told reporters “Her and I talked about it, and we knew that after we got through Daytona everything would kind of calm back down and people would start talking about the race-track things, but we haven’t had any race-track problems, so it’s still [calm].”
Neither have tweeted about the incident yet.
