Matt Kenseth knocked Erik Jones out of the way on the final restart to win his seventh Slinger Nationals title Tuesday night at Slinger Speedway.
“My move wasn’t a very good one,’' Kenseth told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It was definitely uncalled for. I hit him way too hard. I didn’t want to make any contact to start with, but I felt like he moved me three or four times before that. I felt like that was probably going to be the etiquette. It was definitely way too extreme, way too hard. I was just trying to move him up off the bottom a little bit and overshot it a bit.”
Jones finished second.
Jones had a final shot at Kenseth when caution came out before the white flag, creating a two-lap shootout. Jones got underneath Kenseth in Turn 2 to take the lead before they made contact on the final lap.
“We raced into 1 and 2, I moved him up ... and after that ... we just about got dumped in 1 and 2 — I don’t know what that’s all about — the next time by,” Jones told the Journal Sentinel.
“That’s not really short-track racing in my book. We were the best cars here, with Matt, and I thought we were a little better, but it got away at the end.”
The newspaper reported that the two Joe Gibbs Racing drivers talked afterward.