What’s happening to motorsport nowadays?
It seems that more and more racing drivers adopt impromptu dirty passing maneuvers in order to pass an otherwise skillful opponent. We saw it happen in DTM, we saw it happen in RallyCross and now, it’s time to see it happen in NASCAR Xfinity Series.
Racing on Saturday’s National Children’s Hospital 200 at Mid-Ohio Sports Car course, driver Regan Smith decided to shove leader Alex Tagliani’s Ford out of his way with a little push. The pass is even dirtier given the fact it occurred two corners from the finish line on the final 2.4-mile road course lap. Needless to say, Smith emerged victorious from the “quarrel”, braking his 52-race winless streak in the Xfinity Series.
What makes the occurrence worse (besides the tasteless celebrations given these circumstances), is Regan Smith’s hypocrisy as he made a tantrum – if you can call it that – with Ty Dillon a couple of weeks ago when the latter accidentally bumped into him and took him out (you can check out the additional video below).
“The pass I put on Regan early on, it took a lot of time to put that pass in because I know he’s working for the championship and he was very vocal about what happened last weekend so he seemed to be very aggressive, too. I’m a little guy, so I didn’t want to get into a fist fight. Knowing what I know now, I probably would’ve done a little bit less of an in-between pass, and it’s really unfortunate what happened at the end. Take your point and walk away happy, but to celebrate this way … winning this way is not winning for me”, Tagliani said after the race, according to Nascar.com.
Mind you, Smith stated that he had to take the oportunity:
“The fact of the matter is, I moved him out of the way and he finished second. I didn’t wreck him, I didn’t spin him, I didn’t do anything like that. Obviously, I don’t expect him to be happy about that. I wouldn’t be either. I’ve been on the receiving end of many of them here on these road courses. We had to take that opportunity. I’ve been wrecked so many times on these road courses, I had to do what I had to do right there. I didn’t spin him, just got the spot. We’re going to celebrate hard tonight.”