Full Throttle

What happened with the on track incident with the #38:

Juan “Latino Piloto is Muy Bueno” Montoya: “I was running high the lap before and he went inside of me. He (No. 38) ran straight to the wall and I tried to get away. He put me into the wall. So I went into one and I punted him just a little bit to say, hey, you’re running like 50 laps behind. I hit him a little bit. If I had wanted to wreck him, I would have wrecked him. He came out of four and just wrecked us. It’s very disappointing. It has been great for everybody at Ganassi; we’ve got great cars now. It’s just frustrating to have that happen.”

“We had been running the high line all day. About 10 laps in the run we would start running high. We changed the air pressure a little bit, so I tried to run (high) a little bit earlier. I had a good run off the corner and he run me to the wall. I did all I could, but I still hit the wall. So I went into one and just hit him a little bit to say, hey, I was there, know what I mean. It was like he said I’m better than him, so I’m going to wreck him. The decent thing is not doing it, but if I had wrecked him, it would have been fine. It’s frustrating when people do things like that.”

Grita Un Río Montoya (Cry me a River Montoya).

Meanwhile, short of wearing a Jimmie Johnson Halloween mask and hope it fools everyone, what does a guy have to do? Carl Edwards leads in wins (8), top fives (17) and top tens (25) and still trails Johnson by 106 points with two events left.

Edwards coaxed his Roush Ford home on fumes ahead of the field after a series of caution flags put him behind when all the top-running cars took two tires while Edwards took four.

While those cars had to stop for gas, Edwards stayed on the track and held off on the gas pedal for the final dozen laps.

He trimmed some of Johnson’s point lead, starting the day 183 points behind, and ending the day 106 points behind. Johnson managed to finish 15th, which was his worst performance in this championship run.

Jeff Gordon finished second, also gambling on going the distance at the end without stopping for gas.

Trailing Edwards and Gordon were Jamie McMurray, Clint Bowyer, Greg Biffle, Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex, Jr., Matt Kenseth and David Reutimann.

UPDATE: Gilliland’s comments after being parked for rough driving: “It’s a shame we’ve got some tore up race cars and we got parked, but I got up in front of him – my spotter said I was clear – and I kind of slid up in front of him and he jacked my rear wheels off the ground going down the back straightaway and then got into me again going into turn one and two and jacked me up way up the track. I was trying to let him go and got a good run off the corner and just kind of misjudged it coming down across him.

I was gonna let him go, so I feel real bad for those guys. I guess they were running on the lead lap and now our team is parked, so I feel real bad for my team and Yates Racing. It’s unfortunate because we had a pretty good day that we had going. Our CitiFinancial Ford Fusion was running pretty good – not quite as well as we’d like, but we were just off a little bit. It’s just a disappointing finish to our day.”