Matt Kenseth had won the Slinger Nationals six times before Tuesday night. He apologized for winning his seventh. Faced with a late restart he really, really didn’t want, the champion driver from Cambridge knocked his NASCAR teammate Erik Jones out of way in a two-lap shootout and went on to the checkered flag and a subdued victory celebration. ‘I got going OK, and I was tight on that last restart and I lost the lead to Erik there,’ Kenseth said. ‘He had me beat on the last restart. I just didn’t want to lose it on the last one. My move wasn’t a very good one. 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.’ Despite a wild ride through Turn 2 after the white flag, the 20-year-old Jones hung on for second in his debut at the challenging, high-banked quarter-mile. He climbed out sweaty and irritated. ‘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 said. ‘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 two talked on the victory podium and seemed to come away OK, at least. Behind them, local driver Travis Dassow took third place and came away happier than the first- and second-place finishers together.(Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
