Gordon shrugs off Kenseth criticism

On the penultimate restart of last Sunday's Sprint Cup race at Las Vegas, Kenseth was running third ahead of Gordon but as Dale Earnhardt Jr was slow to get up to speed on the green flag, both of them overtook the No. 88 car before Gordon knocked Kenseth's rear, triggering chaos.

Kenseth later accused Gordon of laying back on the restart beyond what is permissible to try to get by him, saying his tactics were the actual starting point of the incident which ended up with Gordon's massive crash with just a handful of laps remaining to be run.

"I haven't talked to Matt yet but if he did brought it up I would say well, first you talk to your teammate who was behind me," Gordon said. "What happened was we came rolling off from turn four and any restart that I ever had, I'm looking more behind me that I'm looking in front of me.

"So I started looking at my mirror and Greg Biffle was laying back quite a bit and actually my spotter came on and said 'they're laying back behind you'. So I dropped back to him and then as we rolled up there, we sort of came together a little bit more and I really didn't feel like anybody was laying back a ton.

"The biggest issue with that whole thing was that (Dale Earnhardt Jr) spun his tyres. I did get a pretty good restart but not really much better that Matt. It's just that when he got beside (Dale Earnhardt Jr) it stalled him out and gave me the momentum."

Although Gordon admitted blame for clipping the rear of Kenseth's car and sending him into a spin, he says he was just trying to fend off an attack from Greg Biffle on that penultimate restart, rather than trying to get the jump on Kenseth.

"You've got to look at the whole picture," Gordon added. "If you just look in your mirror and who knows, maybe someone behind Greg was laying back, you never know. But I do remember looking in my mirror and seeing those guys laying back and not wanting them to get that momentum on me."

Kenseth said on Sunday that Gordon often plays such tactics on restarts and that although there shouldn't be a gap bigger than a car length to the car ahead before the green flag waves, NASCAR has not enforced drivers to do so.