Gilliland parked for Montoya clash

On lap 262 the Ganassi driver was trying to lap Gilliland when running on the inside of the No. 38 Ford, when he suddenly got hit on the right rear quarter panel by the Yates driver, who clearly drove into him, sending Montoya's car against the wall.

Gilliland tried to put the blame on his spotter for not warning him about Montoya driving past him on his inside. He said the Colombian had previously hit him a couple of times, but still failed to admit that he was retaliating when he wrecked the Ganassi driver out of the race.

"It's a shame we've got some tore up race cars and we got parked," Gilliland said. "But I got up in front of him - my spotter said I was clear - and I kind of slid up in front of [Montoya] 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 going to 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."

NASCAR officials didn't believe Gilliland's version of the incident and decided to punish him by parking his car in the garage for the rest of the race.

Montoya had been running as high as fifth and was comfortably running among the top ten when the incident happened, but the extensive damage his car suffered from the impact didn't allow him to rejoin the race and he was classified in 43rd position in the end.

"I was running high the lap before and he went inside of me," Montoya said. "He (Gilliland) 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."

For the second week in a row Montoya's promising runs have come to an end. Last week the Colombian was running fifth a few laps from the end when he tangled in the pits with the lapped car of Clint Bowyer.