Sieg, Reed have incident in Pocono Garage – Nascar

LONG POND, Pa. — An incident between Ryan Reed and Ryan Sieg on the race track spilled over into a garage altercation involving their crews during a rain delay in the NASCAR XFINITY Series’ inaugural event at Pocono Raceway on Saturday.
 
Reed and Sieg made contact in the 24th lap of the Pocono Green 250, a bump that sent Sieg’s No. 39 RSS Racing Chevrolet into the outside retaining wall. Reed continued but crashed on Lap 40, putting his Roush Fenway Racing No. 16 Ford behind the wall for extensive repairs.
 
With both drivers and crews in the Pocono garage during a rain delay that ultimately halted the race after 53 of a scheduled 100 laps, Sieg and Reed engaged in a shouting match that evolved into a crewmember scrum. The drivers were physically separated, but hurt feelings persisted even after the incident had died down.
 
“Went over to talk about what happened with Ryan Reed, but he obviously does nothing wrong,” Sieg said. “I guess he’s just brain-dead or stupid, I don’t know which one. Probably both. We got wrecked. Any time you get around him, you always see him up in the fence or he always gets up in the fence. Just hate it. We had a really good car, and this is our car next week for Michigan, so now we’re going to have to go back and thrash, which just sucks, you know what I mean.”
 
By coincidence, the teams’ haulers were parked next to each other in the XFINITY garage.
 
“I tried to talk to him, but there is no talking to him,” Sieg said. “It wouldn’t get through, you know what I mean. I figured he’d say, ‘I apologize,’ or whatever, but no, he didn’t say that. It escalated and then he wouldn’t shut his mouth, so I figured I’d shut it for him but none of his pit guys would let me do it, so it is what it is.”
 
Reed had his own version of what happened, saying he hoped to discuss the incident later in a less heated environment.
 
“It was just a racing deal. Emotions run high, obviously, and that’s racing,” said Reed, the winner of the Daytona season opener last year. “I look forward to talking about it in a calm, cool, collected manner and working it out. Obviously we both race every week, and it’s not going to do us any good to go out there and get into a battle royal, but at the end of the day, it’s going to take two parties to agree and I think that we need to sit down and have a mature conversation and when that happens, then that happens.”
 
The two drivers, both in their third full season of XFINITY competition, had similar issues running in close quarters last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Sieg was inching toward a top-10 finish when contact with a laps-down Reed derailed his run.

Through 12 races both drivers are currently in the NASCAR XFINITY Series Chase field.
 
“I think he was upset about just racing each other hard,” Reed said of their most recent run-in, “and so like I said, I have no problem sitting down and talking about it and working through, and if he’s mad at me, I’ll listen. We can go give each other room or we can go out there and wreck each other, but I don’t see what good that does.”

MORE: Complete race results