NASCAR: Earnhardt Bump “Unintentional”

"If he wants to come by the bus after the race and get his ass whopped, I'll do it."

Well that didn't take long.

Three hours into the NASCAR Sprint Cup season and already we have a major controversy. Everything was relatively calm and collected until this lap 124 accident between Brian Vickers and Dale Earnhardt Jr:

Vickers laid the blame for the incident on Earnhardt: "I beat him to the yellow line and then he just turned us. He hit me the first time on the way down — which is fine. We all do that. Then when he came back up he just hooked me in the left rear. To wreck somebody intentionally like that in front of the entire field is really kind of dangerous. That's my biggest problem with it, but apparently he wanted a caution pretty bad."

According to Lee Spencer at FOX Sports, when Earnhardt Jr.'s spotter relayed Vickers' comments, Earnhardt offered to "whop" Vickers' ass.

Something tells me that Earnhardt hasn't forgotten his last-lap tangle with Vickers at Talladega in 2006.

But Vickers does bring up a decent point. He compared the incident to one seen in Saturday's Nationwide race. In that incident, Jason Leffler hit Steven Wallace in the same part of the track and caused a scary crash. NASCAR responded with a 5-lap penalty. "I think the 38 [car of Jason Leffler] was penalized for doing the same thing. I guess they're not going to penalize [Earnhardt] for it. It's kind of sad."

NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston addressed that aspect of the controversy: "Today's incident was nothing like yesterday's incident, which was deemed intentional. Today, the two cars were racing hard and got into each other. It was an unintentional racing incident that did not warrant further action."

So... who's ready for California?