Martinsville prez doesn’t have issue using Kenseth punt to promote race

Any NASCAR fan with a pulse knows Matt Kenseth was suspended two races for his punt of Joey Logano at last year’s Martinsville Chase race.

The crash effectively ended Logano’s title hopes; he was leading the race when Kenseth crashed and didn’t get a win at Texas or Phoenix to make it to the final round of the Chase. Kenseth was mad because Logano had ended up effectively ending his Chase chances with a bump at Kansas two weeks prior.

Kenseth’s punt has been replayed over and over. And over. And over. Some of those replays have included marketing from Martinsville Speedway itself. Track president Clay Campbell said Tuesday that he didn’t have a problem using the incident as a promotional tool.

From Popular Speed:

“Yeah, it stirred up controversy but what do people want me to show, the pace lap? That would be like (the media), you write about the deal after it happened but you can’t do it anymore,” Campbell said on Tuesday at the NASCAR Hall of Fame promoting this weekend’s race. “Is that going to sell newspapers? Is that going to sell what you do?

“I get paid to sell tickets. I don’t think that crossed over the line.”

Fox Sports 1 hasn’t shied away from using the incident either. The network’s commercial for Sunday’s race telecast promotes the bumper-banging style of the Cup Series at the half-mile track and climaxes with Kenseth’s piledrive of Logano into the wall. It’s not subtle; but then again, Fox promotion rarely ever is.

It raises a promotional paradox; while it was the most-talked about event of the 2015 season, it was bad enough to result in a two-race suspension, the first time a driver was suspended for on-track actions since Kyle Busch at Texas in 2011. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but would the NFL be showing the actions New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. took in 2015 to earn a one-game suspension as a vehicle to hype the 2016 season?

Likely not. But NASCAR is a sport that came to the forefront of American sports culture because of a confrontation between drivers and tends to receive the most national attention when drivers are having at it amongst themselves. That’s why there’s no direct comparison available for another sport. And Martinsville isn’t the first to use a controversial act as a promotional tool.

“No, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Unfortunately, somebody did get penalized on it, that was the bad part about it, but we didn’t make a highlight out of that incident. It was just a small blurb of it. Was it a difficult decision, no,” Campbell reiterated. “I wouldn’t be doing my job, and I don’t think anyone sitting in this room would have done anything any different if what I’m paid to do is sell tickets.

“The golden rule is that if there’s an injury or anything like that, certainly you don’t cross over that line. That was a different deal than what NASCAR did with the two drivers; that’s between them. It’s like people saying now you look at a history book and people want to take certain chapters out of it like it didn’t happen.