Following Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series event at Darlington Raceway, it’s become pretty apparent that Anthony Alfredo and Leland Honeyman, Jr. aren’t going to be exchanging Christmas cards during the off-season.
During the closing stages of the Sports Clips VFW Help a Hero 200 at the historic racetrack, the pair of Xfinity Series mid-fielders were locked in a heated battle for a position around the top-20, when disaster struck for them, and several others around them.
Honeyman, driving the No. 70 Chevrolet for Cope Family Racing, drove into Turn 1 when the incident occurred and got into the back of Harrison Burton, who at this point in the run was driving on right-side scuff tires, compared to everyone’s brand-new tires.
With the substantial closing rate in play, Honeyman made contact with Burton and overcorrected hard into the outside wall. That left the cars behind him, including Anthony Alfredo, Kyle Sieg, and Josh Williams, with nowhere to go, getting them all collected in the incident.
Honeyman’s afternoon came to an early end due to the substantial damage to his racecar, while Alfredo and others were able to continue in the event.
But that didn’t stop Alfredo, driver of the No. 42 Chevrolet for Young’s Motorsports, from being irate at the Mooresville, North Carolina-native following the completion of the event. Speaking to Dalton Hopkins of Frontstretch, Alfredo had some pretty strong words about Honeyman.
“Yeah, I got wrecked by the same idiot who starts stuff all the time,” Alfredo said about Honeyman. “I mean, there’s zero qualification for this series anymore and I’ve made a lot of dumb mistakes too, but I like to think I’ve learned from them, but when you see the same person making the same mistakes, it’s really disappointing to see, even if you try to talk to them.”
“I was just picking my way through traffic patiently and cleanly, but those guys have no respect, he just drove it in there so deep, I could not believe it, I was like there is absolutely no way he is making the corner, he ran straight into the back of [Harrison Burton], and then slid right back down in front of me, then hit the wall, overcorrected, and destroyed me, then never held the brake pedal all the way down the track and almost cleaned me out again.”
Asked whether or not the 26-year-old driver will be attempting to reach out to Honeyman to have a conversation about what transpired on-track Saturday, Alfredo was pretty matter-of-fact about the entire situation, saying: “It’s not even worth it, I’ve tried before, so.”
“I race people how I want to be raced, just because somebody did something to me doesn’t mean I’m going to do it to them, frankly, because I’d embarrass myself if I did something like that, but people like that don’t know better. Like, he told one of the guys on my team and asked them why I ran into him. That’s one thing you can’t fix in this world.”
Honeyman, who later took complete blame for the incident on social media, explained his side of the story from the late-race wreck, and also offered his two cents on Anthony Alfredo and how the Young’s Motorsports driver was racing on Saturday.
“I didn’t know who was who with the throwbacks, obviously,” said Honeyman. “I wasn’t told [Harrison Burton] was in front of me, and he was on two right-side scuffs, so it’s just like, in that scenario, I felt like we could carry more speed into Turn 1 on entry better than a lot of other people, so I drove if off in there, but at the same time thinking the No. 25 was going to do the same thing.”
Asked similarly whether Honeyman would be trying to speak to Alfredo at some point about the incident, Honeyman gave a similar response, saying: “No, he won’t talk to me. I tried, but it’s whatever.”
“I ain’t even going to bother, he raced my like an asshole all day. He raced everybody like that, and you can see it, and people are mad, it’s whatever, race how you want to be raced is what they said in the driver’s meeting today, and you know there’s drivers meetings for a reason, and some people belong in them.”
“I’m not saying that was his fault, but he did race like a jackass, so that’s that, there’s no doubt about it.”
Honeyman, competing on a part-time basis in the No. 70 for Cope Family Racing, will contest his next NASCAR Xfinity Series event at Talladega Superspeedway, while Thomas Annunziata will take over the reins of the Chevrolet at Bristol and Rockingham.
The silver lining in all of this, though, is that the two drivers managed to agree on something following Saturday’s run-in: they don’t want to talk to each other.
