NASCAR: Kenseth says tire wall more damaging

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Matt Kenseth believes his violent NASCAR Sprint Cup crash at Sonoma would have been less damaging if he had hit a concrete barrier than a tire wall.

A tap from Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Hendrick Chevrolet sent Kenseth's Joe Gibbs Toyota head-on into a single-layer tire barrier during last Sunday's first road course round of the 2014 Cup season. Kenseth reckons he might have been able to continue had he had a square hit against a cement wall.

"I didn't feel like I was going very fast and I'm like, 'What's over there? Oh there's a tire barrier, I hope I don't hit that very hard...'" he recounted. "And it kind of grabbed hold of the car and whipped it around.

"I'm sure there's a lot of cases where tire barriers are better. Unfortunately I don't think that was one of them.

"I think if I would have hit a cement wall it would have been a lot less damage and actually we would have got the car fixed and been able to finish the race. It just grabbed a hold of it and just destroyed that car. It ripped the front frame horns right off of it. It was definitely a surprise."

Earnhardt said causing the crash left him feeling "sick" but Kenseth classed it as a racing accident.

"I'm sure it was just a mistake," he said. "You're running side by side with those two-wide restarts, and you run two wide at a track that's really made to run single file. It's very small and a lot of marbles, and there's really only one good lane through there."

Kenseth initially said he was "surprised" not to have received a phone call from Earnhardt after the incident given their long-standing friendship. After those comments from Kenseth were published by the media, Earnhardt took to Twitter to announce that he had phoned his rival on Tuesday afternoon, joking, "Did I miss the deadline?"