In the days that followed their incident at Pocono Raceway on Sunday, Corey Lajoie has called and texted Kyle Busch in the hopes of talking through what happened but both went unanswered.
Instead, Busch went on The Pat McAfee Show this week and offered pretty incendiary commentary about the topic.
“He texted me and then he called me,” Busch said. “I didn’t even reach back out because he changed his story four times, so I’m like, ‘you’re just a liar. You wrecked me.’ I get it. It’s fine. Payback is coming.”
In real time, Lajoie said he wouldn’t have changed anything he did on Sunday, saying he had to ‘take the run’ but also that he hated that it caused Busch to crash and that it also collected Ryan Preece, Harrison Burton and Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
But Lajoie, speaking to Jeff Gluck of The Athletic, also says he resents how Busch has handled it.
“He should at least answer a text or a phone call after I’ve tried to tell him my story,” LaJoie told The Athletic on Saturday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway after Brickyard 400 qualifying. “I understand he has every right to be mad, but for him to go on the biggest talk show in the country and call me a liar, it pisses me off.”
Lajoie conceded that he was overly ‘flippant’ after the fact and that he thought there was a second block until he saw the replay that night — thus the phone call and text.
“The moral of the story at Pocono was I crashed him bigger than shit, but it wasn’t intentional,” LaJoie said. “The original story that I saw out of the windshield and was told from (crew chief Ryan) Sparks was my perception. After I got a chance to look at the replay and saw the in-car cameras, I saw what happened — but it never was intentional in the first place and that remains the case.
“So for him to say I changed my story ‘four times’ and I’m a liar pisses me off.”