By Michele Rahal from Race Day on Fox Sports Radio. Heard Sunday mornings from 6-9am (eastern) on 220 FOX Sports Radio Affiliates and XM Radio Channel 142.

When you think of the old days of stock car racing, you’re drawn back to a time when if it didn’t work out on the track, the drivers worked it out with their fists. Well, those days are gone. All the rage this weekend was the shoving match between Kevin Harvick and Carl Edwards. A shoving match, not a fight, not a bench-clearing brawl. No one got put in a penalty box or lost their teeth.  The real story this weekend wasn’t even NASCAR but its stepbrother ARCA.

Going into Sunday’s season finale race at Toledo Speedway the ARCA series had all the underpinnings of an incredible battle for the championship with Scott Speed and Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. in a close battle. Not to be outdone, Penske’s new young find, Justin Algaier, and the wily veteran Frank Kimmel had a mathematical chance of taking the crown.

When the flag fell, no one could have scripted the outcome. Speed, who started third and Stenhouse, starting fourth went at it tooth and claw from the get go. Stenhouse repeatedly bashed, pushed and did everything but throw a hand grenade at Speed to pass him. Finally, on lap 27, after Dexter Bean spun relinquishing third position, Stenhouse got into the back of Speed’s Toyota and, very much like the Geico kid, ‘Put him (Speed) in the wall’.

However, unlike the commercial and straight out of the movie Days of Thunder, it didn’t end there. Speed pitted, took four tires and immediately set out on a turkey shoot, the said victim being Stenhouse. He found him after Stenhouse passed Speed, who was lying in wait. What ensued was classic stock car racing retaliation 101. Speed wasted no time in driving straight into the left fender of Stenhouse’s Ford, kept his foot on the accelerator and all but destroyed Stenhouse’s car and like a chapter straight from Sun Tsu’s ‘Art of War’ totally crushed and ended all hope of Stenhouse taking the championship from Speed.

According to Speed, “He (Stenhouse) was on my bumper and he pushed me flat out until I hit the wall,” said Speed. “And then the car was completely un-drivable; it wasn’t even close. It was so bad from hitting the wall; I couldn’t do anything with it. Stenhouse started it and he isn’t going to win this championship with that attitude. That was ridiculous; that was the most blatant thing I ever saw in my life. Honestly, it’s just ARCA; that’s just how it is.” No doubt ARCA was thrilled with that statement, ultimately parking Speed.

Stenhouse, who knew Speed couldn't care less about winning an ARCA championship, did whatever he had to do to win but did not count on the well-calculated payback.

Like every great story there are always two sides, so Stenhouse and the Roush PR machine put a spin on the incident that a Moroccan whirling dervish couldn’t top.

According to Stenhouse, “I got under the No. 2 a couple times there and let him go because he almost wrecked,” said Stenhouse, Jr. following the race.  “Then I went over the rumble strips in turns one and two and that caused them to fade so I was trying to pump them up in turn three and got into the back of the No. 2 car a little bit.  After that he came back on track and got into the left rear of the Aflac Ford Fusion sending me into the wall and ending our chance for a win and a championship.  He’s a great driver but I just don’t think he drives with his head all the time. It’s a bad situation for both teams.  I can’t thank my Aflac team enough and all the guys on the Zaxby’s team that helped get us back out there.  That was pretty cool.”

Rumble strips? Pumping the brakes? Not hardly. The only thing Stenhouse was pressing was the accelerator, probably through the floorboard shoving Speed into the wall. ARCA’s viewer-ship numbers weren’t readily available, but if anyone other than Stevie Wonder was sitting in front of their television screens, what they had to have seen was a methodical, purposeful and open act of crashing someone to win the championship. Anyone can win by crashing their opponent. That is not the reason we race. Stenhouse should have been parked. But he wasn’t so Speed took the matter into his own hands.

Scott Speed may have done more than openly retaliate against Stenhouse, after all, he’s a Sprint Cup driver as of today with the Red Bull team. What he unwittingly may have done was to send a message to everyone in the sport that he’ll race clean, if that’s what you want, but he’s all too happy to take that trip into the wall with you if you intend to race dirty.

Perhaps Sunday night Speed had flowers, a card and a bottle of Dom Perignon waiting in his hotel room courtesy of Justin Algaier but if he didn’t, he should have.

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By Rob D'Amico and Michele Rahal from Race Day on Fox Sports Radio. Heard Sunday mornings from 6-9am (eastern) on 220 FOX Sports Radio Affiliates and XM Radio Channel 142.

The 2009 Rookie of the Year battle has already begun. Joey Logano and Scott Speed will go head to head in several series, including the Sprint Cup Series, before the flag falls at the 2009 Daytona 500 in February. We have seen both of these drivers win in other series and both have seemingly experienced a meteoric rise. That, like so many ‘overnight sensations’, would be a false assumption. Many in the industry who witnessed Logano’s rise through the ranks on the short tracks of America feel he’s a shoe in for the title. Mark Martin is certainly one of those having repeatedly stated, when Logano was fifteen, “He’s the real deal”. In fact, that message became so ingrained in the NASCAR lexicon that he now has the nickname, ‘Sliced Bread’.

However, a driver that emerged on the scene last year may spoil the aspirations of Logano. That driver is American Scott Speed. Scott Speed was unceremoniously dumped from the Formula One team, Toro Rosso two years ago amid physical altercations with the team director, open press arguments and name calling between himself and team principal, Gerhard Berger. This left the relationship in shambles, the remaining Formula One teams unwilling to look further at him and Speed stating that “there is not enough money in the world for me to stay with this team”.

Dietrich Mateschitz, the owner of Red Bull, felt he owed Scott Speed a chance to continue racing under the Red Bull banner and has made good on that promise. Speed had his choice of where to race and he chose coming back to America to take on NASCAR. To be sure, an active Formula One driver making that move is no longer a precedent, given Montoya’s shocking switch from a world championship team, McLaren, to Chip Ganassi’s NASCAR Dodge team. The difference is Red Bull had put Speed on a ‘training’ program with ARCA, which he leads in points, and the NCTS where he already has one win. He’s going into his Sprint Cup debut at Lowe’s Motor Speedway with a baseline of experience underneath him, albeit abbreviated. Speed is 25 years old.

Taking a completely different, and more traditional path, Joey Logano made his mark in every series in which he’s participated including the Nationwide series with top ten finishes and a win. He recently made his debut with Hall Of Fame Racing in Sprint Cup at Kansas, but did not achieve the results he wanted and it showed in his face. But will the switch to a Joe Gibbs run car in Atlanta make the difference? According to Logano, “We’re going to run the No. 02 Home Depot Toyota in Atlanta and possibly a couple more races. I feel like I’m going to be in a really good car”.

Meanwhile, as if no one was watching they raced each other in both the NCTS and ARCA races this past weekend. They both ran up front in both series and both had troubles that either put them out of the races or kept them from bringing home stellar finishes.  Logano lost a right-side window in the truck race losing him precious laps and Scott Speed had a tire go nuclear in the ARCA race but still holds the points lead by 85 points heading to the season final at Toledo next weekend.

Justin Allgaier, with no drafting help, drove to the outside of Logano which let Allgaier sail away with the biggest victory of his career and Logano who knew he had been schooled. “I don’t know; I did everything I could do; I just got beat,” said Logano. “He just schooled me. I learned a lot and I will do things different next time. That was a lot of hard work a lot of hard hours by all those guys. I’m just mad that I didn’t live up to it for them.” The self-inflicted pressure from Logano shows through.

Scott Speed had virtually nothing to say about his tire problems. In both instances these two drivers were up front and posturing for a potential win. It’s obvious that the two have taken different paths to achieve the same end. To win.

If you compare the experiences of the two drivers you find two starkly different personalities. One is intense, driven, self-critical and under pressure. That’s Logano. The other has exudes liaise faire attitudes, feels no pressure and paints his toenails now and again. We know who that is. Both have paid their dues rising to their present levels and both are inveterate competitors. The difference between Joey Logano and Scott Speed is that Speed has experienced pressure at a level that no other sport can produce, Formula One. In Formula One, the teammates hate each other, the drivers hate the team principals and the team principals consider the drivers nothing more than robots and expendable commodities. The threat of termination is a daily possibility. To Scott Speed his NASCAR experience to date has been a vacation.

Alternatively, Joey Logano has been placed under intense pressure that most 18 year olds, other than those serving in active combat, will ever feel. Logano said he didn’t feel that the Sprint Cup car he raced in Kansas was responsive and that the set-up felt alien. Speed said the Cup Car he tested was great, more fun than the ARCA car and more responsive than the trucks. What? That sentiment is totally opposite of most who are now racing this latest iteration of the Cup car. During the recent Lowes Motor Speedway test Speed set the fastest evening time among all drivers, except Jeff Gordon and that was less than a tenth of second difference. Logano was 49th fastest.

Logano certainly has the race craft to get into the top ten in 2009. He’s been successful at every endeavor he’s undertaken, but this is Sprint Cup, the highest level. Speed has already endured that pressure but doesn’t have the day-to-day experience in these heavy, but very competitive cars.

Get ready for a glimpse of the remainder of 2008 and perhaps a looking glass view of the 2009 Rookie of the Year battle.

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Catch the weekly radio show featuring weekend previews of all the racing series. Rob D'Amico and the SPEED team get you ready for the weekend every Friday on SPEED Radio!  Click Here To Listen