MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) As expected, NASCAR’s four championship rivals were cordial, candid and comical.
No one tried to swing a chair, or even take a verbal jab.
UFC, this isn’t.
”Sorry we’re letting you down,” six-time champion Jimmie Johnson quipped Thursday.
The winner-take-all championship race Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway should be creating a semblance of tension between four rival drivers. But this quartet went bike riding together in one of their many stops on a seemingly sunshine-and-roses media tour. A week after Conor McGregor nearly threw a chair at Eddie Alvarez in a UFC pre-fight hype session, NASCAR’s ferocious four let trash-talking take a backseat on an easy afternoon full of heaping accolades for each other.
NASCAR had the four pull up a chair on the stage during a cozy championship introduction Thursday – you know, just like a late night talk show – and the drivers delivered the yuks. They joked among each other, Kyle Busch repeatedly wise-cracked under his mic to teammate Carl Edwards and everybody grinned like it was Christmas morning.
Come Sunday, they’ll have to psychologically flip a switch and turn against each other. Even Busch and Edwards, teammates in a proud Toyota effort for Joe Gibbs who have shared everything in an open-book organization, must now toss aside professional courtesy to be the last man standing on the championship stage.
But why do they have to be so chummy?
”You know that you’re not going to beat up on a guy in a media session and make his car go any slower,” said Busch, the reigning champion. ”To be honest with you, you’re probably going to make (the car) go faster. You’re going to make him want it more. There’s no sense is doing any of that. That’s why with UFC fighters, they egg each other on, you’re just going to get hit harder.”
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