Grady has been suspended for three races, starting last weekend at North Wilkesboro and continuing through the next two races at Ace and Wake County, of which the next two sting the most because those are important tracks to his family team.
CARS Tour has a blanket policy of suspending anyone who engages in fighting on the tour so Grady understands but he wants everyone to better understand what happened from his standpoint.
Grady was involved in an incident earlier in the race where he crashed hard into the backstretch at the Birthplace of the NASCAR Stars off the nose of Landon Huffman. It was objectively hard racing, which has been the theme of Late Model Stock racing all season, and he wanted to express his frustrations to Huffman.
After the race and on the cool down lap, Huffman was driving down pit road to his stall when Grady threw a chunk of dirt collected from his crash into his cockpit. It’s at this point where Grady says there’s some misunderstanding over what happened.
Since there hasn’t really been good coverage of the whole story. Jack McNelly was trying to escort Grady back to his trailer after throwing dirt at Landons car. Andrew pushed Jack to the ground and he hit his head hard, which caused our crew to step in and break it up.
“I’ll say this … a CARS Tour official put hands on my mother, left bruises on her and that same official choked me,” Grady said. “I pushed that official off me.”
That official accused by Grady was CARS Tour founder Jack McNelly, who is still an official with the series and works Turn 4 and the restart zone.
Grady also takes exception to the actions of Chad Bryant Racing, who he claims further stoked the flames of intensity that led to a full-on brawl on the frontstretch. CARS Tour also issued a $500 fine to Gage Painter of CBR for his involvement in that escalation.
“Anything that happened between the official and I, that happened, but it was made worse because of the other team that jumped into it when it wasn’t any of their business,” Grady said. “It wouldn’t have blown up more if that hadn’t happened.”
Grady took responsibility for his emotions immediately after the crash, where he tossed his HANS device at Huffman as he drove by under caution.
“That was heat of the moment,” he said. “I was mad. This was a brand new race car that now is torn up on every corner. I just felt like Landon could have done something different on the backstretch to where that wouldn’t have happened.
“But I grew up in an era where my heroes, when they got crashed and they were mad, they threw things under caution and they sometimes fought. To me, that’s just part of the sport but I also respect that it’s something that CARS Tour doesn’t like and they have to take action against.”
Grady just felt like the two additional races was unfair or didn’t take into consideration that he felt McNelly initiated the physical confrontation by laying hands on both he and his mother.
“I had nine pounds of grass in my car after doing some landscaping for Hickory Motor Speedway and I felt like I needed to express that I was mad about it to Landon,” Grady said. “As I did that, here came that official cussing me out, grabbing me by the throat and my mom gets pushed and I just want people to understand that side of it.”
Ultimately, Grady says he is not holding a grudge and that ‘you can’t keep a grudge in this sport’ but he really wants to run Wake County, his home race. He wants CARS Tour to reevaluate the length of the suspension given his version of the events that transpired.
And more than anything, Grady wants is asking that fans to look past the headlines of what happened at Hickory or his 2022 incident at Martinsville with Davey Callihan when it comes to his reputation.
“Honestly, I just want everyone to know we’ve been in short track racing for a long time,” Grady said. “I’m 30 and we were short track racing as a family 20 years before I was born. Everyone wants to be racing on Sundays but beyond that, I just wanted to be a Late Model racer like my dad (Tony) and CARS Tour is my NASCAR.
“We’ve been fortunate to win races and win a championship at Southern National but these CARS Tour races are so competitive. When we put into our team what we do, and to have that get torn up the way it did at Hickory. I’m going to be upset.
“I need to be calmer, just in general, but I want people to see the blood, sweat and tears that go into these race cars and that this is something we do as a family.”
And as far as the Tour, Grady will be back whenever his suspension ends to run out the rest of the season but he hopes to have another conversation with series leadership about what happened at Hickory because he feels like he was unfairly maligned with the press release and how the incident was framed.
“Really, it was just unfortunate for everyone involved but we’re going to get back after it and try to win races before the end of the year.”
Matt Weaver is the owner and founder of Short Track Scene. Weaver grew up in the sport, having raced himself before becoming a reporter in college at the University of South Alabama. He also has extensive experience covering NASCAR, IndyCar and Dirt Sprint Cars.
Anonymous
August 6, 2024 at 9:17 pm
Be a big boy and do your suspension