Rajah Caruth has apologised to NASCAR rival Jesse Love after the second incident between the pair in as many weeks.

The O'Reilly Series rookie apologized to the defending series champion following the race, and also made a point of addressing the incident when speaking to the media.

Caruth got out of the collision as close to unscathed as possible, driving on to finish fourth – his best result in the series, and his first top-five finish.

Love was not so fortunate, struggling with damage and a poorly-timed pitstop for the rest of the race to finish down in 27th and lose substantial ground to Justin Allgaier at the top of the points standings.

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Caruth: Obviously I didn't mean to do that

Toward the end of talking to reporters after the race, Caruth said: "Yeah, oh, other thing… Obviously, I got into the No. 2 earlier, and I was just trying to cross behind him. Obviously, I didn’t mean to do that, and obviously, I’ll go over there once we finish up over here. Obviously wanted to do that better, but glad to have a somewhat quiet day at the end.”

The pair got into it last weekend at Martinsville too, with a couple of members of Love's crew getting heated at Caruth post-race before their driver waved them off to handle the matter personally, and calmly.

Love said of the incident: "It’s tough, right? Because, like, me and Danny [Stockman, crew chief] are brothers. And Danny wants me to know that he has my back, and I really do appreciate that. But it’s also my job to let Danny know I appreciate that and let me handle it, right?

"Because I don’t know if Danny knows this, but I see Rajah a lot. Me and Raj have a good working relationship, and I felt comfortable that I could have a conversation with him without just having a yelling match and having to get crew chiefs and engineers involved and people screaming at each other.”

Caruth admitted fault in the incident, and added: “We train together and I think ultimately, we both have a lot of respect for each other. And I heard where he was coming from and he heard where I was coming from. I owe them grace moving forward for a little bit, just because I impacted their day – not only mine, but theirs, not well at the end. Just didn’t do the best job.

“It’s important for the drivers just to talk about it because we can discuss it and not, like, come to blows or anything like that. And that’s all that was. Like I said, I was in the wrong there. Kind of out of character for me. I don’t know what my thought process there was honestly, so I just won’t do that again.”

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