Denny Hamlin isn’t afraid to speak his mind, which sometimes involves his fellow competitors.
On his podcast, Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin, Hamlin talked about all the wrecks that occurred during the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum. Hamlin changed his original stance and called on NASCAR to penalize drivers for “egregious” crashes and name-dropped Chase Briscoe as someone who has done that in the past.
Hamlin said the following:
“I went back and watched the Clash and I’m like ‘Wow.’ At first I said after the race immediately, you probably saw on Twitter, I said, ‘Well you can’t penalize these guys for wrecking because they would just, all of us would be penalized.’ I go back on that.
“I think the [Door Bumper Clear] guys got it right when they said you got to penalize the first couple that are just absolutely egregious crashing of people. If you do that, it stops the next 20 events from happening. And you can tell, from NASCAR, some of those wrecks you could tell when someone’s egregious. They lay into whoever they’re laying into. They don’t attempt to slow down. They don’t attempt to give the person a chance to collect it. They just piledrive them into whoever’s in front of them and say, ‘F*** it. Whatever happens, happens.’
“I watched [Chase Briscoe]. I’m not sh***ing you, I watched him like just drive in and make no attempt to even make the corner multiple times. I saw this, by the way, at the Indy road course as well. I mean, there’s something that Chase is doing where he’s just giving no regard to like, anybody that’s in front of him and he’s just saying, ‘F*** you and f*** the consequences.’ And it’s like, that just kind of rubs me a little bit wrong and I’m like, ‘Man, they need to just stop that bulls*** first.’ And if they can do that, then I think the rest of these events don’t happen. You have a much cleaner race.”
I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say Hamlin was referring to the finish of the 2021 Indianapolis race, where Briscoe spun Hamlin out of the lead during overtime. To be fair to Briscoe, he might’ve felt that Hamlin forced him to the grass earlier that lap, which ended Briscoe’s chance at a win. So to Briscoe, him spinning out Hamlin was more about revenge than anything. Nevertheless, that could possibly be seen as egregious.
Hamlin’s idea is to send the person who caused the crash to the rear of the field, something that happens at some local short tracks.
What Hamlin said isn’t wrong. The problem is that NASCAR would be put in a position they don’t like to be in, where they have to determine what is or isn’t “egregious” and possibly determine the outcome of a race. Maybe 95% of the time, everyone can tell the difference, but there will be that 5% where a sizable portion of the fanbase disagrees, which would cause chaos. Just look at the end of Sunday’s Super Bowl as an example of fans not liking when officials factor into the end of a game.
Usually, drivers self-policed themselves and wrecked a driver they felt wrecked them. But due to the rigidity of the Next Gen cars resulting in drivers suffering concussions, it’s not the best idea for drivers to be sending their competitors into the wall to pay them back. When that’s the case, maybe it makes sense for NASCAR to be a bit more strict on egregious crashes and try to keep drivers in check before things escalate.
