NASCAR made their ruling on the incident that featured Matt Crafton and Nick Sanchez at Talladega on Tuesday, and Denny Hamlin is making his feelings known.
Prefacing, NASCAR announced the punishments for the drivers, following the two getting into a bit of a brawl in the garage area. There was a video captured at the end of the event, where Sanchez yelled threats towards Crafton with blood covering his face. Then, the NASCAR rookie driver claimed the three-time champion had “sucker punched” him.
Crafton was fined $25,000 by NASCAR for his actions, while Sanchez was fined $5,000. Afterwards, Hamlin took his his "Actions Detrimental" podcast to evaluate the situation, where he basically explained he’s siding with Sanchez.
“Somebody isn’t telling the truth,” Hamlin started. “So you had a couple of accounts of people, well you had Sanchez certainly, and then his mom saying that he was walking, got tapped on the shoulder and as soon as he turned around, bam. He got punched. Crafton is saying, if I understand, his side of it was that, he said that when he, ‘Before cameras started rolling, I approached Nick and said hey. When he turned around, I said, what the f—. Which then he looked right at me and threatened me.’ I don’t know. If I were selling this to the court, I immediately would have a little bit of — why would Sanchez threaten you? Like, I don’t — I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.
“When I think about, let’s try to piece all this together. Sanchez clearly got clocked really squarely in the nose. You would think, unless Crafton was a professional fighter, you’re not going to land one square there, unless it was, someone was caught very off-guard. You would think, if they were face-to-face, Crafton is not Canelo [Alvarez]. I hate to say it, he’s not Floyd [Mayweather]. He doesn’t have such a quick punch, I wouldn’t think at 47-years-old, that he’s going to catch him square without Sanchez putting up any defense whatsoever. … Some people are bleeders, some are not. I think it was a sucker-punch, personally. I just think that the evidence, the words, the witnesses. It just leads itself into a sucker-punch scenario.”
Evidently, Denny Hamlin has put a lot of thought into what happened over the weekend, and his evaluation does make sense. Regardless, NASCAR has already come to their resolution, and will be hoping to put the situation behind them moving forward.
More must-reads: