Denny Hamlin tried to make some sense of his early incident with Kyle Busch during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
During the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin was still trying to explain how he spun out after making contact with his former Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, “I have looked at the replay of me and Kyle 20 times. I still can’t figure out what happened,” he said.
Evidently, no clear reason for the wreck happening has come to Hamlin’s mind, but he’s trying to decipher each and every replay to figure out what went down.
“I was driving, and next thing you know, I was sideways, and I was spun out. I couldn’t figure out how the hell that happened,” the NASCAR veteran stated. “I didn’t even know, maybe I wasn’t just paying attention. Maybe I was just lulled to sleep, because I didn’t have a car right in front of me. I didn’t have one like, right beside me. I had a little gap behind me. I just, maybe I relaxed, down the straight away. I’m not really sure. But I look at multiple angles and I’m like, ‘He came up,’ and then I see another one and I’m like, ‘I definitely came down.’ So it’s like, they both happened, and it’s just, when he got super close to the left rear, it shot me even further left, and I guess I spun myself out. I’m not really sure.
“But no harm, no foul. It sucks because dammit, I was in the top five of two stages in a row and did not get s— because I got wrecked.”
As Hamlin said, it didn’t ruin the day for himself or Busch, but it’s still irking him that it went down, although he’s not blaming his former teammate and friend for the incident.
“I’m wondering if I just relaxed for a second,” Hamlin elaborated. “That’s the only thing I can think of, is that maybe I wasn’t — but I looked. I really did. I looked at my, am I tracking the cars in front of me, because you can’t look at the yellow lines, or the white lines on the race track, because they, with that dog leg, they go this way, and then they go that way, it’s all messed up. But I’m looking and I’m like, ‘I’m in the tire tracks of the car in front of me,’ but he’s in the tire tracks of the car in front of him when we make contact. So I couldn’t figure it out.
“It doesn’t matter, because it did no harm to me. Clearly, Kyle’s not trying to wreck me on purpose, and I’m clearly not trying to wreck myself. So it’s just as they say, one of them deals.”
Alas, there’s no bad blood between Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch, it seems like it was just one of those incidents that happen on the track. Either way, both were able to continue, and they ran up front for a majority of the awesome race we witnessed at Atlanta.
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