Joe Gibbs Racing veteran Denny Hamlin is known for his Superspeedway prowess. The three-time Daytona 500 winner has always been competitive in the plate races, but on Sunday at Atlanta fans saw a different Hamlin. The No:11 driver got wrecked left and right during the race and finished in a disappointing P23 in the race.
He was part of incidents, that saw Daniel Suarez win a three-car photo-finish with a 0.002 seconds margin, thrice in the race. Ironically each of his crashes came in three different stages of the race making it a Trifecta. Hamlin, who limbed back to secure a top-25 finish was disappointed with how the race panned out for him.
The first incident involving Hamlin occurred on stage one. Hamlin’s former teammate Kyle Busch who now drives for RCR bumped him from the back and spun him out. This sends the No11 Toyota to the back of the grid. He slowly found himself up the track only to get caught in a crash in the last lap of stage two.
He got caught up on the outside wall with two times cup champion and another ex-teammate Joey Logano. This once again put him on the back foot. Late in the race, Stewart Haas Racing’s Chase Briscoe while trying to make the race four wide made contact with Hamlin and wrecked. NASCAR was forced to red-flag the race after the liquid spill due to this incident.
Denny Hamlin feels like a victim after the trifecta
Hamlin, while discussing the incidents he was involved in admitted that he was helpless and had no chances to avoid them. He was caught off-guard by Kyle Busch and the incident with Chase Briscoe was unavoidable as he didn’t have another lane to take in the four-wide situation.
I gotta look at them but I feel like a victim, I don’t know. The 41 [Ryan Preece] or 14 [Chase Briscoe] whoever ended up spinning out, I guess I ran into but I mean I’m four-wide I had nowhere to go on the bottom. The 99 put me four-wide, second from the bottom, there just was no room. Then on the frontstretch the 8 [Kyle Busch] spun us but I don’t even know, I was totally caught off guard. Hamlin told Bob Pockrass.
Going into the third race of the season at Vegas next week Hamlin will be hoping to secure a win and put himself in the championship conversation. With the Superspeedway swing out of the way teams will have more breathing space to develop the cars for the normal short and intermediate track action coming their way.
More must-reads: