Dale Earnhardt Jr. reacts to Ty Dillon trolling Denny Hamlin over Atlanta upset

Ty Dillon raised more than a few eyebrows on Saturday following the Quaker State 400 at EchoPark Speedway when he opted to troll veteran driver Denny Hamlin. It wasn’t all that subtle.

Dillon quipped “For all you Denny fans out there, I just knocked your favorite driver out,” a riff on Hamlin’s now-famous catch phrase after he wins a race over other favorites. Hamlin took the Dillon troll in stride.

Others, though, have reacted in various manners. Some liked the prod, others found it tasteless. It really depended on where you were sitting.

“I thought it was a clever comment by Ty Dillon,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said on the Dale Jr. Download. “I think that Ty Dillon, you see, that’s what, we’ve got to thank this bracket challenge for those little kind of moments. Because Ty Dillon has been the underdog for the entire week, right? Every team meeting they’ve been in, every conversation he’s had with his wife or his grandfather or whatever, right?”

Not only did Dillon beat out Hamlin, who crashed in a 23-car wreck and saw his day essentially ruined, but he did so in style. He put together a season-best eighth-place finish in the race at Atlanta.

Earnhardt explained how the comment likely came about. He doesn’t think it was off the cuff, necessarily.

“That quote that he gave us was probably given to him mid-week in conversation,” Earnhardt said. “Right? I bet you, oh yeah, I bet you his crew chief, car chief, somebody said something to him and said, ‘Hey man, you ought to say such and such when you knock him out of the bracket.’ And he’s like, ‘Perfect, file that away.’ Gets out of the car… ‘blah.’ But that doesn’t happen if he doesn’t know that he’s in this bracket challenge and the bracket challenge doesn’t exist.”

Essentially, Earnhardt’s take on the whole Ty Dillon quote was that it created some extra entertainment. And it was only really possible due to NASCAR’s In-Season Challenge.

Anything that charges up the fans is likely to be a welcome addition. So Earnhardt was for it.

“(Otherwise) we don’t get to give the Denny bros some sh*t,” he said, “and we don’t get to watch Denny bros lose their minds on social media.”