Denny Hamlin has brutally honest description of Daytona 500

“This is one of these mornings I woke up full Clint Eastwood, ‘Get off my lawn.’ I’m just so [expletive]-ing angry. I woke up p-ssed, and it’s about everything. Now I know why drivers retire. I have that feeling," Hamlin said, reflecting on his 24th-place finish.

"I spent decades learning how to do this, watching the best, studying it and understanding it, and I’m going to get rewarded for this, and then we all crash at the end. That has become normal in the Daytona 500. That’s what kills my enthusiasm for the whole thing.”

Hamlin continued to emphasize the role luck played in Sunday's finish, calling the process to find a winner a "[expletive]-ing crapshoot."

 “I hate that what is supposed to be our most prestigious race, is luck. And I don’t care how else you want to say it. It is luck. You just have to avoid the wrecks. … I don’t know anymore. I’ve grown really, really agitated with how we’ve gotten here.”

To Hamlin's point, six of the last eight Daytona 500 races have gone to overtime. Three of the last five, including Sunday night's race, finished under caution.

Superspeedways put cars closer together on track, and one wrong move can cause the kind of pileup that took Hamlin and so many other drivers out of the race.

It's an unfortunate way to end a great race after hundreds of excellent laps, but it is an unfortunate reality of the current state of superspeedway racing.

Unless NASCAR makes a drastic change — whether in terms of cars or tracks — the potential for "the big one" at the sport's largest tracks will always be right around the corner.

Hamlin is still one of the sport's most decorated drivers, both active and all-time. He'll look for win No. 55 of his Cup Series career on Sunday when the best stock car drivers in the world head to Atlanta.