Ryan Blaney reacts to Denny Hamlin-Ty Gibbs incident at New Hampshire: ‘Should be way easier’

Ryan Blaney won this past weekend’s race at New Hampshire. However, the top story in NASCAR afterwards has dealt with the beef between Denny Hamlin and Ty Gibbs.

The former NASCAR Cup Series champion tried to make sense of it all during an appearance on the Dale Jr. Download. While it wasn’t a good look for Joe Gibbs Racing, he sees this happen all the time with teammates in the sport — although Hamlin and Gibbs certainly took it to another level on Sunday.

“I wonder what that meeting was like,” Blaney laughed. “That’s tough. I feel like, in general, the guys who are not part of the playoffs, I feel like they’ll genuinely be more respectful to guys that are in it in certain situations. Some situations—race hard, I get it, like we’re coming down to a finish or something like that—yeah, I fully expect to get raced hard. But when it’s your teammate and he’s not in it, and you guys are in it, that’s a little bit different to me. It should be way easier.

“But I mean, I can’t, I don’t know what all is going on there. I don’t know the relationship with that, and why Ty decided to run him super hard like he did—and Bell and, you know, Hamlin and Bell. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that would happen in our camp. … Maybe they don’t see eye-to-eye. You’ve seen that before. You go through these little stretches of not really agreeing with each other, or not being on the best of terms. And maybe that’s something going on there.

“I’d say it’s easy to get that way in a teammate situation. Maybe there are some things that have festered over time, and yeah, you know, they linger, and you remember that stuff. I’ve had it before within the team. You just get past it and figure out how to go forward.”

At the time of their incident, Hamlin and Gibbs were battling for 11th place, before Hamlin spun Gibbs on Lap 110. Gibbs did not finish the race due to the damage suffered to his No. 54 Toyota, and Hamlin sounded off on Gibbs to his team via radio. 

In the time since, both have been hesitant to apologize, but many are siding with Hamlin. For now, Blaney is focused on keeping the No. 11 Toyota team behind him on the track, and if Gibbs helps him do that, then there’s no skin off his nose.