Joe Gibbs Racing is in a great position with just two weeks to go before the start of the Chase. All four of the team’s drivers are in contention for the championship, with Denny Hamlin leading the standings and Chase Briscoe, Christopher Bell, and Ty Gibbs all having officially clinched their spot in the postseason.
It should be a good, and ideally clean, race to the finish of the season, but even though they’re teammates now, JGR’s drivers have had their battles in the past. One battle, however, has apparently been drastically misremembered.
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At the Verizon 200 at the Brickyard in 2021, Briscoe — then driving for Stewart–Haas Racing — traded blows with Hamlin through the final laps of the race on the Indianapolis road course.
“Everybody thinks still that I wrecked Denny on purpose that day,” Briscoe said appearing as a guest on the Actions Detrimental podcast. “I would take a lie detector right now on the show to verify it.”
For all of us watching at home, it appeared that Hamlin ran Briscoe off the track early in the last lap of the race, and Briscoe got Hamlin back by driving through him during a later sequence. Briscoe’s hit was made even more questionable as it came after he had been given a penalty that took him out of contention for the race win. While Briscoe swears he wasn’t aware of the penalty at the moment of impact, there’s an easy narrative to build that he had simply decided, “If I’m getting taken out, you’re coming with me Denny.”
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You can watch the scene in question below.
But according to Briscoe, both bits of contact were circumstantial and unintended.
“We short pitted at the very end hoping to catch a caution, and we somehow caught one,” Briscoe explained. “So I found myself on the front row after being like 34th. I go down into one, obviously I get ran wide, but we both kind of missed the corner, and there was no way I was getting back on the race track, so I just gassed the thing.”
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Briscoe sped across the grass, for which he was given his penalty. He said that he wasn’t thinking about the previous contact when heading into his second collision with Hamlin, he was just heading into his strongest part of the race track, and he and Hamlin simply made their moves at the same time.
“I forget what the corners are, I think it was eight, night, 10. In Xfinity the year before, and even in Cup that year, I would murder the field through there. That was my best part of the race track,” Briscoe explained. “I was going to turn off right into turn 10. … I’m like on him. He goes to turn left to set up for that next one right when I was shooting right to try to pass him. I smoked him in the right rear right as we turn off.”
While it wasn’t his plan, it sure looked like Briscoe had gotten Hamlin back for the contact he was on the receiving end of earlier in the lap. Coming off the track, Briscoe said he was congratulated for sticking up for himself, despite having no ill intent.
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“I come in and Tony [Stewart] is like ‘Man, I’m proud of you for standing your ground,'” Briscoe said. “I’m thinking in back of my mind like, ‘I didn’t wreck him on purpose, but yeah buddy! You got it!’ Even now on weekends I’ll have people where they’re like ‘We remember when you wrecked Denny, thanks for doing that.'”
Whatever beef might have stood between Hamlin and Briscoe in the fallout of that race five years ago appears to have been well squashed — at least enough for Briscoe to appear on Hamlin’s podcast when the No. 11 driver is out of town.
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