Denny Hamlin was having a decent race at Darlington, until he wasn’t. The driver of the No. 11 car had some serious issues on pit road that essentially cost him the race.
But it was a little bit of contact with Chase Briscoe that led to the whole thing. Hamlin explained this week on the Actions Detrimental podcast.
“Unfortunately for us, there was two key moments,” Hamlin said. “One was obviously the pit stop that took us from the front to the back. And I knew, listen I resigned. I’m no quitter. I’m no quitter. I knew instantly, though, that that was the end of it for us having a chance to win the race. But let me go back a little bit.
“So before that, the restart where I actually took the lead, Tyler Reddick did do his job well on that restart but almost too well. So if you look, did they show it well on TV? Me and Briscoe hit hard. We hit hard, wheel to wheel, and it bent the damn toe link pretty good.”
It didn’t take much driving for Denny Hamlin to realize something was seriously off. He needed to head to pit road to make some adjustments. He walked his listeners through what was going on in the car.
“My wheel kind of went from I usually like running it, my straight up mark, if straight up is 12 I usually like for my line to be at 11,” Hamlin said. “It moved itself to like 1 o’clock or 12:30. So I knew that, man, my car was tracking differently and just not optimum.
“So that’s when I went from I was leading, Chase passed me back pretty quickly. I realized my car was in trouble. We fell back to I think third or fourth where we pitted. And that’s when we had that blow-up stop right then. So it was two things right back to back in that short window that derailed the day.”
Denny Hamlin’s car came into pit road a little hot. He stopped and an issue with the back right tire forced the jackman to come back around and jack the car up again. A hose got stuck under the right rear wheel. A wrench hit the pavement.
Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong in the first NASCAR Cup Series playoff race. And Denny Hamlin was essentially out of the race.
“That’s what we call a blow-up stop,” Hamlin said. “All hell has broken loose. This isn’t a bad stop, this is a blow-up stop. Obviously we saw it with the 48 as well. It is race-changing pit stops.”
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