The general message from Denny Hamlin on his Actions Detrimental podcast about the incident with Ty Gibbs on Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway was not much different than what he conveyed immediately afterwards.
In bullet point form, his takeaways haven’t changed 12 hours later.
- Gibbs was racing Hamlin and Christopher Bell way too hard, way too early, for inconsequential positions
- Hamlin and Bell are trying to win a championship for the company bearing his name
- It’s a matter than needs to be adjudicated by company leadership and not the drivers
Gibbs had held up Bell and Hamlin for over 10 laps until Lap 111 when it finally boiled over in the form of a decisive incident that sent the No. 54 into the wall and out of the race. This remains a matter of etiquette because Hamlin and Bell are chasing a championship and were being prevented by their non-playoff teammate from acquiring stage points that could prove decisive to advancing to the next round.
“In my mind, he was racing entirely too hard,” Hamlin said on his weekly Dirty Mo Media podcast. “And I know this is going to trigger some people about ‘racing a teammate too hard’ and I agree that everyone should race to win the race.
“We were racing at the time for 11th place. We, (Bell) and (Chase Briscoe) are all battling and scratching and clawing to try to get stage points, which is going to be life and death for us. It’s the air that we need to move on. I just felt like my teammate should not be the hardest car on the track to pass.”
Ty Gibbs, Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota
Photo by: Meg Oliphant / Getty Images
To wit, Hamlin even said rival Ross Chastain, also a playoff driver, let him go because a lengthy battle outside of the top-10 was not in the best interest of anyone’s big picture.
“What Ross thought, more than likely, was that ‘I am not going to hold him up for this entire 60 lap run so I might as well try to prevent someone else from joining this party’ so he could just line up behind me and keep going,” Hamlin said. “This is the race craft that I feel like is missing — understanding that situation.
“Certainly, these things are hard enough to win anyway but if you’re going to have to race your teammates harder than anyone on the track, then this is going to be really tough for any one of us to win.”
Hamlin said as recently as last year, Joe Gibbs Racing had a competition meeting where it was expressed to non-playoff drivers to ‘cut a break wherever reasonably possible’ to a teammate racing for the championship.
Working together as a team
He feels like Gibbs needs to hear that again from senior company leadership.
“What I want to happen is just leadership stepping in and telling us what to do,” Hamlin said. “If you want us to race each other cutthroat, no matter what your position is in relation to the standings, we can definitely do that.
“Like, I expect myself and (Briscoe) and (Bell) to race really, really hard because we’re all battling each other to get above this cut line … If I get eliminated or (Briscoe) gets eliminated or (Bell) gets eliminated and then we’ve established this ‘no rules, you guys just do whatever you want to do’ then none of us are going to win.”
His point is that Hendrick Motorsports and Team Penske, and their affiliates do a good job of respecting their championship racing teammates, and it’s going to be all the harder for a Gibbs driver to win if they are battling each other in addition to the competition.
“If you’re going up against that, and not only that, but your teammates being the most difficult ones to pass, we might as well just hang this thing up,” Hamlin said. “It’s too difficult to win (a championship) naturally, much less, if we’re going to have everyone race for themselves and it doesn’t matter if you’re racing for a championship or not.
“And from my standpoint, I would think Ty would want one of us to win a championship because it’s his name on the building.”
Gibbs is the grandson of team owner Joe Gibbs.
Ty Gibbs, Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota; Denny Hamlin, Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota
Photo by: Meg Oliphant / Getty Images
Hamlin also explained all the reasons that he did not intentionally crash Gibbs. He said that Gibbs was air blocking him, and chopping off his nose, repeatedly, and eventually it resulted in the decisive contact.
This is in addition to Gibbs doing the same thing to Bell before Hamlin caught them both. The contact from Hamlin to Gibbs almost collected Bell as well.
With a competition meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon, the two drivers have not exchanged texts or phone calls. And Hamlin feels like Coach Gibbs, president Dave Alpern or competition director Chris Gabehart needs to handle it because the drivers simply will not agree.
“The challenge is I think that me and Ty are going to have different opinions, therefore you need leadership to step in and say this is how we want it done,” Hamlin said. “And then we will play by those rules. Whatever those rules are, I will play by those rules, but I’ve been told in the past, ‘if you’re not in it, you do everything you can to help your teammates that are in it.’”
