Denny Hamlin guarantees payback on Carson Hocevar, reveals he didn't go far enough with Ross Chastain

Denny Hamlin is going as far as to guarantee Ricky Stenhouse Jr. will get some payback on Carson Hocevar. The veteran wheelman even compared the situation to his own personal rivalry with Ross Chastain from a couple of years back.

“Ricky Stenhouse will absolutely wreck Carson Hocevar sometime in the near future. That’s just a fact. I would — I’d put this week’s salary on it. I’m not kidding you,” Hamlin predicted, via the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast. “You know, he ain’t going to punch him in the face, but he will absolutely wreck him, because Ricky’s that kind of guy that he’s going to feed into what people say. 

“He’s going to hear, ‘Are you going to get him?’ And you know, he’ll just suddenly — he’ll make sure you know, if you’re Carson, just know that it’s coming. So don’t be surprised. … It’s coming. There’s nothing I’m more confident of right now, other than Jordan having a baby, than Ricky wrecking Carson. I just feel as though that’s inevitable.”

While Hocevar hasn’t wronged Hamlin yet, he won’t be taking a wait-and-see approach with the Michigan native if he does. The three-time Daytona 500 winner warned Hocevar, letting him know the wrath he unleashed on Chastain would come to him if he does, and then some on top of that.

“Carson hasn’t done anything to me yet that has been egregious, but I guarantee you, I will get him if he does. I’m going to get him, because he has gotten a lot of people and they haven’t done anything about it,” Hamlin added. “We saw with Ross, eventually I was like, ‘Oh, I’m done screwing around with this guy. I’m going to have to do something,’ and even to this day, I feel like I didn’t do enough. But it was it was enough to get the point across, and it was enough to then get some meaningful dialogue between us to where I’m like, ‘Man, where are we at? How can we when’s this going to stop?’

“While [Hocevar] may think it’s cool to be the tough guy and they want to just put on this persona of someone that’s was one of the most popular drivers in our sport because he was ‘The Intimidator,’ you’re not that guy. So, this is just a different type of racing nowadays. This is not the best strategy, especially with as good as he’s running.”

Alas, it’ll be fascinating to see if Denny Hamlin stays true to his word if Carson Hocevar wrongs him, but there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t. NASCAR fans will be interested to see what goes down if the No. 11 and the No. 77 are racing near each other over the remainder of the 2025 season.