NASCAR insiders react to Denny Hamlin-Bubba Wallace battle at Kansas, massive potential controversy

The finish to yesterday’s Kansas race is going to have reverberations on the NASCAR Playoffs. Denny Hamlin might have regrets. His move on Bubba Wallace in the last turn will be seen as the thing that gave the win to Chase Elliott.

Denny Hamlin was so close to winning. He dominated for 159 laps out front. His car had power steering issues, and he kept fighting it to remain in the lead. Then, the overtime restarts happened.

On the final pit stop, Hamlin’s team messed up getting the jack under the car. Then, he was given another chance with the second restart. We all saw how it played out with Elliott finding the bottom groove to race to the win.

Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic talked about the end of the race on The Teardown. The two NASCAR journalists broke down the finish in double overtime.

“He’s not thinking like that, either. He’s not thinking [as a] team owner,” Bianchi said about Hamlin. “And I give Denny credit for this because it would have been easy for a lot of people to have been like, ‘Hey, I’m in a great spot points-wise, I don’t need to win per se, my guys who I own, they need that win. I’m going to kind of lay over for them or maybe not go as hard.’ And he didn’t.

“This was driver versus driver, this wasn’t driver car owner versus driver. Depending on what everybody wants to accuse Denny of, favoring his own team over the team he drives for, here’s the evidence. This answers it all. This could potentially cost Denny significantly, monetarily.”

Could Denny Hamlin have done anything differently?

It was clear to Gluck and Bianchi that Denny Hamlin had to race Bubba Wallace hard. The potential for controversy if he were even perceived as giving his driver a “break” would be astounding. Still, could it have gone down differently?

“You know, obviously, we know he wants to get 60 [wins] anyway, and it was right there,” Gluck said in response. “Denny said afterwards he probably had maybe one of the best cars he’s had in comparison to the competition. Again, I’m probably missing something and letting Toyota in general and JGR in general off too easy by not saying it was a total choke job. … Who choked?

“What do you do differently, how do you not give that win away? Because hold on, back up, we just said that Denny shouldn’t let Bubba win. So that Denny should race hard there, right? So, do you go back to where Bubba and Bell? Bubba’s trying to race his way into the next round so you can’t tell Bubba not to race hard.”

Denny Hamlin had the win in his grasp. It slipped out. Really, it was yanked away from his hands by Chase Elliott in the final turn. How he handles this moving forward will determine whether this is the race that derails the championship run.