'I didn't learn my lesson the first time' – Hamlin
Today at 03:14 PM
Denny Hamlin was on the losing end of a final lap battle with Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell at Phoenix Raceway, and he has no one to blame but himself.
And Hamlin is blaming himself.
"I'm more mad at myself than anything," Hamlin said, "to not do the things I needed to do to finish it."
The comment was made Sunday night, hours after the checkered flag in the Shriners Children's 500 when Hamlin sat down and recorded his 'Actions Detrimental' podcast. The benefit of time to review the finish had him admitting there were things he could have done differently.
Among those – and perhaps the biggest thing – was that Hamlin wouldn't have given Bell the bottom lane. If he had the chance to do it all over again, he said would have stayed behind Bell and shoved him up the racetrack in the final corners.
Hamlin came up short to Bell in a side-by-side fight off Turn 4. The two teammates ran each other hard, but without contact and Hamlin ran out of room on the high side and got into the dirty part of the racetrack. Bell was committed to the bottom.
A restart with two laps to go set up the run to the finish. Bell restarted on the bottom and Hamlin on the outside. On the restart, the two stayed side-by-side until they hit the backstretch, with Hamlin gaining a brief advantage from a shove by Kyle Larson. But Bell was still to his left rear as they took the white flag.
The side-by-side continued on the final lap. Bell nearly dispatched of Hamlin for good in Turns 1 and 2, but Hamlin stayed committed and got back to his outside down the backstretch. The difference was in Turns 3 and 4, as Bell ran the two into the corners hard and they both moved further up the track.
"There was an opportunity in the middle of (Turns) 1 and 2 on the white flag lap," Hamlin explained, "when he slid me and he cleared me for a brief moment I could have just said, 'OK, I don't want the outside. I'm just going to be on your bumper entering Turn 3.' … If I had to do it all over again, if I knew how he was going to react, knew what he was willing to do, I would done almost like Carl did at Richmond with Kyle Busch.
"He went in there, they got low, and he just kind of knocked Kyle up the racetrack. Didn't spin him out. Had I (got) to do all over again, seeing everything, see the grand picture, knowing that I had plenty of space behind me with (Larson), I would have said, OK, I'm not going to put myself on the outside. I'm not going to win on the outside, he's just going to shove me up. I would have got behind him and shoved him up."
There was nothing dirty between Bell and Hamlin. Butwhat makes it worse for Hamlin in hindsight is that it could have been prevented, and he let himself fall into a trap he went through once before that also ended with a second-place finish.
"I did this same mistake with Harvick at New Hampshire (in 2019) … such an idiot," Hamlin said. "I wish I would do things differently in the moment, but it's so hard when you're in the moment. But I come off of Turn 2, underneath him, and I let off. I'm like, no, no, I don't want to be on the bottom because I don't want to get pinched. That was, like, the stupidest thing ever, and instead, I get behind him and was like, I'm just going to nudge him out of the way.
"Well, what did he do? He just went dead left, slowed way down, and said, go out there. Go out there and pass me. I did and he just turned right and said, ‘ha-ha, idiot’. That's where it's like I didn't learn my lesson the first time."
