While parallels have been drawn to the penalty dished out to Carson Hocevar last week, Denny Hamlin isn’t quite sure Bubba Wallace quite deserves the same level of scrutiny.
Of course, consider the obvious caveat that Wallace drives for 23XI Racing, which is co-owned by Hamlin and Michael Jordan as well. Hamlin tackled the topic on Monday during the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast.
“I don’t know how NASCAR is going to view it,” Hamlin said. “So how this is different than Carson Hocevar is that one is under yellow. And under yellow, that means that there’s an unsafe condition and there are safety vehicles on the racetrack. At the end of the race, there are no safety vehicles on the racetrack and it’s not an unsafe condition. There’s not a drivers safety issue.
“So, I don’t know how they’ll view it and the other also is that Carson spun someone under yellow and it cost them positions and damage to their car. So, that hurt Harrison Burton for the rest of the race. This was the race is over, he took a swipe at Bowman, and I think Bowman underplayed it a little bit in the media.
“But yeah, I don’t know how they’ll view it. I think they could go either way with this because it is different than wrecking someone under caution. Think people that don’t like Bubba will try to draw conclusions into it one way and people that support Bubba will see it in an entirely different way. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, but certainly, I think they are different simply because of the safety aspect of being under caution versus being at the end of the race. There’s no safety vehicles out there, everyone’s running slow speeds. He’ll probably get a talking to, maybe get a fine or something, but that’ll be all I think comes from this.”
For what it’s worth, NASCAR has said it will review all the pertinent data and Bowman has made a public plea that Wallace doesn’t get penalized either. Bowman said he deserved it.
“Yeah, I’d do that, too,” Bowman said. “I ruined his day. We had a really — the restart was chaotic. I just made every wrong decision I possibly could, and I was fighting with my windshield wiper switch trying to get the thing working and I couldn’t get it working and I was focused on that, missed the corner and cleaned him out. I locked all four tires up and slid right into him. I just messed up and absolutely ruined his day.
“I’m pretty hard on myself when I make mistakes like that, and I’ve been embarrassed about it since it happened.”