Denny Hamlin praised Austin Cindric earlier in the season as a driver he trusted to race against, especially in a superspeedway environment, but hasn’t liked what he has seen in recent weeks.
First there was the intention right rear hook at Circuit of the Americas on Ty Dillon but also a three-wide incident with AJ Allmendinger and Riley Herbst that sent the latter, a car owned by Hamlin, around at Martinsville. The COTA incident resulted in a 50-point penalty.
Hamlin spent most of the race out front but was surprised by some of what he saw when he went home that night and watched the race back.
“When I went back and watched the race it was crazy to see, I was up front up race, so my car was obviously a lot cleaner, but the cars were beat to shit back there,” Hamlin said Monday on Actions Detrimental. “It’s just crazy how much they are running into each other. I get it, everybody is grinding because the leader is going to be on you in 40 laps, so everyone is trying to get all you can, but yikes it’s rough back there.”
As for Cindric?
“As a car owner, I’m not liking [Austin Cindric] spinning out Riley Herbst, and it’s starting to get on my nerves a little bit that Austin Cindric seems to be losing his mind a little bit more than usual, and I can only say that because I did give him a lot of credit earlier in the year on his superspeedway driving and being smart inside the race car, but he’s starting to be a repeat offender.
“When things aren’t going his way, he’s wrecking guys, and so I don’t know how NASCAR will look at this. It’s different because it’s not a right-rear hook, it was essentially kind of, not even a left-rear hook, but just kind of a shove into the corner.”
Hamlin says he’s willing to chalk this one as just a bad moment for Cindric but also concluded that it’s alarming trend.
“Cindric’s getting a couple of close ones here where NASCAR needs to start taking habitual behavior into account, it’s happened with Austin Dillon at Gateway a year or so ago, you had the Ty Dillon thing this year, and now this, so it’s not looking good, and Cindric needs to clean that up.”
