Denny Hamlin was going for it late in the NASCAR Cup Series race at Homestead Miami Speedway but it left Ryan Blaney feeling less than impressed.
Hamlin drove hard under Blaney to take the lead on a restart with 38 laps to go but it stalled both of their momentum and allowed eventual winner Christopher Bell to take the position from both of them. Hamlin and Blaney would continue to race for second and then third after William Byron passed both.
Hamlin continued taking shots under Blaney, effectively an attempt at a slide job, but all of them completed a pass. Blaney felt used up and expressed that sentiment after the race.
“He tried to slide me two or three times and failed miserably,” Ryan Blaney said. “And then just decided to use me up. if you’re going to slide somebody, slide somebody and commit. Don’t halfway do it and use me up. What did he say? Hack. I think he was that today. Yeah.”
That was a reference to Hamlin calling Alex Bowman a ‘hack’ at Martinsville in 2021 over how their battle for the win played out.
Hamlin would eventually suffer a mechanical failure shortly after the attempted slide job and hit the wall. The contact broke a tire rod and ended the race for Hamlin. It also forced Hamlin into a likely must-win scenario next weekend at Martinsville in order to advance into the championship race at Phoenix Raceway.
In real time, Blaney watched Hamlin hit the wall ahead of him, and keyed up his radio to chuckle and chide the driver of the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11.
“F–k you, dickhead,” Blaney said about Hamlin to his team.
That sentiment carried over to his post-race media availability as well.
For his part, Hamlin said he raced Blaney hard on the restart because clean air was so important.
“Whoever leads the race, that’s such a key moment, because they have such a huge advantage,” Denny Hamlin said. “I had the bottom and I took (the lead) on the bottom. If I didn’t get clear like I did in 2, I knew it would be tough to hold it. Unfortunately, we just got split.
“It didn’t matter since we broke anyway.”
As for needing to win next week at Martinsville, Hamlin took an impassioned approach.
“If I have to win, we’re going to go try and win,” Hamlin said. “That’s what we go to the race track to do every week and if our season ends because a mechanical, it is what it is. It’s part of the format.”
Hamlin is -17 to the elimination cutline and Blaney is +10.
Blaney has been one of the underdog teams this entire playoff, not because Team Penske isn’t competitive but because they just haven’t met their own par this season. Defending champion Joey Logano was eliminated in the first round.
“It’s no secret we have not been as competitive as some of those other guys throughout the year,” Blaney said. “We’ve been putting together some good runs the past couple of weeks, really the past month. Just working hard. Our group works really hard, the whole organization, about not getting down when we’re not as good as we want to be. We don’t stop working.”
Blaney went on to finish second.
“I thought we had a good shot, car was fast and led laps, it kind of cooled off there and the long run advantage kind of went away,” Blaney said. “I didn’t want to see that red flag. I wanted to race Larson with a long run while it was hot. Proud of the effort. It was a good day, just didn’t work out for us at the end.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.