NASCAR gave Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 team a heavy blow earlier this season. They got penalized for engine tampering at Bristol. The L2 penalty cost Hamlin 75 points and 10 playoff points, putting a serious dent in their championship hopes. Once a top-three contender, the team now faces an uphill battle, forced to rethink their strategy. Frustratingly, the error wasn’t theirs but TRD’s, leading to this harsh setback.

Though Hamlin kept his cool publicly, he vented his frustrations on his podcast, revealing how this blunder has impacted his season. What did he say?

Denny Hamlin wasn’t expecting TRD to drop the ball

Hamlin shared exactly what went wrong. “Instead of it going back to NASCAR because it’s done with its engine cycle, it got sent to Costa Mesa… They cut the seals off and rebuilt the engine, and immediately Toyota’s like, they more than likely saw these red seals sitting on the ground or someone’s desk, and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, why are these here? Who cut these off?’ That’s what should’ve been said anyway,” Hamlin said on the Actions Detrimental Podcast aired on August 25.

The engine of the racecar has a certain life cycle, and after completing its run, it needs to be recalibrated for future use. Every team in the garage does that, but the thing with a race-winning engine is that it needs to be cleared by NASCAR with their inspection procedure. Sometimes it is done on the track during the race, and sometimes later.

In Hamlin’s case, the engine returned to the TRD facility. Now the race-winning engines can be easily identified as they are sealed in red. But that wasn’t enough for the guys at TRD, as they tore it down, repaired it, and sent it back to the #11 team. Hamlin, sharing his opinion on the incident, stated that he raced with the same engine at Darlington.

Moreover, the veteran driver knew that he had no way around this penalty call. “We’ve got something in our rule book that is pretty black and white. If the engine doesn’t go back for inspection or whatever, it is an L2 penalty, and here’s what it is. They told me and I found out on Thursday and certainly was not a good day for me, nor has the last three straight days; it’s been bad.”

Now, that was quite a big fumble. But what did TRD have to say about the issue? Their statement read, “Although we know with absolute certainty that the engine was legal and would have passed inspection, we left NASCAR in an impossible position because they were not given the opportunity to properly inspect our engine. We have reviewed our processes and have implemented several additional steps to ensure that this never happens again.”

“TRD takes full responsibility for this grievous mistake, and we apologize to Denny, Chris, Coach Gibbs, the entire JGR organization, NASCAR and our fans.” Regardless, a loss of 75 points and 10 playoff points was too much for the driver. But this isn’t the only issue he is facing. Things keep getting worse…

Denny Hamlin gets caught in a big problem at Daytona!

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Among the active drivers, Denny Hamlin had the best record with three Daytona wins to his name heading into the week. However, a big issue sparked by Corey LaJoie during the stage 2 run saw the #11 car being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hamlin has found himself in a similar situation at Daytona races in the Next Gen car. So much so that he has been unable to churn out top-10 results in the last six races at the iconic racetrack.

He’s reached a point where he just accepts that he won’t get a good run, as he eventually will find himself on the receiving end of things. “I just need to be okay with it; I just need to ride in line here, and if I get caught up in a wreck, I get caught up in a wreck and not be surprised, right?”

“So just in the Next-Gen era, my finish rate at superspeedways has not been good at all, and nothing I’ve caused. It’s just somebody else making silly moves, and we got caught up in it,” he added.

This week has certainly dampened the spirit inside the No. 11 team camp. But they’ll need to regain their focus as they head into the final race of the regular season at Darlington before the playoffs begin. What do you think will happen? Let us know in the comments below.