During Sunday’s race at Martinsville, Denny Hamlin had a car that could have very easily put him into the Championship 4. His crew was at its best, his car raced splendidly and the driver himself was at his better self. The only problem for him on the day was Team Penske. Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano gave Hamlin enough headaches through the 500 laps and nudged him out of the contest at sunset.

Though Blaney’s part came as a direct head-on for the lead on the short track, the former champion Logano had to employ other means to cause some mayhem. Clearly, the Joe Gibbs Racing’s #11 driver wasn’t fond of it.

Denny Hamlin fires at Joey Logano for disrespecting championship drivers

The feud between Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano stemmed from an incident that did not involve the former, but his young teammate Ty Gibbs. Logano had pushed into the #54 Camry of Gibbs from behind and shoved him out of the way in an unprecedented attack. Taking notice of this, Hamlin had right then spit his anger into the radio with some harsh words for Logano. After ending the three stages of the race, Hamlin came out of his car defeated in his battle with Ryan Blaney. But now, he had more words and time to get into the depth of his feelings about the Logano-Gibbs incident.

Reflecting that Logano would be quite the hypocrite, he said, “If the roles were reversed, he would have a giant problem with it. I just thought it was disrespectful to the guys that had earned their position up there and the guys that were trying to make it to the final 4. (…) I just thought it was disrespectful to the guys who’d earned the chance to race for the championship.”

A feud between Logano and Hamlin is not new to the surface of the Martinsville short-track. A battle brewed between the two back in 2019 after the First Data 500 race. The post-race talk between the two appeared to be a calm affair but quickly turned sour and ended up with Hamlin finding the floor. However, time has long passed by and it might appear that the two could be rekindling lost spirits at Virginia again.

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Denny Hamlin expresses confusion over the intent of Joey Logano to crash Ty Gibbs

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Team Penske’s champion and Denny Hamlin were once teammates at Joe Gibbs Racing. Some of the bad blood from back then has always seemed to risk overflowing into the current age and time. Sunday was a prime example of that happening. Talking to another mic, one that of Bob Pockrass, the #11 driver explained his issue with Logano’s move on Ty Gibbs.

He said, “The only issue I really had was with Logano knocking out Ty there. Knocking Ty into me. Just thought some more respect to be had there. Myself and Ryan Blaney are trying to earn a spot in the Final Four, and I thought we deserved a chance to race it amongst ourselves and not have someone else in there knocking cars around”

Getting out of the race track later, Hamlin also revealed on his podcast that he’d texted Logano asking him about the incident. He said on his podcast, “I texted Joey after the race, and I said, ‘Hey, why would you do that?’ Were you trying to hit him into me ?”. Upon response from the Penske star, Hamlin got to know that there’d been some feud between Logano and Gibbs all season. Finally seeing clearer where the sequence had come from, he also mentioned that he’d advised Ty Gibbs to be the first one to extend a peaceful arm.

End of the day, Hamlin found his ground as a middleman between the two. Though he did end up losing his Championship 4 spot to Logano’s teammate, Hamlin will be happy that he wasn’t a casuality caught in the beef between two other drivers who weren’t even racing for the championship.

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