“They Don’t Care About Making Friends on the Racetrack” – Denny Hamlin Frustratingly Explains the Difference in Fans’ Narrative While Embracing His Villain Era for Wins

NASCAR is such an amazing sport where one can witness friendships turn into rivalry in the course of a race. It seems to be the case with Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson‘s fiasco, too. It all started with the post-race interview, where Larson referred to Hamlin as a friend. The debate kept going as some raised questions about the comment while others added fuel to the fire by calling Hamlin the new villain of the sport.

Well, it is normal that fans tend to side with their favorite, to support them. Following the narrative about Hamlin becoming a Villain, the JGR driver has now opened up about the reason behind this fan’s perspective.

Denny Hamlin explains the reason why the fans are divided

Denny Hamlin has been in the midst of controversies this year. It all started off with his incident with Chase Elliott at Coca-Cola 600. After that incident, Hamlin was criticized by Chase Elliott’s fans after his raised demand for Chase Elliott’s suspension. Now, he is being termed a Hypocrite, as he is not liking requests for his suspension raised by the Kyle Larson fans.

Denny Hamlin revealed the reason behind all of this by explaining, “If things don’t go your way, There’s blame to be placed somewhere right. it doesn’t reside with your fandom to one given person or manufacturer or whatever it is. I get all that but I also people need to understand too that like I get in the sense that I don’t expect Kyle Larson to get out and be happy with it right?

According to Hamlin, there are two sides to any incident: a winning side, and a losing side. And Larson, unfortunately, was on that losing side. That was the reason why #5 fans expressed heated emotions against the #11 driver.

He continued, “But of course, the emotions flipped from you think you did right, you think you did wrong because of what the result was to you. So it just shows that fandom doesn’t always mean what’s right and what’s wrong, right? I think it really depends on who’s the characters involved and whether the acceptable level is not set by fan sentiment”

Regarding Kyle Larson’s post-race interview, where he called Hamlin a “Friend,” the JGR driver believes that, “Racing is racing and they should want us to go out there and be aggressive every single time, it doesn’t matter whether we’re friends or teammates or whatever. They win in that scenario, so I get it and I understand but you know, there’s a lot of drivers that don’t care about making friends on the racetrack and they won a lot of races because of it.”

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While most believe otherwise, Denny Hamlin claimed that he is innocent

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The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was involved in a couple of wrecks in that Pocono race. First, it was Alex Bowman, who was running third, followed by Hamlin. Suddenly #48 got loose and made hard contact with the outside wall. And the second one was Kyle Larson.

However, Denny Hamlin has something different to say about those incidents. He believes he didn’t even touch the Hendrick Motorsports guys. In a post-race interview after Pocono’s victory, the #11 driver said, “Both guys wrecked themselves. There was a lane. He missed the corner first, and evidently, he didn’t have his right-side tires clean and when he gassed it up he kept going again…I didn’t hit either one of them. I didn’t touch them”

Well, despite these clear statements of Hamlin, he has been handed the villain crown, which he has surprisingly accepted.

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