In the immediate aftermath of Justin Allgaier blocking Denny Hamlin from the lead and triggering ‘The Big One’ in the 68th Daytona 500, the JR Motorsports driver took ‘100 percent’ of the blame but the Joe Gibbs Racing contender conceded his share a day later.
The crash took place approaching the end of the second stage and collected 20 cars on Lap 124. Allgaier left about enough space for a car to fit between him and the wall so Hamlin took the run to the outside.
Allgaier shaded right and they both ended up in the wall with the field piling in behind them. Hamlin addressed the incident on Monday during his Actions Detrimental podcast season premier.
“Allgaier took 100 percent of the blame; I’ll take 20 of it,” Hamlin said. “I’ll take 20 of it because it was an aggressive move, but it’s coming at the end of the stage. He’s gotta know I’m gonna be aggressive, like, I’m gonna take every run I’m gonna get at the end of a stage because stage points do matter to me. I established very early I wanted to be in the top. It’s why once I cleared the bottom lane, I went right to the top. That’s where I wanted to be to end the stage. I was coming with such a massive run… I made up my mind probably 100 yards or so before I actually went high, I said, ‘I’m going to the outside no matter what,’ because I knew where he had run on the top before that, so I’d knew there’d be enough space.
“It was enough space, obviously, if he didn’t move up, I had outside position, but it probably happened so quickly that it caught him off guard. So, for me, I think my 20 percent is that he probably didn’t have a whole lot of time to react or see that was coming, therefore was late to react to it.”
Hindsight being 20/20, Hamlin would have approached that moment differently.
“Had I had it to do all over again, I would have stayed on (Allgaier),” Hamlin said. “We were running 10 mph faster than him at the time because of the push I got. If I go into the tri-oval and check-up for him, does (Ryan Blaney) just plow into the back of me? Probably not because he’s got a good spotter, he’s good driver, so they can know and plan for that kind of stuff, but it would have caused a huge domino effect had I checked up and not taken it.
“Or I could have just gone to the bottom and probably cleared him with the speed differential that I had. … Again, doing it all over again, had I known what the result was going to be, I would have just stayed in line there for a few more laps.”
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