Denny Hamlin weighs in on Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson pit road incident

Denny Hamlin weighed in on the pit road incident between Hendrick Motorsports teammates Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson at Kansas on Sunday.

Late in the race, Larson got pushed up the track on pit road, and made contact with Elliott as they exited. Evidently, Elliott wasn’t a fan of his teammate’s move, even if Larson simply had nowhere to go, and let him know about it, dooring him on the way back to the racing surface.

Of course, everyone has their opinion on the matter, including Hamlin. He sees both sides, and believes this is a non-issue for Elliott, Larson and Hendrick as a whole.

“Obviously Chase, to get the bigger scope of it, he’s going to see that Larson had no choice,” Hamlin said, via his Actions Detrimental podcast. “The No. 6 car was coming out of his pit box. They were four-wide, on a two-and-a-half-wide racing surface there, on pit lane. So that kind of stuff does happen often. But Chase can’t see that either. He sees that he’s got a car on the outside. He sees that he’s got a teammate on the inside.

“He’s like, ‘Hey teammate, if you’re going to run into someone, run into the guy on the left, don’t run into your teammate on the right.’ That’s probably what his mindset was. … Cooler heads will prevail there. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong, between those two.”

Moroever, Hamlin is a car-owner himself, and was asked what he would do if something similar happened between his drivers, Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace.

“Yeah, probably,” Hamlin responded, asked if he would scold Reddick and Wallace for a similar incident. “Probably. … I think Chase just kind of was super angry in the moment. I’m really not sure. It’s tough for me to kind of speculate on what Chase Elliott was thinking there.

“All he saw was that his teammate turned right, and ran into the side of him. Certainly he knew it wasn’t for no reason. But he probably was thinking, like I was saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to have to make contact, do it with the other guy. Not your teammate. Let’s not avoid the No. 6 to hit the No. 9.’ So that’s probably what he was thinking.”

Alas, it’s been a frustrating season for Chase Elliott, and maybe we saw some of that come to light, geared towards Kyle Larson. Nevertheless, we’re betting Mr. H will have his drivers back on the same page come next weekend.