Immediately after Justin Allgaier blocked Denny Hamlin with a header and sparking “The Big One” during the 68th Daytona 500the JR Motorsports driver took “100 percent” of the blame, but Joe Gibbs Racing’s competitor conceded his share a day later.
The crash occurred near the end of the second stage and brought together 20 cars on lap 124. Allgaier left enough space for a car to pass between him and the wall, so Hamlin took the run to the outside.
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Allgaier shaded right and they both ended up in the wall with the field piling up behind them. Hamlin addressed the incident Monday during his Harmful actions Podcast season premiere.
“Allgaier took 100 percent of the responsibility, I will take 20 percent.” Hamlin said.. “I’ll take 20 because it was an aggressive move, but it comes at the end of the stage. He has to know that I’m going to be aggressive, I’m going to take every run I’m going to do at the end of a stage because stage points matter to me. I established early on that I wanted to be at the top. That’s why once I got through the bot lane, I went straight to the top. That’s where I wanted to be to finish the stage. I was coming in with such a massive run… I made my decision probably about 100 meters before I went up high, I said, “I’m going to the outside no matter what,” because I knew where he had run at the top before that, so I knew there would be enough space.
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“It was enough space, obviously, if he didn’t go up, I had an outside position, but it probably happened so fast that it caught him off guard. So, for me, I think my 20 percent is that he probably didn’t have a lot of time to react or see what was going to happen, so it was late to react.”
Hindsight being 20/20, Hamlin would have approached this moment differently.
“If I had it to do over again, I would have stayed at (Allgaier),” Hamlin said. “We were running 10 mph faster than him at that point because of the push I got. If I go into the tri-oval and check for him, did (Ryan Blaney) just run into my back? Probably not because he has a good spotter, he’s a good driver, so they can know and plan for that kind of thing, but it would have caused a huge domino effect if I had checked and not caught him.
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“Or I could have just gone to the bottom and probably cleared it with the speed differential that I had. …Again, starting over, if I had known what the outcome was going to be, I would have stayed in line there for a few more laps.”
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