Welcome to FTW’s NASCAR Feud of the Week, where we provide a detailed breakdown of the latest absurd, funny and sometimes legitimate controversies and issues within the racing world.
NASCAR’s latest feud seems like it’s just one of those racing deals between Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe, but their little tiff from Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday has spilled over onto social media. And it’s pretty entertaining — unless you’re one of the two drivers involved.
In the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500 — the first NASCAR Cup Series playoff race in the Round of 8 — Hamlin, a playoff driver, finished 11th, while Briscoe, who’s not in the playoffs, finished 15th.
But with about 60 laps to go in the 334-lap race, Hamlin in the No. 11 Toyota and Briscoe in the No. 14 Ford were racing each other hard, side-by-side with Briscoe on the outside of Hamlin. At one point, Briscoe’s car bounced off the outside wall and suffered some right-rear damage, including a cut tire, which forced him to pit.
“That’s what he gets for being a [expletive] idiot,” Hamlin said on his team’s radio after the incident.
But this isn’t the first time these two have gotten into it on the track.
In August at Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course race, Hamlin was in position to get what would have been his first win of the 2021 season. But out front in overtime, Briscoe nailed the back of Hamlin’s No. 11 car, which sent it spinning as Hamlin lost the lead. Later, Briscoe said he was racing for the win and was unaware that NASCAR had penalized him for cutting a corner earlier on the lap.
Between that and what happened a couple months later at Texas on Sunday, it’s safe to say Hamlin and Briscoe aren’t happy with each other. And they traded jabs on Instagram on Monday in response to a post about the Texas incident by the NASCAR on NBC account.
First, Briscoe responded to the post with a reference to Hamlin’s claim from 2017 that he’s run 10,000 races since he was 7 years old (and the math didn’t quite check out there).
And then Hamlin shot back, seemingly with a reference to Briscoe ruining his hopes for a win at the Indy road course.
The two went on from there with Briscoe defending himself as a non-playoff driver, and Hamlin offering a lesson in risk management.
While Briscoe is not competing for a championship this year, Hamlin enters Sunday’s race at Kansas Speedway third in the standings and nine points ahead of the cutoff mark. After Kansas and Martinsville Speedway the following weekend, the playoff field will shrink from eight drivers down to the final Championship 4, who will compete at Phoenix Raceway in a winner-take-all event for the title.
