Denny Hamlin’s quest for his first Indianapolis Motor Speedway victory took a devastating flip throughout qualifying for the 2025 Brickyard 400.
What began because the quickest automotive in follow and a transparent path to pole place led to a crushing crash that relegated the veteran driver to the again of the sphere. In a brutally sincere reflection on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast, Hamlin dissected the psychological error that probably value him his most reasonable shot at Indy glory.
The 44-year-old was working over two-tenths of a second quicker than teammate Chase Briscoe when catastrophe struck in Flip 2. His No. 11 Toyota made contact with the surface wall earlier than spinning into the grass and hitting the within SAFER Barrier, forcing Joe Gibbs Racing to modify to a backup automotive and sending Hamlin to the thirty ninth beginning place.
Denny Hamlin’s Second of Reality
“Saturday is like 100% me,” Hamlin admitted throughout his podcast look. “I can’t consider any share… I knew one and two, I killed it. I knew I killed that. So at that time, do I must go proceed to go balls out right here each single nook? No, like, I want a pair good stable corners.”
The crash occurred as a result of Hamlin was feeling distinctive grip and working about 5 miles per hour quicker than meant via Flip 1. As a substitute of backing off barely, he carried that aggressive momentum into Flip 2, the place his signature driving fashion betrayed him on the worst doable second.
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“I attempted to enter Flip 2, and I felt the grip on nook entry felt positive, however I simply obtained again to it,” he defined. “Anybody which have seen sort of my traces and the way I drive and the way I take advantage of the throttle, I gave it a kind of large stabs proper in the course of the nook of two and it obtained me off offline.”
Denny Hamlin’s Painful Realization
What made the error much more irritating was that Hamlin had watched different drivers wrestle in the identical spot all through the qualifying session. Regardless of having 38 different automobiles as examples of the treacherous situations, he did not course of the warning indicators when it mattered most.
“What’s painful about it’s I watched different guys do the identical factor, proper?” Hamlin mirrored. “I had 38 different automobiles to look at and see that one out of each 4 had points off of flip two. So clearly, there was a change within the observe there and situations that made that occur. And so I simply wasn’t I wasn’t conscious, I used to be simply overestimated.”
The crash remodeled what Hamlin referred to as his “best path to victory” at Indianapolis into an almost not possible process. Ranging from the again with a backup automotive he described as a “trailer rat,” his probabilities of successful dropped to what he estimated as “1% or much less.”
Regardless of rallying to complete third and watching his co-owned 23XI Racing workforce declare victory via Bubba Wallace, the qualifying mistake will endlessly characterize a missed alternative for the driving force who has received each different crown jewel race besides the Brickyard 400.
