Yahoo Nachrichten 
Hamlin says if JGR didn't do Talladega strategy it'd have been 'dumbest group in history'
Denny Hamlin strongly supports what his teammates did at Talladega to advance to the third round of the Chase.
Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth occupied the last three spots in the top 30 on Sunday as they purposefully ran behind the leaders the entire day. Each driver had a big enough cushion in the points standings to ensure moving on to the third round with a top-30 finish. There was no sense running up front and risk getting crashed.
Thanks to a blown engine at Charlotte, the first race of the Chase’s second round, Hamlin didn’t have the same luxury his teammates did. He needed a good finish to advance. He got it, finishing third and moving on to the third round via a tiebreaker with Austin Dillon.
“I thought it was smart,” Hamlin said of what his teammates did. “From my standpoint I knew we had an uphill battle because we weren’t going to have any teammates all day, I knew that we weren’t going to have any teammates all day because we all knew what they were going to do before the race started. Just everyone else saw it when it actually happened. There’s no way, they would be the dumbest group in history if they had run in the middle of the pack and got wrecked at some point when they didn’t have to be. It’s about winning championships, it’s not about winning Talladega by any means.”
Some NASCAR fans took umbrage with the strategy of Busch, Edwards and Kenseth, attempting to cite NASCAR’s paradoxical 100 percent rule implemented in 2013. It certainly looks like the teams weren’t running at “100 percent” at Talladega, right?
Sure, but that’s simpleton reasoning. And NASCAR recognizes the nuance, saying earlier this week the JGR teams wouldn’t be penalized for what they did. Why? Because the possibility of a championship is much more important than the possibility of a race win, just like Hamlin said.
And anyway, Talladega won’t be the final race of the Chase’s second round in 2017 as it swaps dates with Kansas. The successful strategy won’t be replicated. Joe Gibbs Racing has four of the eight cars remaining in the Chase.
“There’s no way that those guys should have been up there helping me and then risk putting themselves in danger of making the Chase and instead of Gibbs having three cars in the Chase, they could have had two or maybe one if there had been helping me and we got in a wreck. Luckily it all worked out where we have all four and they played the strategy they had to play to get in and I did the strategy I had to do to get in. Nobody from any other team would have done anything different, that’s for sure and if they tell you different, that’s a lie.”
– – – – – – –
Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
