Elliott, Hamlin put wreck behind them
MARTINSVILLE, Va. – They were defining moments in NASCAR’s 2017 Cup Series playoffs.
Denny Hamlin crashed into Chase Elliott at Martinsville Speedway in October. Elliott responded by bumping Hamlin into the wall at Phoenix a few weeks later. It followed the time-honored NASCAR theme: He wrecked me, so I wrecked him.
As a result, neither driver got a shot at the Cup championship.
This weekend the Cup Series returns to the scene of the original incident, and it’s fair to say that neither driver has fully recovered emotionally from the fireworks of the closing months of last season.
It’s unlikely they’ll be going to the Easter egg hunt together.
Elliott said Saturday he frames last fall’s Martinsville race not around the trouble with Hamlin – they engaged in some animated discussion immediately after the crash – but on how well his car was running before it was mangled. Elliott was leading and nearing his first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series victory with a few laps to go when the crash occurred.
“I try to make myself think about the characteristics and things that our car was doing that made us good,” Elliott said, “and just try to run laps in my head and try to have I remember a lot of that night.
“When your cars are good a lot of times I feel like you remember certain things about them, and you just try to think back on the small things that were making the difference, that were allowing us to have the performance we had.”
Hamlin said he made a mistake hitting Elliott’s car.
“It was a mistake on my part, and I’ve moved on from it,” Hamlin said. “We both have. We’ve raced each other quite a bit since then.
“Those type of incidents have happened for a long time in the course of NASCAR history by a lot of different people. It’s part of short-track racing. It was so long ago that my focus has already shifted to this season. I can’t go back, so I’ve got to go forward.”
Elliott said he doesn’t dwell on what might have been – a run through the rest of the playoffs “if the Martinsville crash had not occurred.
“The ‘could have, would have’ game doesn’t really matter,” he said. “There was a lot that was laying on that race. It wasn’t just a win; it was a chance to go race for a championship, so that obviously had a lot of implications, but it doesn’t matter. It didn’t happen.
“I can’t turn back time. We all kind of know the implications and the things that could have been, but they weren’t, so no point in really getting caught up in it too much.”