Denny Hamlin speaks out after wrecking team-mate following radio rant

Joe Gibbs Racing was absolutely dominating the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, until it wasn’t.

On Sunday at New Hampshire the wheels came off (figuratively, not literally) for JGR, and that clean sweep of the Round of 16 races was swiftly forgotten.

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This time the team failed to put any driver into the top five, while it was Team Penske claiming the glory with Ryan Blaney taking the checkered flag and three-time champion Joey Logano claiming fourth.

Christopher Bell was the highest placed JGR finisher in sixth, but it was 44-year-old great Denny Hamlin who made most of the headlines. For all the wrong reasons.

Denny was center stage after wrecking teammate Ty Gibbs, who also just happens to be the grandson of team owner Joe Gibbs. Not a great look for the 59-time Cup Series race winner.

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Hamlin reacts to wrecking Ty Gibbs

Hamlin was clearly exasperated by how things were shaking out even before the contact which sent Gibbs into the wall, asking via radio: "Does Ty know we’re going for a championship? What the f***!”.

Once the pair had made contact that final time, Hamlin again raged on radio, screaming: “What the f*** is he doing?”.

Once the dust settled, with Hamlin limping home in 12th place, he was more diplomatic as he spoke to media postrace.

"I’ll let leadership quarterback it however they’d like to,” he said.

"We made contact into Turn 1 - it was like a fourth or fifth time we made contact, but eventually he ended up getting spun.

"I made a mistake into Turn 1. So I would have made a mistake with anybody in that position. I was trying to get by him. That was a task in itself."

The JGR chaos was in sharp contrast to the smooth operation that was Penske on Sunday, a point that Hamlin appeared to ram home.

"Obviously us, the 20 [Bell], the 19 [of Briscoe] are all trying to win a championship for their family. So it's crazy unfortunate why we're racing the way we are."

Hamlin also spoke about his relationship with Gibbs - the vastly experienced star has acted as something of a mentor to a driver who is exactly half his age at 22 years old.

"I definitely have more dialogue with him than any of the other teammates that I have. But he's just got so much to learn and certainly got a very high ceiling of talent. Just understanding down and distance seems to be the struggle."

Joe Gibbs on New Hampshire flashpoint

So what did Joe Gibbs - a man who dealt with the odd locker room conflict during a Hall of Fame career as an NFL head coach - make of it all?

He said: "It's always the drivers that have to handle that. They're the ones that have got the wheel, and that's always the case. So that's what we'll do.

"Those guys all are the ones driving the cars, and so those guys will get together on their own and figure it out."

The other man at the center of this story of course is Ty Gibbs, and his reaction to the whole thing was very short and very sweet.

"We got wrecked there. We’ll go see him next week."

The next few days should be…interesting. We are on to Kansas.

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