Tony Stewart says that he loves
Denny Hamlin "like a little brother" and intends to put the run-in with Hamlin during Saturday's
Pepsi 400 at
Daytona behind him as soon as possible.
Hamlin was leading on the 14th lap when he was hit from behind by Stewart, his
Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, in Turn 4. Stewart initially blamed Hamlin for the wreck, saying Hamlin "just stopped for no reason, right in the middle of Turn 4."
Stewart didn't exactly remove the blame from Hamlin on his
Sirius Satellite Radio show Monday night.
"So I'm not sure what happened yet," Stewart said. "I still haven't talked to Denny. The end result was that we got in the back of him. He got loose off the corner, almost made a really good save, but it ended up coming across to the right, and it pinned us in the wall and tore up both Joe Gibbs Racing cars."
The two-time
NASCAR Cup champion said there was nothing he could have done to avoid hitting Hamlin, that turning right around the outside wouldn't have worked because he would have hit the outside wall, and slowing wouldn't have worked because he would have been hit from behind. Hamlin, Stewart said, should have moved out of the way.
"For three laps before the wreck happened, we started catching him faster and faster through that section of the track, and that leads me to believe that his car's handling went off," Stewart said. "And versus trying to stay in the front and get everybody choked down and get them in bad positions like that, it would have been better just to move and let everybody go and know that you have a pit stop that's going to give you a chance to work on your car."
Stewart said he has tried calling Hamlin, but the two have yet to talk. He said if they don't before Friday, he would seek Hamlin out at Chicagoland Speedway, site of this weekend's races.
"We'll have a chance to talk, obviously, but this isn't, at least on my end, this isn't going to be a situation that's going to linger for weeks," Stewart said. "I think there's things that he can do different as a teammate, but it's nothing that's going to be a deal breaker or anything like that with anything that we all have going on.
"It's just a situation where, you know, when Bobby [Labonte] and I were teammates years ago we never had any problems. And it's not that Denny and I have problems, but we can make ourselves better teammates by working with each other better."
07-11-2007, 11:03 PM
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