A seven-car melee took out some top contenders following the restart to begin the final stage of Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway (FS1, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
The incident occurred in Turn 4 on Lap 177 when Denny Hamlin lost control of his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, tagging Aric Almirola’s No. 10 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford and sending him into the outside wall. Hamlin then slid up the banking, taking out Brad Keselowski and Jimmie Johnson in the process.
Austin Dillon, Trevor Bayne and David Ragan also received significant damage during the crash.
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Hamlin shouldered the blame for triggering the incident, placing himself in a precarious spot when Kyle Busch lost ground and stacked up the pack in the previous corner. But he also accepted his part in putting the No. 11 team behind with a pit-road speeding penalty in Stage 1.
“I shouldn‘t have been in that position, but obviously the 18 (Busch) was falling back there and I made a move to the inside and everyone is fighting for the bottom,” Hamlin said. “I was obviously running the bottom there — the 10 (Almirola) tried to squeeze and I realized that he was going to come down and I got out of the gas and I got loose underneath him. It‘s my responsibility to keep the car under me, but we were just in such tight quarters there that it was nearly impossible to do.
“It all starts with me at the beginning of the race, it‘s my fault and I hate it for this race team. We had a car that I thought was very capable of winning this race and unfortunately we‘re back here.”
Johnson’s No. 48 Chevrolet was pinballed in his second DNF of the season. Johnson’s car bounded into Hamlin’s car and the outside wall, then impacted the inside wall and Bayne’s No. 6 before coming to a halt.
“I was in the outside lane and knew I was in the wrong lane at that point and probably going to get caught up in it,” said Johnson, whose ninth-place starting position was his best of the season. “Unfortunately, we did, but a lot to build on from the weekend. We had a strong Friday, a fantastic Saturday and today we had plenty of speed, but just a lot of things worked against us. We just need a good clean weekend and we will go to Bristol next week and see if we can do it there.”
Said Keselowski: “Somebody got loose and the net thing I knew there was a big mess in front of me and it was either pick left or pick right and I made a quick decision to pick right and it was the wrong decision. Tough break. I hate it for everybody on the team.”