Denny Hamlin surprised many by calling out SMI’s Marcus Smith on social media over the last week, due to what Hamlin believes has been a subpar set of decisions from Smith.
During the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin stated that he regrets the way he went about sharing his feelings on the matter, but the No. 11 wheelman does believe there’s a chance for some positive change to be made moving forward.
“I think positive change will happen. Yes,” Hamlin said, asked about the situation. “You know, their argument will be, ‘Well it’s a negative. You’re talking negative about something, and so that’s not a positive.’ This is 100% — this is not this is not going to be a rose-colored glasses show today. I’m sorry about that. But we will be as honest as we can be.
“I feel like I’ve given credit to NASCAR, and others that have deserved it a lot, over the last few episodes. When I have my conversations with Steve Phelps and say ‘Listen, 80% of my podcasts are going to be very good for you, and there’s gonna be 20% that you’re just gonna have to be, you know, you guys are the big boys. You are the the league. Sometimes the league, you know, needs to be called on a few things.'”
What it all boils down to for Hamlin is holding the people accountable who need to be held to a higher standard, and that’s what he’s hoping for moving forward as it involves Smith and SMI.
“So we had a tough weekend. I had a tough week, I guess, when you kind of look at the stuff with Marcus,” Hamlin added. “But yeah, we needed to move on from it, as quick as we could. I’m glad, I think it’s it’s pretty much done now. But yeah. Hopefully we get, you know — we hold these tracks to a little bit higher standard than what we’ve been holding them to.”
Since the advent of his podcast, Hamlin hasn’t been afraid to call out NASCAR and other motorsports entities when they’ve needed to be, and he’s helped change some things in the process. Perhaps this will be another one of those moments.
Time will tell, but Denny Hamlin is at the least speaking his mind, and sharing some thoughts that a bevy of other drivers probably have as well. We’ll see where it all goes from here, but it’s evident the story between the two parties is far from over.
The post Denny Hamlin expects positive changes to come from dispute with SMI’s Marcus Smith appeared first on On3.