Before Denny Hamlin ever hit record on his podcast, he’d already texted Corey Day’s mentor with his immediate reaction to the moment William Sawalich turned left into Day’s door at Gateway. “I texted Kyle and was like, no awareness whatsoever,” Hamlin said on this week’s episode of Actions Detrimental. So, Hamlin had already made up his mind about who was really at fault. But could it be JGR loyalty showing up?
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Hamlin drives Cup for Joe Gibbs Racing, the same organization fielding Sawalich’s car. That is the context he tried to get ahead of by insisting the two have no relationship at all before offering his blunt conclusion in the same episode.
“I’ve never spoken ten words to William Sawalich. I got no bias. I do not care,” Hamlin said, “but that is — the 17 is lacking awareness in a big way of what his role is in all this. And if you look at all the highlights from who’s wrecking who earlier in the year, it’s all the 17.”
“Drivers can only take so much. They need to send a message back,” Hamlin added. “He got himself wrecked for being an idiot.”
It began at Darlington on Sept. 5, the opening race of the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series’ Chase. On Lap 68 of the Fleetio 200, Hendrick Motorsports’ Day’s No. 17 Chevrolet tangled with Sawalich’s Joe Gibbs Racing No. 18 Toyota down the backstretch, sending Sawalich hard into the outside wall and ending his night in 30th.
Day had admitted that exchange wasn’t entirely one-sided. He and Sawalich had already been running each other out of room for a couple of laps, and after Sawalich “really crammed” him exiting Turn 2, Day said, “so I clipped him,” sending Sawalich spinning before his own damaged car limped home.
Day rallied to finish second and jumped from seventh to fifth in the Chase standings. Afterward, by Day’s account, Sawalich wasn’t interested in hearing him out. “He told me to go f— myself,” Day told reporters, adding that Sawalich threatened payback: “We’ll see how the rest of your Chase goes”. It wasn’t their first run-in, either, as the two had already clashed at Circuit of the Americas and Daytona earlier this season.
Seven days later at World Wide Technology Raceway, Sawalich made sure to deliver on the warning. On Lap 134 of 180, Day got shoved up into Sawalich’s door entering Turn 1 by Justin Allgaier’s trailing No. 7. As the cars split apart down the backstretch, Sawalich swung left into the right side of Day’s car, sending him hard into the inside SAFER barrier. A finish-ending, 33rd-place crash that dropped Day to eighth in points, 69 behind new leader Sheldon Creed with seven races to go. Allgaier picked up right-front damage in the mess, finished 13th, and surrendered the points lead to Creed by three markers. Jesse Love scored his first win of the season while it all unfolded behind him.
“What is the 17 thinking, knowing the guy is mad at you, you run into him into turn one, you then run into him in the middle of turns one and two and then you can’t get off of him off of turn two because the 7’s right on your bumper,” Hamlin said. “He addressed in his interview, ‘Oh, the 7 had me all jacked up.’ What about the first two times you hit him?”
Sawalich barely addressed it later on, telling reporters only to “worry about next week.” Day was just as brief, saying through reporters that Sawalich “made himself look stupid enough for me to need to say anything,” per NASCAR reporter Toby Christie. Allgaier, dragged into someone else’s fight and stripped of his points lead for it, played peacemaker instead: “The last thing you want to do is start a problem with somebody, because then it just festers on.”
That is maybe the consequence Hamlin meant Day should have seen coming. And now he believes NASCAR should stay out of it entirely.
“NASCAR needs to let this one go,” he said. “This has been a self-policing garage for a long time… you can’t look at the result, you have to look at the action. He doored him down the straightaway.”
He further waved off the notion, one he credited to reporters Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck, that NASCAR frowns on non-Chase drivers wrecking Chase contenders. “Who gives a s— about that? It’s a self-policing sport.”
Hamlin even reached for a Cup Series parallel: Carson Hocevar wrecking Brad Keselowski at Darlington, after which Keselowski publicly vowed his “day is coming, and it’s coming hard,” with no penalty issued to date. “You can’t promote the Brad and the Carson thing,” Hamlin said, “and then penalize Brad if he ends up wrecking him.”
Whether NASCAR sees it that way is genuinely unresolved as of now. The series fined Ryan Preece $50,000 and docked him 25 points earlier this year over a radioed threat followed by contact against Ty Gibbs, but cleared both Kyle Busch and Shane van Gisbergen in similar-looking incidents where intent couldn’t be proven. Sawalich has no recorded threat on tape, and that gap in the evidence might make NASCAR follow Hamlin’s words.