Denny Hamlin’s appearance in front of the National Motorsports Appeals Panel was one of the most highly anticipated events this week. After publicly accepting that he made intentional contact with Ross Chastain at the Phoneix Raceway, Hamlin was fined $50,000 and 25 points for attempting to manipulate the outcome of the race. However, Denny Hamlin argued that his actions were no different than the hard racing that happens every weekend. And hence, he decided to appeal the governing body’s penalty.

However, it turned out that the Appeals Panel did not warm up to Hamlin‘s explanation, and decided to uphold the penalties. Hamlin, who was obviously upset with the verdict, decided to share his side of the story in an emergency episode of the Actions Detrimental podcast—the same podcast that had got him in trouble in the first place.

During the half-hour-long episode, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver revealed that he wasn’t satisfied with NASCAR’s response to the panel’s question.

Denny Hamlin isn’t convinced that NASCAR had a legitimate response for the panel

While sharing the details of the events that transpired during his hearing, Denny Hamlin said that he wasn’t expecting a verdict in NASCAR’s favor. Moreover, he explained how the panel questioned the governing body more instead of him, he said,

“The panel was asking NASCAR how is it so different than what we see every single week. And there really wasn’t a legitimate, good response to that. And I thought that ‘Man! There seems to be questioning them a lot and they not really have a whole lot of questions for me.”

Furthermore, he added that one of the panelists, Lyn St James did have some unresolved queries for him. He shared,

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“I thought Lynn had a really good question for me though, I won’t expand on that. But she was really good, she was writing down a bunch of notes.”

However, after hearing NASCAR’s not-so-convincing explanations, Denny Hamlin felt that the penalties were not actually a direct result of his on-track actions.

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Was NASCAR really just going after Actions Detrimental?

While recalling the details of the hearing, Denny Hamlin said that the officials asked them to sit back and wait till the panelists arrive at a decision. And while he and his team were waiting, they were optimistic that the panelists will rule out the verdict in their favor. He shared,

“We were kind of really high-fiving and smiling like ‘Man! We’ve really presented as good as we could present.’

“I feel so good at it simply because too, we had heard words that in the last two hours sounded like they [NASCAR] were conceding. ‘We’re just going after Actions Detrimental. He just can’t be saying these things ’cause it makes us look like we’re not officiating it correctly.’

“They already said we agree it’s not egregious. We agree it’s something that normally we stay out of. The whole severity of the incident was just benign—benign was the word used.”

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However, even though Hamlin claims that NASCAR found his actions to be “benign,” the fine and the upholding of it by the Appeals Panel seem to spell out a whole different story. After the penalty, Hamlin now stands at the 12th (instead of 9th) position in the points table.