Denny Hamlin passed Ross Chastain. Chastain wrecked him. Why both had regrets
A despondent Ross Chastain was busy apologizing to everyone he presumed he let down — everyone on the No. 1 team and at Trackhouse Racing and beyond — when someone tapped his back and asked for a private chat.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Denny Hamlin whispered.
Chastain nodded. Hamlin whisked the driver of the No. 1 car away and trudged a few yards from the press scrum. The two then turned their backs, looking out toward Turn 1 of the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course, and talked.
You might expect such an exchange to be fiery. The two have clashed before. On superspeedways. On short tracks. On podcasts. Their styles alone make for a compelling matchup. Hamlin is the uber-talented and equally opinionated elder statesman of the NASCAR Cup Series. Chastain, meanwhile, is the disruptor who stomped onto the scene in 2022 and surprised everyone — slamming contenders on the track, throwing punches off of it, riding walls into glory that baffled his competitors but simultaneously captured the collective race fan’s imagination.
And on Sunday, in the playoff elimination race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course, the two ended the race entangled again: With Chastain racing for his season’s life — needing to hold on to his track position to ultimately beat Joey Logano on points and advance to the Round of 8 — Hamlin passed him on a last-lap turn. Chastain, in desperation, then took his car on the final braking zone and wrecked into the 11 with the hope of passing him back. Chastain ended up spinning out the both of them, however; he had to put his own car in reverse to cross the finish line.
In the end, it wasn’t enough. He was out. Logano was in.
And to show for it, Chastain had a beat-up car and some explaining to do to one of his fiercest rivals.
“It’s heartbreaking for almost 200 employees at Trackhouse, for our teammates, for ECR Engines — everybody that helps make this go round,” Chastain said. “When you watch and you learn and you study for half your life: to get here and to fail is a terrible feeling. I will wake up tomorrow and go right back to work. ...
“I know the 11 (Hamlin) is mad. I’m sure I would be too. He got by me clean and was giving me room, and I wiped him out. Just have to wake up tomorrow and go back to work, though.”
Then, on pit road, Hamlin was informed of the stakes Chastian was working with. The driver of the No. 11 car understood what happened and pulled Chastain aside for a discussion that appeared amicable. The two probably shared an exchange not too disimilar from what they each independently told reporters: Hamlin regretted passing Chastain. Chastain regretted wrecking Hamlin.
And Logano — the one who got away clean — was left smiling.
Denny Hamlin keeps ‘dangerous’ Joey Logano in title hunt
Hamlin said after the race that he has no ill-will toward Chastain after this result. In fact, Hamlin disliked that he passed him at all. His reasoning may have had something to do with Chastain — but also a ton to do with Logano.
After all, Hamlin and the rest of the Cup field had a chance to vanquish Logano, the three-time Cup Series champion, from this year’s playoffs at the Roval. Yet, Logano, who is mighty good at each of the final four racetracks, is still out there, still vying for back-to-back titles.
In other, more cryptic words: If Hamlin would’ve known all that ...
“I would’ve made the best decision for me,” Hamlin said. “I wish I would’ve known.”
Hamlin, who was safely into the Round of 8 and whose season was largely unaffected by Chastain’s wreck, added: “On pace, the one is faster than the 22. But obviously if it comes down to the Final Four, the 22 probably has a leg up there. Again, I’m just trying to advance. I didn’t know if I was running for 10th or 25th. I was listening to the radio the whole time.
“There were just crickets. Nobody said anything. Nobody told me anything. I wish they did.”
Upon being informed of Hamlin’s comments, on the other side of pit lane, Logano smiled and shrugged.
“We’re a dangerous team,” Logano said. “Anything can happen with us. We’re just a bunch of scrappers. We just keep grinding away. It’s the way we operate. We just keep going and going, trying to stay alive, and we had it work out.”
Ross Chastain takes accountability for other blunders
The driver of the No. 1 team didn’t run a flawless day otherwise, of course. He accepted such responsibility.
After climbing to fourth at the end of Stage 2, he made a few too many mistakes in Stage 3 that put him a hole. That included the big one: a speeding on pit road penalty that stunted his momentum — which, for a moment, seemed to be carrying him to a breezy margin of victory over Logano.
“I would have liked to have not run off the end of pit road,” Chastain said. “And to not speed. To not miss Turn 7. I’ve got three big ones to spin in my head for a long time to come as I try to get back to tomorrow.”
And then came that final lap. The pass and the clash.
Even Trackhouse team owner Justin Marks, who in one moment consoled Chastain and in the next celebrated with race winner and road-racing-wonder Shane van Gisbergen, weighed in on the last-lap debacle.
“I think ultimately everybody is out here to try to get the best finish and the best result for their team, and I don’t think anybody really owes it to anybody else to try to help anybody else,” Marks said. “I think it’s nice to hear Denny say those things, but Denny is doing what he has to do for the 11 team and try to get the best finish that he can for the 11 team.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, it was a bit self-inflicted on the 1 team. We shouldn’t have been in the position that we were in having to fight for one point on the last lap and having to throw Hail Marys and all that kind of stuff.
“We need to be better on pit road. We need to eliminate the mistakes that were made today so we weren’t in that position.”
‘This playoff format is just wicked’
Sunday yielded plenty of regrets. Plenty of in-the-moment decisions. For Logano, who ended up on the right side of history in this one, Sunday left him smiling.
What else did it leave him?
Validation for a conviction he’s been spreading for a while.
“The playoffs create drama, they create story lines,” Logano said. “They create awesome moments like that. I don’t understand what people don’t like about it. I really don’t get it. And if you’re one of those people who say the regular season doesn’t matter, and Playoff Points don’t matter, one point would’ve been the difference there.”
What Logano is referring to is the crowd of fans and people within the NASCAR industry who claim that the most worthy way to determine a champion is to take them at their entire season’s body of work — to eschew the postseason entirely, which is how the sport operated before 2004.
But this new format prompts “desperate people to do desperate things,” Logano said. Or, more bluntly: “The playoffs make you question your morals.”
In a good way, that is.
“I preach that all the time,” Logano said. “I’m not just saying it because it works for us. I’m saying it because it’s true. Everyone likes to look at it in other ways. But like I said, one point was the difference there. Real drama. If you don’t have cut-off races and things like that, what are you talking about today? How Shane waxed everyone? I’m just saying, I think this playoff format is just wicked.”
One final Ross Chastain regret
The fact that Sunday’s race was so entertaining may have left Chastain with one final regret, too.
“The way the points and the cut-offs and how this race plays out, it continues to create this drama,” Chastain said. “I want to race on the oval, personally. Unfortunately I just gave (Speedway Motorsports CEO) Marcus (Smith) a whole lot more ammunition to keep the Roval here.”
“It creates the drama,” Chastain continued.
It also creates the wrecks. The backward finishes. The heartbreak.
And the kinds of moments that you saw on Sunday after such an eventful battle. It pitted rivals together, away from the cameras, looking at the racetrack, talking about the things they wish they would’ve done.
This story was originally published October 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Denny Hamlin passed Ross Chastain. Chastain wrecked him. Why both had regrets."
