Cole Custer nearly won the Daytona 500 in his first race for the Haas Factory Team. But, he timed his run in the final stage all wrong and ended up wrecking himself and Denny Hamlin. He spoke to the press on Tuesday and explained how things were between him and the Joe Gibbs Racing veteran.
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Hamlin had been frustrated when he went up to Custer immediately after the race. But the emotion did not boil up to a point of no return. Custer noted that he had asked to see a replay before commenting on anything. He said, “I made sure I saw a replay before I really had a great opinion on anything. But, yeah, I felt like we were both calm about it.”
Hamlin was battling Austin Cindric for the lead in the final lap. When the duo pulled slightly ahead of the pack, a space to make a run emerged for one of the cars behind them. Custer took the opportunity and hit the throttle but did so on Turn 4 instead of waiting for the front stretch. The mistake cost the drivers their shot at victory.
Hamlin spoke about the sequence to Fox Sports. He said that Custer got into him even though he was being given ample space. He added, “But in those situations, we gotta get off of 4, then we can do this. But we just never made it, and someone else won. I don’t even know where William [Byron] was running.”
Custer defends himself for making an early run in the final lap
The driver willingly accepted that Hamlin was right in his assessment. He had no arguments about the fact that he would have had a better shot at winning had he waited for the front stretch to make the run. But in the situation that he was in, he did not have many options left. Cars had been falling out of the race all around him, and he did not have a second to waste.
He detailed, “I just tried to take the run. It was the last lap. I tried to take it. I knew I probably should have waited for the frontstretch, but it’s one of those things that you learn for the next time, and then also having the 35 spin out on the frontstretch, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, man. These guys are all wrecking. You’ve got to get to the lead now.'”
He was relegated to a 21st-place finish at the end of the day and Hamlin to 24th. It was a day to forget for either driver. They now look forward to making amends at the Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend.
