Hamlin still ruing his mistake at California

CONCORD, N.C. -- Late in last Sunday's race at Auto Club Speedway, Denny Hamlin very nearly keyed the radio and asked one of his teammates to remind him at some point to make sure and get a good finish out of the day. For whatever reason, he didn't do it. And 50 laps later, he regretted it.

Hamlin took himself out on a restart with 60 laps remaining, making a late move to try and block the onrushing car of Juan Montoya and instead spinning himself down into the pit wall. From a championship perspective, it was a disastrous turn of events -- Hamlin went from leading the race to an eventual 37th-place finish, and from 99 points behind the Chase leader to a distant 219 back.

No wonder the Joe Gibbs Racing driver has spent much of this week beating himself up. Hamlin owned up to his mistake immediately after the race. But Thursday at Lowe's Motor Speedway, he still seemed a little stunned by what he had done.

"It's just one of those things, immediately when it happened, you're thinking, '[What the heck]?' I mean, yelling it, right to yourself, right when it happens," he said.

"It's one of those things where, I saw through the course of the race that maybe we weren't going to have a winning car. But my pit crew got me out first, and we had like a second to a fifth-place car, it seemed like we were going to finish that day. It was just like man, just trying to make something happen. It was like 60 laps from the end, and just trying to do all I could. I just bit myself. It frustrated you for about two days, and then you get over it, and then you hear someone say, 'Sorry about last weekend,' and you're like, 'I just forgot about it until you said something.' You have to put it out of your mind and try to hope for the best in the future."

Easier said than done. Hamlin was in the thick of the Chase hunt after a fifth-place finish two weeks ago at Kansas, and started from the pole at California. The instant he hooked himself on Montoya's right-front fender, he knocked himself almost out of the running, given that he has now has eight drivers to climb over now, in addition to a large points deficit to make up. Hamlin said he couldn't remember making a similar mistake of that magnitude, especially one with so much at stake.

"It's tougher when you make the mistake, I think," he said. "When someone gets loose underneath you and takes you out, that stuff just kind of happens. But I think every race car driver expects himself to be the best at all times, and not make mistakes. When you do make a dumb mistake, that's when we beat ourselves up the worst."

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