In 2012, Denny Hamlin’s day at Michigan went up in literal flames. He had just tangled with Ryan Newman, sending his car spinning through the grass. Hamlin tried to steer it to pit road, but before he could even pull into his stall, the right side of his Toyota exploded into flames. “I thought for a second there I was OK. It was just in the back, and then something exploded in the front and caught on fire,” Hamlin said at the time.
His day ended in the infield care center, where he was cleared, but not before watching another potential top-five run burn out. That moment stuck with Hamlin. He admitted he had seen it happen to others but had “never known what it’s actually like.” The heat. The smoke. The helplessness. “It gets hot,” he said with a grim tone. “A fire’s not a great way to end it.” That incident wasn’t just another DNF—it was a reminder of how fast things can fall apart in this sport. One second, you’re racing up front, the next you’re climbing out of a smoking shell.
Now, more than a decade later, that same nightmare returned, this time at Texas Motor Speedway. Sunday’s race at Texas wasn’t kind to Denny Hamlin. Just 75 laps into the Wurth 400, his No. 11 Toyota suffered a violent engine failure. Oil leaked beneath his race car. Smoke clouded his cockpit. Then came the fire. Somehow, Hamlin avoided hitting anything. But the damage was done. His day was over before it really began.
Denny Hamlin vents out over team radio!
NASCAR’s safety team acted quickly, and Hamlin climbed out without injury. But you could hear the exasperation in his voice. As his car smoked in the background, Hamlin’s radio crackled with a smug, exhausted sigh: “Well, that was fun, fellas.” Five words, soaked in sarcasm. A message less about the fire and more about everything that had gone wrong before it. The boiling point wasn’t just mechanical—it was emotional. After the incident, he said, “Uh, it’s just a lot before it started missing, but, uh, no, not really. It just blew up.”
However, Denny Hamlin’s day had already started sliding sideways before the incident. During the first pit cycle, a miscommunication over code words caused a total breakdown on pit road. The team used “Cowboys” as a signal. Hamlin misheard it due to overlapping voices on the radio. He never made the stop on his first pass, then got a speeding penalty when he tried to correct it. Two trips down pit road and a penalty later, Hamlin found himself at the back of the field. “You can’t call a team that’s the same f——- name as another… Never mind,” he vented over the radio.
Fire in the No. 11. Denny Hamlin is okay. pic.twitter.com/LjuFx6KyLK
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 4, 2025
“You boys were talking over each other, and I heard ‘Cowboys,’ and obviously I looked at my card,” he added. The tone wasn’t angry—it was annoyed and tired. He knew this kind of mistake shouldn’t be happening at this level. And boom, within a few laps, his car was on fire. After the race, he told the broadcaster, “Yeah, miscommunication between me and the team, and, uh, they gave me a code. It was too close to another code, and, uh, it just got mixed up there. Hoping to lift it back, and then it caught fire.”
This is a developing story.
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