NASCAR owner scolds Denny Hamlin for lighthearted video with Kyle Larson

NASCAR Twitter thought Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson’s grocery store video was funny. But Chip Ganassi didn’t.

Welcome to FTW’s NASCAR Feud of the Week, where we provide a detailed breakdown of the latest absurd, funny and sometimes legitimate controversies and issues within the racing world. This one is part joke, but also appears to be part serious.

NASCAR Twitter thought the video of Denny Hamlin running his shopping cart into Kyle Larson at the grocery store was pretty funny, as it mimicked the run-in the two friends had Sunday at Auto Club Speedway.

But Larson’s team owner, Chip Ganassi, disagreed.

Hamlin — who opened the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season with his second consecutive Daytona 500 win — tweeted the video of him and Larson at the grocery store Sunday night, hours after the Auto Club 400 ended at the two-mile southern California track. And he ran into Larson with his shopping cart, loosely recreating what happened during the race, the third of the season.

Early in the race, Larson, Hamlin and Kevin Harvick were running together going into Turn 1. As FOX Sports’ Jeff Gordon explained during the broadcast (and the video below), Harvick gave Hamlin a push, which got the No. 11 Toyota right on the bumper of Larson in the No. 42 Chevrolet.

But then Hamlin gave Larson a push that was just too much, and it turned Larson’s car, which then hit Auto Club Speedway’s outside wall.

Larson had to pit so his team could repair the damage to the right side of the car. Behind Alex Bowman, who won his second career Cup race, Larson finished the race 21st and a lap down, and Hamlin came in sixth.

Judging by Hamlin’s Twitter video later that night, Larson isn’t holding a grudge against his friend.

But Ganassi tweeted Tuesday morning that he disapproves of the video making a joke out of their run-in and said it was in bad taste.

Clearly not everyone in NASCAR thinks Hamlin and Larson’s video joking about the on-track incident is that funny.

It seems unlikely that Hamlin would purposefully wreck his buddy like that and so early in the race, no less. So maybe it’s OK to laugh about something that is probably truly an accident.

But a team owner looking at a wrecked car that costs around $300,000, understandably, might have a different perspective.

[jwplayer MI8BOaKj-q2aasYxh]

[vertical-gallery id=895003]

[lawrence-auto-related count=3 tag=421393221]