HAMPTON, Ga.—Denny Hamlin got a rude awakening on Friday morning—literally.
Hamlin was in his motor home at Atlanta Motor Speedway when an SUV rolled backwards into Hamlin’s home for the weekend. The owner of the SUV thought he had left the vehicle in “park.” As it turned out, that was a mistaken assumption.
The SUV crashed into the slide-out (motorized extension) where Hamlin’s bed is located, and that helped prevent extensive damage to the body of the motor home.
“I thought it was going to be way worse from what I felt inside,” Hamlin told the Performance Racing Network after a Saturday news conference at AMS. “My bed was the slide-out that caught the car. I literally thought that there was a bomb or something that had gone off.”
As it turned out, the SUV came within about a foot of broadsiding the motor home proper.
“The slide caught the roof rack of his SUV and it kept it that far from crashing just totally into the side,” Hamlin said. “I don’t know if there’s any damage to the slide, but there are some scratches and some dents and stuff—but I thought it was going to be caved in from what I felt.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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