Denny Hamlin Exposes Carefree NASCAR’s Deception Toward Fans Holding Back Horsepower Solution

“My favorite racetrack! We got another,” exclaimed Denny Hamlin over his radio as the Joe Gibbs Racing veteran took the checkered flag in the highly competitive 500-lap Sunday feature while the crowd unapologetically peppered him with boos and jeers. Now, that is not something new for Hamlin, who last year won the September race here at Bristol only to hit the hostile crowd where it hurts. But, what surprised most fans was how the race unraveled. The newly repaved half-a-mile track tested the field like no other but gave the drivers what they needed the most in a short track – “off-throttle time.”

Speaking on his Action Detrimental podcast, Hamlin relayed his thoughts, saying how the race went down. Although the 43-year-old admits that now there’s no need to bump up the horsepower in racecars, he uncovered NASCAR’s deception about the aero packages which are updated frequently.

Denny Hamlin gets a change of heart after Bristol

Anticipating close-quarters short-track action, fans got a thriller of a race and an unexpected ending with Denny Hamlin taking the throne. Don’t get us wrong here but nobody expected the race to go in the direction it went on Sunday, given the short-track debacle and Hamlin’s own ‘parity’ claim. Despite not increasing the overall power figures of the car, NASCAR pulled off a clever trick to make the race more interesting.

They relied on tire wear, and the repaved Bristol surface did just that, separating the best driver and team from the rest with the new surface eating away rubber unlike anything else. Reflecting on this, Hamlin said, “The reason we want horsepower, people, is because it creates off-throttle time. It creates…an opportunity for the best drivers to go out there and, manhandle their car. And, change their line and really be a factor in their finish because…there’s more breaking more off-throttle time more rolling time more cracking the throttle.“

When asked if this “happy accident” can be controlled and incorporated accordingly, Hamlin exposed the truth, saying, “Even if they added say a hundred horsepower to the car, you wouldn’t see what you saw today, like normal conditions. It wasn’t going to wear the tires out that much. It would be at Martinsville, Richmond, things like that, it would improve the racing at those tracks. And when we advocate or when I personally advocate for more horsepower, I’m saying, leave the mile and a half stuff alone, if you want to add some there, great. If not, that’s okay too. But it’s the short tracks. The short tracks have needed work with the Next-Gen because…We have a bigger tire. And we have less horsepower than we’ve ever had. We have shifting and they’re just never going to create an aerodynamic package that is going to fix the short tracks. You have to do it with grip on the tire or you have to do it with horsepower in the engine.”

What do you think about the Food City 500 winner’s insights?

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