Denny Hamlin’s 14-Minute Rant About “Hard to Watch” Daytona Triggers NASCAR Investigation

Dale Earnhardt Jr hit the nail on the head when he said the race, post that Lap 6 crunch, seemed like it was run by AI. The drivers were playing it safe, not daring to go three-wide or give each other a nudge, making the whole thing a bit of a yawn fest. On his podcast, he also pointed out that this year, with the Next-Gen cars being such gas guzzlers, everyone was tiptoeing around in fuel-saving mode for the bulk of the race. Denny Hamlin was singing the same tune.

On his podcast, “Actions Detrimental,” he dived into how the drivers were tweaking their strategies to save fuel, all to stay out front and dodge extra pit stops. This candid chatter seems to have caught NASCAR’s ear, and now they’re officially looking into the whole shebang.

NASCAR is going to examine the fuel-saving strategy after Denny Hamlin raised his voice

NASCAR’s got its magnifying glass out for the Daytona 500’s leisurely pace, zeroing in on the fuel-saving tactics that had everyone talking. Denny Hamlin spilled the beans for a good 14 minutes on his podcast, painting a picture of a slow-moving pack and the mental gymnastics drivers were performing to stretch their fuel. He shared a nugget about how hugging the back of a tight pack could let you leapfrog from the tail end to the lead post-pit stops.

Hamlin didn’t stop there; he dove deep into the nitty-gritty of fuel conservation. With the next-gen cars acting like parachutes, easing off the gas just a tad meant you could significantly stretch your mileage, turning the race into a bit of a crawl. “It’s [next-gen car] got a ton of drag. So anytime you can run 10% less throttle than the person in front of you, it’s gonna allow the fuel mileage to get way, way better, way better probably in the, you know, from, let’s just say from five miles per gallon to maybe six miles per gallon. So, the drag of the car has actually created this fuel mileage racing its way,” he explained. “The field just kept getting slower and slower and slower.”

He also hinted that the snail’s pace might be a knee-jerk reaction to dramatic flips on the track, sending everyone into a tizzy to ‘fix’ things. Talking about how it should ideally have been Hamlin asserted, “You see some great racing you do where I mean we’re pushing each other. I, I don’t like that part of it ’cause we’re slamming into each other so hard. But we’re finally racing with 20 laps to go. Like there’s no racing going on in the field until 20 to go. And in a 500-mile race, that’s, that’s hard to, hard to watch.”

This whole spiel by Hamlin, along with Dale Earnhardt Jr’s two cents, nudged NASCAR officials to dig deeper. They’re taking a “much deeper dive” into the whole throttle-taming strategy that had drivers barely pushing the pedal at times. Jayski’s latest tweet gave confirmation on the same, “NASCAR’s Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said NASCAR will do a deeper dive into the fuel-saving strategy Cup teams employed during the Daytona 500.”

And while Hamlin turned up the volume on the issue, it was Dale Jr who chimed in with a potential fix to the fuel-saving issue.

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Dale Earnhardt Jr has a solution to the fuel-mileage situation on the superspeedways

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Dale Earnhardt Jr has cooked up a potential fix for the fuel-saving drama at superspeedways. On his podcast, he tossed around the idea, ‘What if the stages were so short you could breeze through on a single tank? Not my favorite idea, but it’d turn the race into a series of quick dashes, about 50 laps each.’ He went on to suggest, “If you split the stage in half then you don’t have guys really doing the fuel mileage game anymore.” 

He elaborated, “We have to figure out a way to either allow them to… the stage needs to be nearly two tanks of gas. Okay? So they’re going to run a tank out, then fill up, and almost you know, and complete the rest of the race.” It was actually Ross Chastain and Dale Jr who were the first ones to address the mileage muddle, but they were not alone.

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The chatter’s spread through the paddock, with Legacy Motor Club’s Erik Jones and Bubba Wallace chiming in. Jones, in a heart-to-heart with Toby Christie, shared his frustration, saying, “It’s really hurt the racing for sure at these tracks. It’s a 480-mile fuel-saving race and a 20-mile sprint of chaos to the finish. I wish we could race more during the day.” Wallace gave a nod of agreement, backing up Jones’s sentiment with a tweet that simply said, “Facts.”