“I’m not really sure,” Denny Hamlin remarked after checking out of the infield care center. Although the silence in the initial stage of the Coke Zero Sugar 400 was deafening, it was soon overturned. A huge melee erupted in the second stage and caught Hamlin’s No. 11 Toyota in it. Although the crowd consensus pointed fingers at Corey LaJoie, Hamlin scratched his head. But then his confusion set in further as he sided with the crowd.

Superspeedway racing has been associated with one thing in recent years: excessive fuel-saving. Gaining track position and shaving pit stop time reign supreme, and drivers move slowly to save gas. But then things start going haywire towards the later parts of the race. So when Corey LaJoie got ahead of himself on lap 60, a massive wreck followed, involving a whopping 16 drivers in the melee. And Denny Hamlin was in it.

Denny Hamlin blamed NASCAR’s fuel-saving byproduct initially. He said, “But in the second stage, there’s definitely some fuel-saving going on, which allowed some cars to be more aggressive, I guess because they wanna get some rack position. I think it was just a combination of some people who didn’t wanna go and some people who did. You know, obviously, I was wrecked,” he said in his post-wreck interview.”

Yet immediately after, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver agreed with the crowd that Corey LaJoie’s antics led to this. Denny Hamlin released a subtle 3-word statement about the ‘Big One‘ at Daytona International Speedway. “7 caused it.”

Earlier, he had told the press that “the first thing I saw was the 7 (LaJoie) got turned in front of me.” But even after his confusion about the fuel-saving maneuver, Hamlin cleared up his thoughts on Twitter.

As the 16-driver postseason field is entering its final stages of selection, the Daytona race is the next-to-last race in the Cup Series regular season. After next week’s Cook Our Southern 500, the drivers would run out of chances to prove their playoff mettle. So Corey LaJoie is going all out to deliver a final gift to Spire Motorsports before he bids adieu to the team. However, LaJoie may not be entirely to blame for the Coke Zero Sugar 400 debacle.

Typical Daytona debacle

Saving gas to save your track position: “The Daytona 500 and superspeedway racing in general has kind of come down to that.” Elton Sawyer, senior vice president of competition for NASCAR, commented soon after the Daytona 500 race.

This issue has become more prominent as the typical wrecks in the Daytona 500 dwindled in the first stage and crammed into the latter stages. Drivers bunch up against each other in a slow-moving pack and, as a result, lose control of the aerodynamic qualities that Daytona is famous for.

And that got on the nerves of Kyle Busch as well, akin to Denny Hamlin. The Richard Childress Racing driver lamented after the 2024 Daytona 500 race: “I believe it’s a problem. The start of the race last weekend for the Daytona 500 – we’re all sitting around there running half-throttle; not passing and just riding in a line. I felt disgraceful, myself, being a race car driver – wanting to go fast, lead laps and win the Daytona 500, and that was our strategy that we had to employ at the start of the race because everybody was doing it.”

So we witnessed the same thing panning out at the Coke Zero Sugar 400 race, happening on the same racetrack. Let us see who can win this race.