If we go back to 1994 and talk about steps for safety, NASCAR added roof flaps to stop cars from flying through the air at high speeds. Yet here we are, more than 30 years later, still watching cars go airborne. After the recent flip in the Daytona 500, Ryan Preece spoke about fearing for his life. But veteran driver Denny Hamlin has a very different view, saying flying cars shouldn’t be a “high priority” for NASCAR—words that clash with the concerns of drivers who just want to make it home safely to their families.

This gap between one driver who recently thought he might die and another who sees flips as just part of racing shows how NASCAR struggles to balance competition and safety. As the Next Gen car seems prone to taking flight at speedways, Hamlin’s casual attitude raises questions about who should have the most say in safety discussions.

Hamlin’s Dismissive Safety Stance Raises Eyebrows

“I don’t know, it’s going to be really hard to keep them on the ground just because, I mean, any kind of certain speed and certain angles, things are going to fly,” Hamlin told media before the Jack Link’s 500 at Talladega. “I haven’t seen that many bad injuries from flips. You know, I get it, we don’t want them to go up in the fence, but I just don’t think it’s making the racing not quite as good as slowing down running the speeds that we’re running, and we’re doing that essentially to try to keep the cars on the ground, but it’s, to me, I wouldn’t put it on a high priority.”

These words stand in sharp contrast to what Preece said after his scary Daytona 500 crash, where his No. 60 Ford Mustang went airborne and rolled multiple times. “When the car took off, I got real quiet, all I thought about was my daughter,” Preece said after walking away from his second major flip in recent years. “I don’t know what the right thing to say right now is, but I think the thing I want to say as a father, as a racer is we keep beating on a door, hoping for a different result. And I think we know where there’s a problem at superspeedways, so I don’t want to be the example when [death] finally does get somebody.”

Safety issues go beyond just flips. Drivers like Alex Bowman and Kurt Busch have suffered concussions, Cody Ware broke his ankle, and Erik Jones broke his back in crashes with the Next Gen car. Yet Denny Hamlin seems more worried about keeping the racing exciting than fixing these safety problems, suggesting that higher speeds might actually create safer racing conditions.

This isn’t the first time Denny Hamlin has made such a statement. On his “Actions Detrimental” podcast, he explained his theory: “Let’s be a little careful with these ‘knee-jerk reactions’ because they are why we got to run 175mph on these tracks and it’s why we’re crashing each other so hard. I’d rather let us run 200 mph with a little more space and it would be less dangerous. I am telling you it would be.”

Hamlin believes that cars flipping on the racetrack is nothing new. If anything, with the current superspeedway package, the field is bunched up together, which is the recipe for the big ones. With more horsepower in the cars, Hamlin thinks there will be enough separation across the field where teams won’t have to bank on a fuel-saving strategy. Or drivers going all-out on the final few laps of the race, igniting chaos. We all saw what happened at the Daytona 500 earlier this year, and last year’s fall Talladega race, where a wreck took out 28 cars in one go.

Although NASCAR’s oldest driver isn’t sold on the new safety features, Kyle Busch called out NASCAR for delaying the implementation of a new safety feature. One that is expected to keep the Next Gen cars on the racetrack. 

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Kyle Busch was hoping a quick response from NASCAR

It is important to note that NASCAR tried adding the shark fins on both side windows of the race cars last year. But it did little to keep them on the ground. Having encountered Preece’s horrifying crash, the sanctioning body was forced into action, and they are working on adding a flap to the A-post of the greenhouse, which, during a 90-degree spin, increases the chances of the car staying flat on the floor by 40-50%. Unfortunately, this new feature won’t be available for this weekend’s race at Talladega.

And Kyle Busch didn’t understand why NASCAR opted not to roll this feature at Dega. “I think they tested it at Michigan, and I’m pretty sure greenhouses aren’t that easy to make and are very expensive – probably one of the more expensive body parts that these cars have. So, you know, you would like to have anything like that as soon as you possibly could get it and have it on the race car, especially coming to places like this. So I would agree with the sentiment that, yeah, it’s a little disappointing we don’t have it yet if it’s a safety feature for us.”

Will this new flap turn out to be a game changer in the safety mechanism, or will it turn out to be another band-aid solution? We will know more about this when NASCAR make a return trip to Daytona later this year.