600 tons of asphalt, 23,000 square feet of cement sub-base, and 1,000 cubic yards of dirt. That should amount to roughly upwards of a million dollars (including labor charges). Speedway Motorsports LLC (SMI) spent roughly this amount behind the repave of the Charlotte ROVAL road course a few months earlier. But on a closer look at things, it feels like chaos is about to break loose on that new chute slicing through the infield between Turns 5  and 7. 

If you didn’t know, the 2024 ROVAL is now a 2.32-mile-long hybrid road course with a few brand-new details that have the whole NASCAR buzzing. But not everyone’s happy with all the changes to the jousting grounds for the last race of the Round of 12. It comes as little surprise that Denny Hamlin is leading the charge to oppose an SMI road course experiment. Yet again.

Denny Hamlin predicts a “parking lot” disaster at the Charlotte ROVAL

Be it at press conferences, Actions Detrimental, or on X, Denny Hamlin never holds back from speaking his mind. Sometimes, his opinions highlight an issue to an extent where NASCAR’s higher-ups feel compelled to react for the better. Other times, Hamlin meets a lot of backlash for his unfiltered takes on some of the sport’s most controversial discussions. In both cases, the #11 driver’s words hold more weight than one would give him credit for, no matter how they’re taken.

His race team’s anti-trust lawsuit against NASCAR is a prime example of that weight. Last week, after months of expressing displeasure on public forums, Hamlin, 23XI Racing, and Front Row Motorsports initiated action on the sport’s sanctioning body and the France family for its “monopolistic” charter agreement for the 2025-2031 timeframe. This lawsuit has the potential to change NASCAR forever. However, this week, he offered his views on quite a recent problem–the repaved ROVAL. But for the 43-year-old, the problem specifically lies in the new hairpin left-hander on Turn 7, which opens onto the original oval course of the Charlotte Motor Speedway. In his eyes, the “reconfigure was designed to create more chaos.”

On the October 8th episode of Actions Detrimental, he explained, “They (the organizers) make corners sharper and tighter, it was tight in Turn 7 anyway. But now they made it to a point. So instead of you driving the normal line to make this corner, that is tighter than the Coliseum, they made it a point…” Outlining his complaints with a potential worst-case scenario for the 2024 Bank of America Roval 400, Hamlin let his frustrations slip. “They want you to drive straight in the corner, I believe, and wipe out whoever’s in front of you. And then it’s going to be a parking lot in Turn 7. Then it’s just going to be who can navigate and get through there…”

Leading up to that corner is an elevation change through the new chute that bypasses the old Turn 6 right-hander. Hamlin reveals: “There’s a blind spot when you go through five to six,. You go over a rise and your car gets really high in the sim, it gets airborne. It probably won’t realize but we get to experience this new ROVAL config.” For someone who has not done too well historically on the ROVAL, he concluded with a troubling picture, “And I don’t know what to say about it other than try to qualify and try to avoid the wrecks. That’s about it,” said Denny Hamlin.

Last year, he ended his race with less than 30 laps to go at the ROVAL, finishing 37th. Here’s to hoping Denny Hamlin can improve his fortunes this time at Charlotte. But Turn 7 isn’t the only major difference that should take away most of his attention — the rest of the changes to the racetrack include sharper chicanes on both the backstretch and frontstretch. Regardless, it still claims 17 turns, even after all these alterations.

Besides, the Charlotte ROVAL seems destined to be one of those racetracks that will divide NASCAR fans further with each passing year’s schedule. Some love the experience, others scoff at its rare ingenuity. Many drivers and members of the NASCAR community have been part of the debate surrounding this hybrid circuit. However. to understand Denny Hamlin’s beef with SMI better, we must rewind to where it all started a few months earlier in April at the Sonoma Raceway.

A tweet that uncovered NASCAR’s behind-the-scenes tensions

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In April, images surfaced online of potholes on the surface of Sonoma, after the track underwent a brand-new repave during the off-season. According to the pictures and the consequent information, asphalt was coming off at least four sections of the California road course. Although heavy rains and flooding in the region might have affected the racetrack, with little time to prevent the asphalt from setting in properly, Denny Hamlin had suggested on X that this was a simple case of “paving on a budget” gone wrong back then.

This sarcastic comment had spiraled into a full-blown online argument between Denny Hamlin and the President of SMI, Marcus Smith, whose family owns and operates ten other tracks, such as Atlanta, and Bristol to name a few, under the Speedway Motorsports umbrella. SMI often receives flak from the collective NASCAR community. But with Bruton Smith’s extensive efforts that brought into existence the Charlotte Motor Speedway way back in 1960, they have done a lot for the sport of stock-car racing ever since.

Regardless, Marcus Smith and Denny Hamlin would eventually see the detriments of their little X spat and put a pin on it when things got too nasty and “personal.” Ultimately, both men apologized and put their insults in the past, looking to move forward from the incident. But it lifted the curtains on the underlying tensions between all the stakeholders involved in making NASCAR racing the spectacle we all cherish and love today. It cannot be perfect, but people rarely ever hold back from speaking their minds about a problem. All things considered, that is a win for NASCAR.

As for the 2024 Charlotte ROVAL layout? Denny Hamlin’s crew chief Chris Gabehart might have had the best opinion about it, approaching the race weekend. In his own words, “We’re off to the new look Roval to see whatever the Smith family has dreamt up for us this time.” Indeed, we are. But will the ROVAL act as a redeeming stage for Denny Hamlin come Sunday? The race goes green at 2 PM ET on NBC for your TV screens and PRN for radio coverage.