It’s not very often that NASCAR drivers unite on one thing. Of course, it happened last season only with the protests against the safety of the Next Gen car. However, one race into the season in 2023, and names like Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, and now Denny Hamlin are all speaking in sync on one subject.
The subject here is how awful the Clash at the Coliseum really was.
It’s worth mentioning that all three drivers mentioned above spoke about their disapproval of ‘racing at the Coliseum’ at different times. A few days before the Clash, Elliott claimed racing at the Coliseum “isn’t the most exhilarating” thing he can think of as a racecar driver.
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Then, right after the event, the defending Cup champion Logano reacted to the possibility of making the Clash a competitive race by saying, “We can’t even make a caution lap without the pace car bumping the last-place car.”
“That’d be dumb.”
And more recently, it was Denny Hamlin who candidly revealed his thoughts on the event a day after it happened.
Denny Hamlin claims racing at the Clash was “the worst racing”
In the first episode of his new podcast show Actions Detrimental, Hamlin slammed the event right out of the gates with a thumping, “It’s awful.”
“It’s the worst racing, it’s not even racing. Once you bump the car in front of you, it takes one person that’s two rows back to just get pi**ed at somebody in front of them, and they just drive in and blatantly take out that person,” he described.
“But that person doesn’t spin, it’s the car in front that spins, which is why I’m looking around, and after the race, I don’t know who to be mad at.”
Then, the #11 driver revealed that all the drivers, after all the wrecks they had, when the race was over, weirdly, nobody was fighting. “You wanna know why? Because we got out of the car we were like, ‘Well, I don’t know who’s responsible,'” Hamlin continued.
“We were running the fine line between entertainment and racing at the Clash now.”
Hamlin suggests how the Clash can become better
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After revealing what he thought of the racing product in the first race of the 2023 season, Denny Hamlin explained a solution as to how NASCAR can improve the quality of their product in the Coliseum.
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“I think you would have better racing at the track if you keep it the Clash and stopped inviting everyone to the party. Like if you win a pole, like you used to, you get to participate in the Clash, if you don’t, you don’t show up,” he said.
Hamlin claimed that if the drivers, and the field is spread out, the problem could be solved.
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“It might not provide the boxing type of entertainment, but I don’t know, is the juice worth the squeeze on this thing?” he wondered. “Has it run its course?”
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