“Totally Different”: Denny Hamlin’s Crew Chief Unwinds the Toughest Challenge of Cup Series Calendar

Bristol Motor Speedway is the first half-mile track for the year and has garnered a lot of attention recently. The Food City 500 race will witness a major change: the Tennessee red clay that covered the Bristol track till last year is gone now. Drivers will get the pre-2021 feel at Bristol, as concrete has been paved over the track for 2024. Denny Hamlin’s crew are bracing themselves for a showdown on this revamped track.

Hamlin’s No. 11 Toyota team is also wary about the Next Gen car. With aerodynamic changes and other modifications, drivers have a lot to wrap their heads around to get used to driving the 7th Gen car. Hamlin’s crew chief elaborated more recently.

Denny Hamlin’s crew chief is cautious about Bristol

The Bristol Motor Speedway is slightly narrower than a full half-mile. The 0.533 track has steep banks and sharp turns, making racing on it an ordeal. The place is prone to easy wrecks and boiling rivalries. On top of that, drivers are still getting used to wielding the Gen 7 car. Denny Hamlin’s crew chief, Chris Gabeheart, could not stress the Bristol dilemma more in a recent talk with Sirius XM NASCAR Radio.

“There is no track like Bristol concrete. There’s just not. I mean, sure, you try to draw parallels here and there, but it’s its own animal. And this car is its own animal. In the history of Cup racing, we’ve never made a bigger change in the car overnight, as we did when we moved from the Gen 6 to the Gen 7 car. Literally everything…how you drive it, how you work on it, what it wants, it’s totally different. So when you pair those two things together, the drivers just had a very short amount of time…they’re still learning a lot because of it.”

Gabeheart further mentioned Denny Hamlin’s advantage given his prior experience, saying, “Fortunately for us, in the Fall, I think we made huge gains in terms of how to make the car drive better and more comfortable for Denny, from the 2022 night race, which was our first time at this track in this car. I think it’ll be hard to make those kinds of gains again because these teams are too smart. They’re gonna learn quickly when they get some laps in the place. But you’re still gonna see some of that.”

Last year, Denny Hamlin aced the first cutoff race of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. He clinched his 51st career victory in the 500-lap Bristol night race. Hamlin beat Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet by 2.437 seconds.

Yet, Denny Hamlin seems to be harboring a mixed attitude towards Bristol’s concrete track.

Hamlin switched his view about Bristol concrete

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The transition from Bristol dirt to concrete had garnered loads of positive responses from racers. Denny Hamlin was among them, as he recently waxed euphoric about the concrete surface on his podcast, Actions Detrimental. “Yeah, looking forward to that. Obviously, we had a great run last time we were there Bristol. Excited to get, you know another race on the concrete there. It’s one of the best short tracks that we go to.”

But after the practice session in Bristol, Hamlin was left cursing the new mixture in the traction compound. Racers complained that resin was running off the track. “I think someone p*e-p*ed in the Goodyear rubber mixture, I’m not really sure.” He further said, “I’m not really sure (about) the mixture of the resin and the tire. It’s throwing all of us for a loop in the short term.”

Bristol has stirred up a whirlwind of emotions in racers. Let us see what the actual results turn out to be on the short-mile track.

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