Joe Gibbs Racing veteran Denny Hamlin secured his third win of the 2024 season at Dover last Sunday. He out-raced teammate Martin Truex Jr. and friend/foe Kyle Larson with impressive final restart for the victory. Hamlin’s win against Larson in the No:5 car was the result of his solid air-blocking.
After the race, while talking to the media, Denny Hamlin opened up about how tough it was to race Kyle Larson in an HMS Chevy. He pointed out that the 2021 Cup champion is really good at optimizing lap time by pushing to the edge and asserted that that makes him dangerous as he is willing to wreck to win the races.
If you're not willing to push it to the absolute edge, you're not optimizing lap time and I know that when he's (Kyle Larson) chasing, he is pushing it to the edge. It's hard when you're racing against a guy who's willing to wreck to win. Denny Hamlin said at Dover.
Kyle Larson in his post-race interview had pointed out that if he had a better restart and bit more time the win would’ve been his. He also highlighted the issue with air-blocking that Hamlin used to his advantage for the win, as it was big factor on the race at Sunday.
Denny Hamlin overlooks Kyle Larson solution to fix air-blocking
Kyle Larson after the race on Sunday urged NASCAR to remove the rear-camera to make the air-blocking less efficient. But Hamlin doesn’t see it as the right suggestion and pointed out that having spotters’ factors, means this suggestion is silly.
For me, I looked at my camera a few times during the race, but not very often unless I was just kind of checking my gap on a restart. So that's certainly not gonna fix it. As long as we have spotters telling us where to go, which, we've got to have those. There was a silly suggestion of not letting the spotters spot, I mean we've gotta breeze over that because that's just not gonna work. Denny Hamlin said.
The Larson-Hamlin battle wasn’t the first one of the seasons and wouldn’t be the last one as the duo will have more similar fight in the coming race weeks. The 2024 season so far has been defined by the JGR-HMS battle and the duo being the top drivers for both team makes it an interesting battle to look up to.
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