Fatigue may be to blame for the reaction from NASCAR fans in regards to the racing at Phoenix last weekend, according to Denny Hamlin.
We’re only through four races, but Hamlin believes the negative reaction towards Phoenix’s product from Sunday’s race in the desert may be due to the action fans grew accustomed to throughout the first three weeks of the season. They’re not all going to be wild ones, Hamlin explained.
“I wonder how much of that is fatigue from — we just came from two super-speedways, and a mile-and-a-half, right? A mile-and-a-half in which, we were just we saw last couple lap battle, right? You didn’t know who was gonna win that thing until the last lap, probably. And then you came off Atlanta, the greatest race ever. So this is the first short track. This is normal short track racing,” Hamlin said, via his Actions Detrimental podcast. “I don’t — they’re not all going to be great.
“By the way this is, this is just sports. This is sports. Because you can’t have that three-wide finish all the time. It doesn’t become special if there’s a three wide, photo-finish, every single week. I’m sorry, you will get tired of it. It will get boring.”
Evidently, Hamlin believes the sport can benefit from a bigger focus on battles throughout the field, and not just the lead pack, as well as if they get some help from Goodyear regarding their series’ tire.
“I think that there’s plenty of other stories to tell. There’s battles within the field that you don’t see, unless you’re at the racetrack,” Hamlin added. “I’m just not ready to s— it all over it and say — well, it’s it’s definitely not worse. To me, it’s not worse. It just doesn’t matter who says what, it’s not worse. Was it dramatically better? No. But yeah, we still got some work to do.
“I would love to challenge Goodyear and say ‘Okay, what was the tire wear?’ We had — clearly, we had a 100 lap run. Show us some tire wear. I think we it definitely was improved from the previous tire that we had. Can you push it more? Give us a little more. Because if you create that variability of you know, fast, running really fast, and then running really slow, because the tires start to wear out, that’s when you’re gonna see tons of overtaking.”
Perhaps Denny Hamlin has a point. We’ll see if NASCAR takes some of his advice, and they look to add some more excitement to tracks like Phoenix and Richmond in the future.
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