Since the introduction of the Next-Gen cars, one of the main concerns for NASCAR has been the Superspeedway racing product. The racing there has become pretty clean due to the reduced intensity in initial stages. This was mostly due to the controversial fuel saving strategy that was employed by the racers.
Drivers were forced to go on fuel saving runs despite hating the lack of proper racing. Now Joe Gibbs Racing veteran Denny Hamlin, who previously was very critical of fuel saving, has suggested a wild way to end the fuel saving runs. He advised the sanctioning body to reduce the race length of Superspeedway events from 500 miles to 400 miles.
Denny Hamlin believes with this change, the team wont be needing to save fuel as the pit-intervals as reducing the race length would make them align with end of stages. He reckons this re-alignment would make three wide racing the whole event and asserted that adding another stage to the race isn’t definitely they path to choose.
What you could do is take the speedway down to 400 miles then the stages would actually probably line up quite a bit better. Yes, if a stage was a fuel run we would never save because we’re always going to fight for stage points. That’s why we’re fuel saving… If you made the stage lengths the length of an actual full fuel run where we could run wide open you would see balls out racing for the entire day… I don’t think we should add another stage to it. Denny Hamlin said via Action Detrimental.
Denny Hamlin details how updating on cars isn’t the right choice
The three times Daytona 500 winner discussed how tweaks with the Next-Gen isn’t a better choice despite it being a fix. He pointed out that the teams would be forced to run more restricted engine, if tweaks regarding drag is made and this would make the engine builders to make new ones, eventually leading to the same old cycle.
If you want to fix the type of racing where you can’t pull out and pass, you gotta take drag out of the cars. You got to reduce the spoiler height, you gotta do something. Then we’re going to be running too fast so then they need to restrict the engines more. Then the engine builders would say, ‘We need to build a new engine based off of the new specs of this plate.’ So, it’s just we keep going in these damn circles where we’re making adjustments and it seems to always go back to these engines. Denny Hamlin said.
NASCAR needs to come up with a solution to fix Superspeedway racing issue, as these track produces the most entertaining events in the Cup Series. A failure to do so will result in loses on and of the track for the sanctioning body.
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