Talladega Motor Speedway hosted the GEICO 500 on Sunday and it was a day of mixed emotions for Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin . He ended up in the victory lane as the co-owner of 23XI Racing, as his driver Tyler Reddick was the winner. At the same time he had a really bad day as a driver, after getting DNFed in all Toyota crash.
The race wasn’t great as an entertaining event, as the drivers employed a fuel saving strategy and ran below the optimal speed. This might have been the reason while the first two stages of the race were really clean, before the usual Superspeedway type chaos. Denny Hamlin was furious about how the strategy dictated the race.
While talking about it in his podcast Action Detrimental, he pointed out that the tag line of fastest track in the world no longer suits the track. He claimed that they race much faster in other tracks that Dega and counterintuitive race fuel saving has produced is really disappointing.
It's just a battle over who can just slow down the most, it's so counterintuitive. They need to stop calling Talladega the fastest track in the world, it's not. We run faster probably half the race tracks than what we ran today. We were creeping around the race track just fighting to run slower than the guy beside. Denny Hamlin said via Action Detrimental.
Denny Hamlin breaks down how the fuel-saving run worked out
Hamlin before giving the not the fastest track verdict, explained how fuel saving works. He pointed out that it all starts with the leader show slows down once it’s time to save fuel and the racer fighting besides him would slow down as well.
You never really want to be lead car for sure, the lead cars get out there and they're like 'I wanna save fuel!' and the person behind them saying 'I wanna save fuel too.' And the person beside starts going forward and they start passing and they're like 'Wait a minute am I going too fast, I need to slow down. Denny Hamlin said.
Most of the fans are really frustrated with how the fuel saving strategy played out on Sunday and how the Next-Gen era has had been hard for Superspeedways. NASCAR cant keep ignoring the issues despite strong finishes and has to find that silver bullet sooner that later.
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