Denny Hamlin ‘not sure’ why NASCAR fans didn’t like Phoenix race product

Denny Hamlin was slightly befuddled by the reaction to NASCAR’s latest race at Phoenix on Sunday afternoon.

Evidently, Hamlin believes the racing was better than the fans and the media were giving it credit for being, and he even decided to stick up for NASCAR a bit in making his point.

“To get back to what we’re talking about, the aerodynamic package. Listen, I am the last one to stick up for NASCAR on anything. I shoot everyone as straight as I can on this podcast and I don’t play favorites. I try to call it as I see it, and I am very unbiased. I don’t understand the uproar of the race, because I thought that throughout the entire race, certainly the first two stages — I was in third, and I could see first right in front of me. So it was never really spread out,” Hamlin stated, via his Actions Detrimental podcast. “Now, there was the three of us, right? The No. 20, the No. 45 and the No. 11, that were kind of breaking away from the pack, a little bit. But I thought, yeah, it’s not easy, right.

“I actually saw Derek Kraus‘ interview, I think after he got a wreck, and he was like, ‘Man, these Cup cars are ten times harder to pass in than any other thing I’ve been in. Now, he’s been in, Trucks and Xfinity and he’s raced in a lot of different things, so he’s not wrong. He’s definitely not wrong in, it is difficult. But we have to — we have an identity crisis as fans. We need to figure out what we want.”

Continuing, Hamlin pleaded with the sport’s detractors to explain to him just what they want from the Cup Series, as he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with last weekend’s race.

“Do we want all the cars to be, and I guess I’m asking, do we want the cars to be the same? Do we want all the cars to run close to the same speed, there’s a bunch of parity and just whoever’s out front is going to win that day? Or if you don’t want that, and you want more ingenuity, and you say, ‘Okay, let the teams play in this area, and that area, and we’re going to add more horsepower. Go back to where we were eight years ago.’ You’re going to have blowout wins, as well,” Hamlin added. “You’re gonna have days where people hit it.

“Kevin Harvick days where, you know, they just go out there and they dominate. Martin Truex days, where they just stink up the show.”

Alas, Hamlin is of the opinion that there’s been a lot more passing throughout the field, and not only in the front of the pack, so perhaps that’s where fans are misconstruing things.

“What I’m saying is, through the pack, there’s more passing,” Hamlin explained. “Because you’ve got to create. There’s got to be fast cars and slow cars. If there’s no slow cars and everyone’s fast, passing will be difficult, because then it will be about air, which we’ve seen and that’s a topic we’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks, is that it is being about — it is about air. Because the first place car, or the car in front, has such a dramatic aerodynamic advantage, being the car that takes the the air first, and the second car is at a deficit. The third cars at a bigger deficit, and on and on and on.

“Not until you catch lap traffic does it level out the field. But then you’re just running around in a roller skate skating rink, because then we’re all getting dirty air, and no one’s going anywhere. So we have to figure out what we want. Do we want parity? NASCAR seems to want parity, right? They want everything to be the same. The negative to that is that you’ll have everyone running the same lap time, and no one passing. You’ve got to have the haves and have nots if you want actual passing.”

Time will tell if there’s any changes made, but Denny Hamlin makes some fascinating points regarding the reaction to last weekend’s race at Phoenix.