Denny Hamlin issued a warning of sorts to NASCAR in linking both the waiver decision for Kyle Larson with the official announcement that Stewart-Haas Racing is going to close at the end of the Cup Series season.
Basically, Hamlin said on Monday’s episode of Actions Detrimental that NASCAR has always operated under the conviction that the show will go on with or without certain drivers and teams, and while that is historically true, it’s less true at this current juncture. He also says that NASCAR risks doing significant damage to itself if it makes a misstep in both how it treats Larson but also in how it navigates the charter negotiation process.
“I need to think carefully about how I word this, and it isn’t going to (come across right) for sure, but I feel as though they get offended very easily,” Hamlin said of the sanctioning body. “They are very sensitive people.
“They believe they are the show in the U.S. and if you participate in NASCAR, you shouldn’t participate in anything else … and I just think they don’t like playing second fiddle to anyone.
“There is someone in NASCAR headquarters that doesn’t like being second fiddle and believes if you’re going to be over here, you need to be over here, and you’re ours now. So when he chose Indianapolis over the Coke 600, that person got very offended and you just never know what they’ll decide to do or the choice they’ll make.”
Hamlin says he could see NASCAR ‘making up a rule’ and allowing Larson to remain in the playoffs but also stripping him of all the playoff points he had earned to date.
“There’s no governance to keep them from doing whatever they want,” Hamlin said.
Hamlin pointed out that NASCAR added Jeff Gordon to the playoffs in 2013, even though he failed to qualify, but made up a grounds to do so in the aftermath of a scandal that saw Michael Waltrip Racing attempt to manipulate the regular season finale at Richmond.
He says the longer this goes on, no decision being made, that the worse it is for Larson.
Hamlin was one of nearly a dozen drivers over the weekend, at least, who endorsed NASCAR giving Larson a waiver. The argument were made that there was a good faith effort to run both races negated by bad weather at both locations but also on the basis that running both races was good for motorsports holistically, including NASCAR.
So what does this have to do with the closure of Stewart-Haas Racing?
“NASCAR believes the show will go on with or without you, and I don’t necessarily believe that is as true today as it used to be,” Hamlin said. “There used to be a steady stream of young stars coming through the roots, sponsorship was plentiful, and when you didn’t do what (NASCAR) wanted you to do, it was ‘this is our show, this is our sandbox, take it or leave it and if you don’t like it, leave,’ and I don’t think our sport is like that anymore.
“If you ruffle the feathers of a Chase Elliott or a Kyle Larson, now you have a team that can say ‘you can go on without us, so okay, we’re out,’ and that’s what knocks out the legs of your stools. If you keep having things that show the splinters in our sport, that’s not good for the sport long term and that’s troublesome.”
Hamlin says NASCAR needs to be careful with their ‘we don’t need you, we are the show’ mentality.
“That’s a very dangerous way to think because these teams and these drivers are the show,” he added.
Of course, this is coming from a driver who also co-owns a team that is currently in a negotiations process with the sanctioning body over governance and revenue streams so you have to filter the comments from both a altruistic standpoint as well as a possibly biased one.
“I just think (Tony Stewart and Gene Haas) are done with the headache of NASCAR,” Hamlin said. “And the headache of being in it.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.