Maybe it’s a fresh wound for all involved or maybe it’s an inflection point but NASCAR Cup Series drivers seem ready to do something different at Daytona and Talladega following yet another messy rendition of The Great American Race.
The question for the roster was a simple one. Is there a better way to conduct business on the 2.5-mile and 2.66-mile superspeedways?
“Well, there’s always a better way,” said 2012 champion Brad Keselowski, “but I don’t necessarily know how to find it. This track (Atlanta) almost kind of proves there’s a better way. It runs two or three-wide and puts on a fairly exciting race and still exhibits trade craft both from the teams and the drivers — the moves they make with their race craft.
“Atlanta is kind of a poster child for the idea that both can exist in the same time in the right conditions.”
Keselowski echoed a sentiment that is kind of prevalent right now from Cup Series drivers in general regarding the state of the highest level of the sport and how it balances sporting competition and entertainment.
“The Cup series is in this interesting spot right now where I think some days we have to decide if we’re the Harlem Globetrotters or not and I don’t know that I have a perfect answer for that. There’s a balance but we need for this series to be completely legitimate at all times and for race craft and trade craft to matter.
“Right now, there are weeks where it matters more than others.”
Denny Hamlin, a three-time winner of the Daytona 500, did not mince words about how he felt earlier in the week suggesting that the status quo is all about luck and that it makes him question his love for it all. Hamlin, speaking on his Actions Detrimental podcast, said he is starting to view winners of the Daytona 500 in the same light as the champions under the current playoff format.
It was a very blunt rant.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver said he had not heard from NASCAR one way or the other about everything he had to say. However, Hamlin said he still feels just as strongly about it this weekend at Atlanta and knows he is up against a combination of TV partners and a sanctioning body that likes the chaos and randomness.
“I think if you ask the competitors they probably like one sort of thing and even that’s probably a varied answer,” Hamlin said. “I think NASCAR probably likes another thing and TV maybe wants another thing. So, trying to balance that is going to be really, really tough.
“Ultimately, I think as a competitor myself, I mentioned it, that it’s, you would like to get rewarded. When you make the right moves like it’s very frustrating that it’s kind of is out of your hands most times at superspeedways and we’d like to put it more in our hands.”
The point Hamlin and Keselowski are making is that they spend these entire races trying to lead laps and position themselves to win and it’s all undone by a series of late crashes.
A good example of talent and performance not meaning anything by the end is Joey Logano. The three-time champion led 45 laps in the Daytona 500 last year but crashed out. He led 34 laps in the summer race. Crashed out. Logano led 43 laps last weekend but once again crashed out.
He called the state of superspeedway racing ‘unfortunate’ based on those stats.
“I mean, you can look at the stats on almost every superspeedway and the cars that lead the most laps don’t win the race because they end up on the hook almost every time,” Logano said. “That part is frustrating. The car that leads the most laps mote times than not, leads a lot of laps, those cars don’t end up with the trophy.”
Unlike Hamlin, Logano is still reluctant to use the word ‘luck.’ He says he ‘hates it’ but also offered a caveat.
“I hate it more than any other word in a dictionary,” Logano said. “But sometimes, you look at the end of these races and you’re like ‘geez, right? You’re like ‘wow.’ Like, William (Byron)was out of it and then he picked the right lane when they started wrecking and now he won the 500 again.
“It’s just, I mean, I don’t know how you don’t get a little frustrated as a competitor. I mean, congrats to him, right? I’m not taking anything from him but as a competitor, you watch that and go ‘geez’ because he was so far out of it. If the race played out naturally without a wreck, he wouldn’t win the race. But he was in the right place, at the right time, and they won it again.”
Austin Dillon, the 2018 Daytona 500 winner, said he believes there is a better way. Dillon says he has been raising his hand in practically every competition meeting and asking, ‘hey, when are we going to look at superspeedway racing’ because he says ‘right now, this isn’t preferable’ to racers.
“Now, if fans like it, we’re not going to change it, you know what I mean,” Dillon said. “So first, the fans have to get to a point to where they say, ‘this isn’t what I want to see’ and that ‘I want what we used to see’ and then we need to go test.
“We need to try some different configurations and see what we go.”
Dillon says NASCAR would then run into the problem of keeping the cars on the ground and there’s just a lot of things to work on right now. Maybe they can solve both or maybe solving one comes at the expense of the other. There’s also the matter of the big rear springs or rounded bumpers that make the cars light when getting pushed.
“Maybe it’s something like taking this underwing off,” Dillon said.
Could that help both?
“We got to try,” he said. “We need to go test that style and see if it helps at all. There are a lot of things we can try. We just need to go test. We haven’t tested or practiced at this in a long time and we know what we got. I want to try something just to see if we can land at a different configuration.”
Hamlin wants to take drag out of the NextGen cars.
“It’s very frustrating that this kind of racing is out of your hands and I want to get it back in our hands,” Hamlin said. “I think that getting the drag out of these cars can be a fantastic start.”
Hamlin said Dale Earnhardt Jr. was correct in his own podcast commentary that the current cars race at the same speed as the previous one but that it’s 13 mph slower in qualifying, meaning that they are bumping each other to speed now.
“That’s what we do and that’s what ultimately causes these wrecks,” Hamlin said. “If you took the drag out of these cars, made them run faster by themselves, I don’t think we’d run much faster in the pack and it would clean up some of the hammer tags we’re giving each other down the straightaways.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who has been a contender at every superspeedway race for a decade and has won four races in the sub-discipline, says it’s ultimately about serving fans and how they have mixed opinions of the various packages over the years.
He cited the 2010 Xfinity Series race at Daytona, the first using the current generation of that car, and they struggled to stay packed up due to the lack of grip. This was before the repave in 2012.
“That track was so much fun,” he said. “The tires were worn out and we were sliding around. To me, that’s what made superspeedway racing so good for a long time, because there was a balance between drafting and handling. That got the field spread out a little bit and maybe fans didn’t like that.”
Stenhouse pointed out that Earnhardt won that race ahead of Logano, Keselowski and himself. That was it. It was a four-car breakaway.
“I had fun doing that but I don’t know that the fans liked it.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
