Denny Hamlin has a suggestion to improve the current NASCAR Cup Series superspeedway product.
The problem that he is trying to address is that cars run too closely together, can’t pass, and thus the only way to get track position is to save more fuel than everyone else and jump the field on pit road by having the luxury of taking less fuel.
Thus, the first two thirds of every superspeedway race right now features teams running extremely slow laps, half throttle or even slow and just running that way in place, because even a driver that elects to take track position will burn up a tremendous amount of fuel doing so.
Further, when it’s time to race it out, drivers are still gridlocked in place because the car has some much drag that peeling out of line absolutely kills momentum and will result in going backwards unless a line forms behind that driver that is longer than the line being passed.
It’s not the superspeedway racing of old.
“I hear Dale Jr. talk about this all the time, it is poo poo,” Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast. “A lot of it is poo poo because we’re running too much horsepower at the plate tracks. The car makes too much drag, way too big of a spoiler.”
Cup cars use a 510 horsepower configuration with a 7” spoiler at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta.
“If I’m going to fix NextGen superspeedway racing, I’m going down 150 horsepower or whatever it might be with the Cup cars on the speedways and taking a ton of drag out of the car,” Hamlin said. “You cannot pull out of line on superspeedways right now because of the detriment of how much drag your cars have.
“They have that much drag because we have too much horsepower. We used to run in the 300s horsepower range and now we’re running like 600. To keep us from going 220 mph, they added spoiler and drug the car down with speed using the outer body so get that out of there.
“Go back down to a smaller tapered spacer for superspeedways and that will allow us to make more aggressive, three or four wide moves, when we get a run, we will take it versus staying in line.”
When asked what he thought about the idea, Tyler Reddick, who drives for Hamlin at 23XI Racing said he was intrigued.
“Thinking about how much power we have with these cars on the speedways, there’s more horsepower than we’ve had in many many, many years on superspeedways and it’s just because of the drag of the car is so high,” Reddick said. “Certainly, when I think back to my first Daytona 500, I understood what the horsepower level was and we had the tiny spoiler and splitter, no aero ducts, and those cars were a monster to drive at the back of a draft.
“You couldn’t run up on somebody going 10 miles per hour faster and hit them for multiple reasons. You hurt them and yourself, you’d junk your nose. There’s a number of things.
“With how much drag these things have and the amount of power that has to go with it to get them their speed, I feel like it would change it. I don’t know if it would fix it.
“To some extent, unless we get it to the point where we can’t run inches off the nose of the cars ahead for an entire fuel run, it seems fuel saving will always be important. the only way you can make fuel saving not important is I guess going that direction, less downforce, less power, maybe that will wear out tires more. Unless the field spreads out more than what we currently have, fuel saving will occur because it’s more valuable to save fuel than have track position.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.