Both Denny Hamlin and NASCAR itself took advantage of an open window on Saturday night and that is how the third annual Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will be remembered.
When Joey Logano and Ty Gibbs tangled for the lead on a restart with 10 laps to go, both drifting up the track, Hamlin drove under both to retake the lead. He would survive an overtime finish to strike, albeit in an exhibition race, first in the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season.
At first blush, winning on a track that resembles nothing else in the NASCAR Cup Series shouldn’t mean anything but the previous two winners have enjoyed wildly successful campaigns after a win at the legendary sporting venue.
Joey Logano won the 2022 championship
Martin Truex Jr was the 2023 regular season champion
So this has to mean something, right?
“I would say this track, there’s some correlation to some short tracks that we run,” Hamlin said. “It’s not like a complete throwaway where we don’t have any idea if we’re going to be good or not.
“I guess the correlation would be for me personally that the first year here we had some issues and our setup wasn’t very good. Then we went to the Martinsville spring race and were terrible also, and then when we ran really good here last year, we went to the spring race at Martinsville and ran really, really well.
“I think there are some small correlations that seem to be somewhat substantial.”
Like Hamlin, NASCAR took advantage of an opening too.
With a historic storm, an atmospheric river, set to descend upon the Los Angeles area for the next five days, NASCAR opted to take a sunny Saturday practice day and make an unprecedented decision to revamp the schedule and run the race right then and there.
Refunds for everyone
Free attendance for anyone who could make it
A revised format
But like Hamlin, NASCAR snuck by a potential disaster and drove to victory lane in its own way.
Like, there is probably something to criticize in terms of how the field was set in scrapping heat races and the last chance race but the format was going to be an open question if it kept raining past Wednesday night too. This was objectively the best of a bad situation.
Everyone got the race in and provided the short track theatrics that racing on such a quarter mile bullring was designed for.
Ready Player One
Denny Hamlin is kind of the main character in NASCAR right now.
That will make some roll their eyes but he is the most vocal personality in the Cup Series. He is the most willing to generate headlines and conversation in the media or on his Actions Detrimental podcast. He gave the Netflix camera crew the most access during his playoff run last fall and came across like the absolute biggest star.
So it was fitting in a way that Hamlin won the first race, embraced the boos that once again came with his success, and gave it right back to the fans.
“You know I beat your favorite driver again, right?”
Hamlin also hopes this race, his bombastic personality and the drama surrounding Saturday makes it into a potential second season of NASCAR Full Speed.
“Certainly, I think that it just gave the fans just a little bit of taste of what this sport is about and what it can do, and I think there’s still really a lot of stories to be told,” Hamlin said. “I think more than likely you’ll see something like that again this year.
“This is a great opportunity to tell the story about LA and that collaboration.”
Hamlin also immediately answered any question that’s anyone might have had about his surgically repaired shoulder. Part of the narrative of that first season of NASCAR Full Speed was the injury and how it inhibited him in subtle but not insignificant ways during his latest playoff effort.
Over the holidays, the 42-year-old was worried the rehab might force him to miss the start of the season, but Hamlin made it and he leaves the City of Angels a winner.
“Yeah, it feels good to me now,” Hamlin said. “Certainly, I can feel it now that I kind of let things go. It’s aching and whatnot but that’s very normal. When I do PT it aches the next day, as well. It’s all just part of getting better and stronger, and I found while running the sim that this race was far more strenuous than a Las Vegas or a Daytona will be.
“I think we’ve kind of passed the test that we’re going to be good to go to start the season, and it’s certainly not going to be a factor for the (number) 11 car.”
The shoulder didn’t really cost him the championship. That was whatever broke on the No. 11 at Homestead-Miami Speedway but having a 100 percent Hamlin will go a long way towards getting him in position to once again challenge for that elusive first championship.
Short Trackin’
Logano confronted Gibbs after the race and it ended with an argument that neither seemed to accept as resolved in any kind of way.
“He was just mad that I ran him up,” Gibbs told FOX Sports after the race. “If you go back and look at the replay, (Blaney) kind of chucked him out of the way too. So, it’s just hard racing and this place is hard to get the tires warmed up and once the caution comes out, you see everyone slide around.
“I got in there deep and washed up into him and got all tangled up after that. He said that to me in much different words.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Michael McDowell were door slamming in the middle stages of the race.
“He was just dive bombing me three wide for no reason on the restart,” Stenhouse told Frontstretch after the race. “That was it. I’m going to go talk to him about it. We were both a lap down, actually he was two laps down, and there was no reason for that.
“It’s smaller than a quarter mile and we’re playing pinball out there.”
Hamlin thought Ross Chastain dirtied up McDowell after a lap of tussling. Kyle Larson retaliated against Bubba Wallace for a series of incidents between them.
“The restarts get crazy,” Larson said. “I think it was the second to last restart, and I was able to get in front of him, and then the leaders got started racing, and that was right when Ty Gibbs got back in line and Bubba just decided to run through me and sent me through Ty and spun him. So, I hate that because we were running fifth, sixth and seventh. I thought we would settle in, get to the finish.
“From there, I was like, okay, whatever, that’s the style of this racing.
“I haven’t seen any of the replays from the last restart, but he got me again and then got me again the next corner. I think at that point that was three times to my none, so I wanted to get him back before the checkered. I wasn’t trying to spin him out or anything; I was just trying to shove him through the corner like he was doing to me, and he ended up going around. Product of this racing and finally reaching my limit, I guess, but yeah, just how it goes.”
Chastain dumped Tyler Reddick after the race.
“When that last wreck happened, I just felt like he drove through us,” Chastain told FOX Sports after the race. “
There was no shortage of short track drama commensurate of racing on a quarter mile bullring.
“Yeah, everyone ran into everyone,” Chastain said. “I got into McDowell, he came over and we talked. I bounced off the wall and spun my tires. I wrecked him. He came over, we shook hands and smiled.”
What next for LA?
This race unceremoniously marked the end of a three-year deal NASCAR had with the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to host the Busch Clash.
So what now?
On one hand, NASCAR would be keen to explore new options to freshen the race up, even if it likes the idea of running the race on makeshift stadium short tracks.
The race could be taken to an international market with a warm climate, perhaps a Mexico City, or maybe even a large enough indoor or retractable roof style stadium.
NASCAR’s Ben Kennedy says the concept still has legs moving forward.
“The interest is still strong,” Kennedy said on Friday. “The first year, it was new and novel and we’d never done anything like that before, and frankly I don’t think anyone has ever built a temporary racetrack inside a stadium that is a century old.
“The second year, obviously a lot of return customers and some new customers as well. In this third year, we are seeing similar trends to what we saw last year.”
Overall, moving the Clash from Daytona to the football stadium the past three years has been ‘an opportunity to test out new methods and exercises that we might want to apply to some other tracks’ and the argument could certainly be made that it made racing on the Streets of Chicago last July appear more viable.
While the contract is up at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, another factor in what comes next is that without this event at its current location, NASCAR will not have a presence in Southern California.
That’s because Auto Club Speedway has started to be dismantled, and while it still could be converted into a half-mile short track, NASCAR is still exploring its options and waiting for more favorable economic conditions for construction.
Kennedy says NASCAR has explored ‘a dozen different concepts’ in the area but hasn’t found anything enticing.
“If we had our druthers, we would have a race in Southern California every year,” Kennedy said. “But a lot of that will depend on what the future of both of those tracks and both of those concepts look like.”
All told, the newest winner of the event, Hamlin says he thinks the past three years should be considered a net victory for the sport. He says that as both a driver and the co-owner of 23XI Racing with Michael Jordan.
“I think it’s a huge win for NASCAR – no matter if we choose to come back or not,” Hamlin said. “I think this event certainly did what they were hoping it would do and that was to create buzz in the area, create better ratings and I feel like they accomplished that.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.