Denny Hamlin was on every driver’s mind at Richmond Raceway Saturday.
Even a week removed from his aggressive move at Pocono that put Kyle Larson in the wall and relegated him from the front row to 20th, that style of racing divides opinion.
The move is what Kyle Busch called a “no win situation.”
William Byron summed up how Hamlin was able to exploit the different handling characteristics of the Next Gen car to give himself the advantage and put Larson in an impossible spot.
“The old car would get aero-loose under somebody, so you would never get that close to somebody without sucking your car around. Eventually, you’d kind of tag them in the left-rear and both of you would crash,” Byron explained.
“With this car, the inside car gets tighter and comes up into the outside car,” he added. “The inside car is the one at the advantage, aero-wise, so he has the control. He can move up and put that guy in a vulnerable spot where he really has no choice but to hit the wall.”
Byron is still willing to use the move in some circumstances, he acknowledged.
“I think to me, it does matter who you’re racing. Like, to me, I try to play it fair to where – if that guy hasn’t done something like that to me, I probably wouldn’t do that to him,” he said.
Hamlin, then, might be an acceptable target compared to other drivers too who pass more cleanly. Other drivers certainly recognized that Hamlin has a new reputation for dirty moves.
“Ever since I started racing stock cars, you race how you want to be raced,” said Austin Cindric. “That’s an example. If someone’s racing Denny Hamlin, they’ll know that that’s what he’s willing to do to win a race.”
“If Denny likes pulling that move to get you in a bad spot off of the corner, you’ve got to expect him to do that,” added Cindric’s Penske Racing teammate Ryan Blaney.
Other drivers, particularly those on the Playoff bubble, admit that they’ll at least be tempted to try the move to get that all-important win.
“I got five weeks. And I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no,” said Cindric.
Chase Elliott, who also needs a win, was equally noncommittal.
“We’ll see,” Elliott said. “We’ll see what the situation is and what’s going on. My goal is just to be fast enough to not be in this position.”
“I don’t really know,” added Christopher Bell. It’s just going to be off instinct and reaction. I don’t really know what I would do.”
As for the driver himself, “I’m not going to back down,” Hamlin said.
“You have to adapt to where you are at. You adapt or you die. Certainly, I feel like over the last few years, I’ve decided to be more aggressive because I’ve got used up by aggressive and it is hard to blame them at the time – especially in a race winning situation,” he explained.
Hamlin said the aggressiveness is a product of the win-and-you’re-in system implemented in NASCAR in recent years.
Kyle Larson, for one, disagrees. He points to his own racing at the World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway as an example of how to race clean.
“Well, I think you can look at the four or five restarts I had with the No. 8 at Gateway and you can see how, if roles were reversed, I would have played it out… I respect Kyle and that’s why I raced him that way at Gateway. And I respect Denny – or, I did – so I don’t think I would have raced him differently,” he said.
The two RFK Racing teammates looked at it very differently. Chris Buescher said he hopes NASCAR doesn’t try to officiate its way out of the problem.
“It’s a slippery slope when you start talking about more rules and penalties. That’s tough,” said Buescher.
As for Brad Keselowski, he thinks the rules are all that matter in terms of guiding drivers’ behavior.
“Nobody cares what’s fair in this sport. It doesn’t matter,” Keselowski argued.
“What matters is what the rules are. That’s what we race to, we race to the rules. You always get into this different code of ethics, and we could probably debate that until we’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t matter in the end. He won the race; he got the trophy.”
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