Denny Hamlin is one of three drivers in the field for Sunday’s eero 400 who has won a NASCAR Cup Series race at Chicagoland Speedway.
But Hamlin says his experience at the 1.5-mile intermediate speedway won’t amount to a significant edge when drivers take the green flag for the 19th race of the season (6 p.m. ET on TNT, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
For one thing, the asphalt at Chicagoland has weathered for seven years, and the bump over the tunnel in Turns 3 and 4 is perhaps more pronounced.
And though 18 drivers on the entry list for the race have never driven Cup Series race cars at the Joliet track, it’s also true that no driver in the field has ever raced a Gen 7 Cup car at Chicagoland.
The Gen 7 car debuted in the series in 2022, three years after Alex Bowman outdueled Kyle Larson to win the most recent race at the speedway.
Even though Hamlin represented Toyota drivers in a Goodyear tire test at Chicagoland in April, he doesn’t think that experience or his history at the track will be a decisive factor on Sunday.
“I ran some laps here during the test but it’s still one line,” Hamlin said before Friday’s Cup practice. “I’ve been around long enough to know that a test race track and a race weekend track are two vastly different things. So, lots of unknowns, just what line are we going to run?
“What’s going to be the fastest? And as Kyle (Larson) mentioned, we didn’t really go up the race track at all during the test, so we don’t know whether the bump is more or less the higher you go. I have some old notes I had in the book that I looked at, but it’ll be something small, nothing big.”
