Denny Hamlin admits COTA was 'not the most exciting' race
After an exhilarating weekend at Bristol, Denny Hamlin relented that COTA wasn’t the most exciting sequel for the NASCAR Cup Series.
During the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental, the No. 11 wheelman elaborated on why NASCAR’s trip to Austin lacked some flavor, believing that’s just the type of racing we’ve come to expect when the Cup Series goes to COTA.
“Not the most exciting, but I thought it was still a compelling race,” Hamlin stated. “I thought that you had many stories, right? In the sense of, you know, the No. 24. Obviously, they start up front, and they led early on. And at that point, you know, when I rewatched the race, I’m thinking, you know, let’s just pretend I didn’t know the result. You’re like, ‘Yeah, well, let’s get this guy in traffic, and see what happens. Everyone’s cars fast out front. But what happens when he gets put in traffic?’ And he got in that situation. After Stage Two, he didn’t have a great restart or something happened on the restart, and he went back to P3 or P4, but then he — he drove back to the front.
“So I think the, probably the right guy, the right car won. Although you have an argument for Christopher Bell there. We’ll get into kind of where their day ended up. But I think that it was compelling. It wasn’t — there was never like, a huge lead.”
While Hamlin doesn’t believe the product was bad by any means on Sunday, he recognizes that it’s a challenge for NASCAR to put races to television at gigantic tracks like COTA.
“I mean, listen, this is gonna be the challenge, when you go to these racetracks that are three miles long. We’re gonna get spread out,” Hamlin added. “I mean, that’s just part of it. Right? It’s — that’s why the shorter the racetrack, the more action that you’re going to see, because we can’t help but — we’re all on top of each other. And so on road courses, where we’re never lapping anyone, it’s just, the clean air is good for everyone. So in other tracks, what happens is that clean air is really, really big for the leaders, until they catch lap traffic, and then everyone is equalized. Because everyone’s in the same amount of dirty air. Well, that never happens on a road course. So the clean air for the leader, and then the second and third place continues to get stretched more and more and more, because they never see any dirty air throughout the day. So that’s why you see these leads sometimes 30 seconds to eighth place or 10th place. So it’s just part of road course racing.
“Some love it, some hate it. Some were indifferent on it. I’m indifferent on it, probably. I liked when our schedule only had two of them. But I think, you know, COTA is still a really good market. You know, speaking from a team perspective. It’s a track that sponsors are interested interested in. I thought the fans came out in big numbers yesterday. I thought the atmosphere was very, very good. So it’d be hard for us to leave that racetrack just simply because of the market.”
Denny Hamlin the driver may not love COTA, but Denny Hamlin the owner certainly understands why NASCAR has it on their schedule. We’ll see if there’s a way to make the racing more exciting in Austin moving forward, but the venue likely isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.