Denny Hamlin blames NASCAR leadership for low fan morale

Denny Hamlin believes that NASCAR leadership has caused low fan morale over the last few weeks. On the Actions Detrimental podcast, the veteran NASCAR driver explained how NASCAR has let its fans down.

“When you had Elton [Sawyer] go on last week talking about Superspeedway racing and say, ‘I don’t understand. What do we have to fix?’ Look at the stats that we got for this week. We had 67 lead changes,’ and whatever else, I think you lose some credibility with the fans,” Hamlin said. “I think the fans have a low morale right now due to their lack of faith in the competition leadership.

“I think it’s a tough position they’re in, but I think that they should just probably cancel the whole coming on the radio. I know why they’re doing it, I know why NASCAR comes on every Tuesday morning and says, ‘Let me tell you why we did this and why we did that.’ I appreciate that transparency from them. But when you go in there and you kind of brush off what every driver said and has said for quite some time with the superspeedway package, go back three years’ worth of podcast. I’ve said we’ve got a superspeedway problem and we’ve kept ignoring it. I just think that NASCAR created its own stats to make itself look good.”

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Denny Hamlin’s comments come on week after the drivers took part in the spring Talladega race and said they had trouble pulling out of line to make a run. Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition and SiriusXM NASCAR last week and defended the quality of racing at superspeedways.

“When you’re sitting in race control… [you can see] our fans standing on their feet. We’re four-wide, in some cases five-wide, back to single file and our fans are standing up and cheering. And then you go look at the metrics. And you look at the stats after the race and you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers,” Sawyer said. “When we look at all of that, what are we trying to fix? What’s not going the way we would like it? I get it when we start talking about short-track packages when we have a guy that leads 400- some laps of a 500-lap race. OK, we’re gonna do our best to try to get to work on that and figure out what we can do.”

On3’s Nick Geddes contributed to this story.