Denny Hamlin explains what led to NASCAR penalizing him, No. 11 team for engine teardown issue

Denny Hamlin explained how he and his team were penalized by NASCAR for an engine teardown issue after winning the Cup Series race at Bristol. On the Actions Detrimental podcast, the 43-year-old driver broke down how Toyota Racing Development (TRD) made the error.

“We’ve gone into an era where we’re running engines for two or three races. What happens is they put seals on the engines. They’re like blue seals that go on the engine itself. …Once you win a race, they put red seals on it. They either add red seals as marking as this is a race-winning engine, at some point it needs to be inspected, or they cut the blues off and add the reds,” Hamlin said.

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“…This engine got seals all over it. The only way to get them off is to cut them off. So while it’s not unreasonable for Toyota to cut seals off because they cut blue ones off all the time when the engine is done with its life say after the third race, it will go back to Costa Mesa where it gets rebuilt, and the workers there will cut the blue seals off and they’ll rebuild the engine and then they’ll run it another cycle. It’s ready to run into the season for a refresh or be ready for the following season.”

Denny Hamlin says race-winning engine was rebuilt before inspection

Hamlin continued: “Whenever you win a race and get these red seals put on, NASCAR says ‘Okay, we don’t need to inspect this now. We can inspect it whenever you’re done racing it after its third cycle.’ Well, it was only on its second cycle, so we had another race to run. That engine needed to go back to NASCAR. It’s very typical when NASCAR’s tear-down process inspecting the race-winning car, they do it at the race track. They say all official, all good. Sometimes they take the car to R&D (Research and Development), sometimes they do not.

“What they do is the engine… They’ll take the NASCAR R&D, do a normal protocol, make sure it’s the right size and checking things with small gauges that we don’t know anything about. We haven’t seen an engine penalty in quite some time obviously because you cannot mess with the engines, tires, things like that. They drop the big hammer on you.”

Hamlin goes on to say the red seals are put on the engine after the Bristol race and use that engine again at Darlington. The engine is put aside so it can be inspected. “Instead of it going back to NASCAR because it’s done with its engine cycle it got sent to Costa Mesa,” Hamlin explained. It was then revealed that someone cut the red seals off, and the engine was rebuilt before NASCAR could inspect it.

Once that happened, TRD notified NASCAR leading to Hamlin and his team being penalized. Because of the penalty, Hamlin can’t win the regular season championship and will have to work hard to win his first Cup Series title.