Denny Hamlin weighs value of NASCAR limiting Richmond Raceway to a single race

Richmond Raceway lost one of their usual two dates ahead of the 2025 season, and that originally disappointed Virginia native Denny Hamlin. However, after this past weekend’s resounding success of an event, he’s changing his tune.

Austin Dillon won a thriller of a race, and a fantastic crowd came to the track on a Saturday night. While Hamlin originally believed Richmond losing a date would be detrimental, he’s seeing the other side of the argument now.

“It broke my heart that they lost one of their dates. (But Saturday) was a good crowd turn out. It’s so interesting, because Richmond is always one of our top-five cities that people watch us. It’s one of the higher-rated cities. It’s always like, Greensboro, Richmond, Indy — something like that, is our kind of our top five. But they didn’t come to the track,” Hamlin stated, via his Actions Detrimental podcast.

“The track president there, she’s doing a good job of kind of getting the fans back. Certainly, it seems as though people are responding to the one date. I mean, let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter what sporting event you go to, it costs money to go. When you have the option to have multiple times to go, what happens usually is you skip the first, ‘I’ll go get the next one.’ Then, something comes up before the next one, you don’t end up going at all.

“As a sports person for me, I know when something comes in to town once, that’s my opportunity. Block it off, don’t plan anything else, because I don’t have another option. So, I think that there’s something to that, and it seems like the tracks with one date? It’s working out for them.”

All in all, it’s part of a larger issue for Hamlin. He thinks NASCAR simply has too long of a schedule, and the sport could benefit from allow its fans to miss them a bit moving forward.

“I think it’s another example that we have too many races in our schedule,” Hamlin added. “We’re just over-saturating the market. We’re trying to come up with new tracks and things like that, but it’s just — certainly (there shouldn’t be) 36 or 38 (races). I just think that there’s something to making the people want it, instead of just always giving it to them whenever they want it.”

Perhaps NASCAR will listen to Denny Hamlin in the future on the matter, but tracks like Richmond, Dover and Pocono consolidating their dates has been a great development for the sport. We’ll see if the trend continues in the future.