Freddie Kraft pushes back on Denny Hamlin skepticism, reveals NASCAR teams can't mention playoff points to drivers

Denny Hamlin was upset that his team did not notify him of the ongoing points battle between Joey Logano and Ross Chastain on the final lap of Sunday’s Round of 12 finale at the Charlotte ROVAL. Hamlin was not aware that Chastain was a single point ahead of Logano for the final transfer spot into the Round of 8.

Furthermore, Logano owned the tiebreaker on Chastain. So, when Hamlin passed Chastain on the final lap, that was it — Chastain was eliminated from the playoffs. Chastain made one last effort to get by Hamlin on the last corner but ended up taking both of them out. Hamlin might have done something different had he known the points situation. Freddie Kraft, spotter for the No. 23 team, said that spotters are “no longer allowed” to inform drivers about points.

“The biggest thing to me to explain to the fans side of this, I know a lot of people can’t believe Denny didn’t know,” Kraft said on Tuesday’s Door Bumper Clear podcast. “We are no longer allowed to mention the word points as a spotter, as a team. I know some teams did and God bless them, they got away with it.

“But on Saturday, it was a playoff driver that was in no threat of losing his position or anything, asked his spotter, ‘What’s the playoffs look like? What’s going on?’ The spotter simply read the standings… no directions, just read the standings. He got a warning from NASCAR, do not talk about points standings because they don’t want race manipulation.”

Denny Hamlin explains why easing off Ross Chastain at Charlotte wouldn’t be ‘race manipulation’

Hamlin did not see it as potential race manipulation. He saw it as him being able to do what was best for himself.

“There’s obviously two reasons I would want to know,” Hamlin said on Monday’s Actions Detrimental podcast. “One is if these guys are battling, it would give me a much better understanding to prepare if I’m going to attack the 1. I need to know that he’s going to be really aggressive blocking. That could have been a simple message. It then allows me to say to myself, ‘Who do I wanna race?’

“It’s not race manipulation if I’m trying to get the best result for me. I got no allegiance to Ford, Chevy, Joey, or Ross, but I have interest in myself winning a championship.”

From a spotter’s perspective, Kraft said the No. 11 team had far more to lose than gain by telling Hamlin what was going on in the points: “For Denny, who’s not involved, he’s well above the cutline and not involved in the points standings. If they start feeding him information… it would be manipulation if they tell him, ‘If you pass the 1 [Chastain], it knocks the 22 [Logano] out.’ You can’t give that information over the radio because listen, Denny is smart enough to know going into the race the 1 or the 22 are probably gonna be the two guys battling. … I saw he was mad at the team for not giving him information and I’m like, ‘They can’t!’

“I got suspended over this sh*t last year, allegedly. [Spotter Chris] Lambert can’t feed him that information because if he does, you don’t know what the penalties are going to be. They could knock you out of the playoff. If you try to manipulate stuff, we saw Michael Waltrip Racing with fines and basically put them out of business. So, the idea that he didn’t know, well he can’t know because they shouldn’t tell him.”