Mike Forde responds after Denny Hamlin claims NASCAR official blames playoff criticism on 'bots'

Mike Forde, NASCAR’s Managing Director of Racing Communications, is setting the record straight about his ‘bots’ comment during his conversation with Denny Hamlin. On X, Forde shared more details about the discussion when he told Hamlin that the social media platform has ‘bots’ when it comes to people criticizing NASCAR’s playoff format.

“Yeaahhhhhh, not exactly how the exchange with [Denny Hamlin] went,” Forde wrote. “Said Twitter/X generally has an abundance of bots. But, I guess I could see how that could be misconstrued. Trust me … I see many of the fan tweets about the Playoffs, and they have pulses.”

Forde then shared another post about the conversation after responding to a fan. “I’m not going to share the whole conversation with Denny because that’s not fair to him. But, he suggested that Twitter/X was the information capital of the world,” Forde explained. “I said that’s a tricky statement, because there are ton of bots. It wasn’t a direct reference to NASCAR topics.”

Denny Hamlin has issues with NASCAR’s playoff format

Hamlin made the ‘bots’ claim on the Actions Detrimental podcast when he was talking about the playoff format being flawed to Forde. “I said, ‘Man, this format is getting hammered on the internet.’ He’s like ‘It’s bots. It’s not real people,’” Hamlin said on the podcast. “I said, ‘Okay, you can turn a blind eye if you want, and you can be in denial, but numbers don’t lie, numbers never lie. The fact is that you’ve got some randomness to this thing.”

This comes after Ryan Blaney won the final Round of 8 playoff at Martinsville. Blaney will join Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and William Byron next week as the four drivers will compete in the NASCAR Cup Series Championship race. While those four drivers earned their way into the title game, Hamlin argued that someone like Kyle Larson should have been left out since he won six races this year. Hamlin said fans have been complaining about the playoff format because it doesn’t reward drivers like Larson who has arguably been the most consistent driver in the Cup Series.

NASCAR’s playoff format was created in 2004 to make the mid-season more competitive and increase fan interest. Before the playoff system, NASCAR would determine the champion by who had the most points at the end of the year.