NASCAR refutes Denny Hamlin’s “absolutely not true” claims about All-Star Race

In a war of words playing out across podcasts, NASCAR has hit back at Denny Hamlin and his claims about the proposal to let teams run cars outside the scope of the rule book at the All-Star Race. With the hope of it yielding new ways to improve the short track package, the sanctioning body was going to let teams build cars out of Next Gen parts that would essentially be illegal at any other race during the year. However, teams quickly shot the proposal down.

Denny Hamlin, who co-owns 23XI Racing, pointed at the added cost as the primary reason for being against it. Hamlin claimed it could cost up to $2 million dollars and with the winner of the annual exhibition race earning $1 million, it didn’t make sense financially. 

But on the Hauler Talk podcast, NASCAR has countered these and other statements, which were made on Hamlin’s own podcast, Actions Detrimental. 

Mike Forde, the managing director of racing communications for the sport, explained that the offer was put to competition directors on March 12th of this year, and that there were also prior meetings to discuss it. At that meeting, the teams raised concerns and it never went forward.

Questioning the cost

“Denny talked about how this would cost — potentially — $2 million dollars, if we went ahead and did this,” said Forde. “I think his math was off by about $2 million dollars. What, actually, it could cost, is zero dollars or potentially save team’s money.”

Forde explained the financial impact as follows: “His [Hamlin] reasoning — what he threw out there was if the car costs $300,000, he has three cars, so we would destroy every single part in that car trying to make it the best they can by modifying every part to its max capability. So that’s $900,000 worth of parts that are now obsolete because they can’t be used anywhere else except the All-Star Race. Part 2 would be that they’d be CNC-ing parts, making new parts with their partners at Joe Gibbs Racing that would cost another $1 million dollars. So, almost $2 million dollars just for this race that ‘only’ pays $1 million dollars to the winner. That’s incorrect. What we presented to the teams is that you cannot modify any parts. You cannot build new parts. You cannot create any new parts. Everything still had to be single source, but there was a list of things that we were going to allow teams to do.”

Hamlin responded to this on social media, posting: “Oh it cost us nothing to run a race team now. Whew, this business is easier than I thought. BTW, Great stats on Sunday!”

Forde later explained how teams could have saved money in the end, saying, “If you didn’t want to do anything. If you didn’t want to come up with any ideas and just build your car, what you could have done was just use body panels that probably aren’t race ready for Talladega or a Coke 600 but probably too good for a show car and use that for an All-Star Race. So you could have used hand-me-downs.” He conceded that teams likely wouldn’t do that, but added, “maybe a smaller team would.”

What could they do?

There were also more details revealed around what teams would have been able to do with the cars. One of the offers was unenforced damper lengths so teams could mess with the ride heights.  Total and right-side weight would be enforced, but not the nose weight. Teams would have ben able to mix and match the available spoiler types. Forde also said the teams could use whatever diffuser they wanted (either the intermediate or short track version) and some other underbody changes.

Teams would not be able to manipulate the chassis, as Hamlin said. Forde reiterated that it needed to be “an existing single source part.”

The NASCAR podcast also touched on why Hamlin tends to become a constant topic on the show. “This is the second week in a row where — and I would say this to his face — where he claimed there wasn’t that much thought put into this,” said Forde “I can tell you that is absolutely not true. There was a working group working on these ideas for months. There was a lot of thought put into this.”

You can listen to the full podcast HERE.