Nashville Superspeedway winner Denny Hamlin came out earlier this week and asked NASCAR to shorten the race length. The Joe Gibbs Racing star has now come out and pointed to the tough task of balancing nostalgia for the core fans while looking at the future amid the talk of growing the sport.
Denny Hamlin made an almighty comeback at the Nashville Superspeedway last week, where he dropped to last after a jump start, but managed to fend off his teammate in the final moments of the race to take the win.
After the win, Hamlin appeared on a podcast and suggested that Cup races at Nashville should be shortened and explained the fans’ perspective on how the race ended after midnight.
The same was met with backlash from some fans online. Hamlin spoke with Sirius XM about the same, and detailed the challenge for NASCAR to keep the core audience content while looking at the future. The JGR star gave examples of baseball, highlighting NASCAR’s challenge of making a race look the same but speeding it up.
“It’s the toughest job that they’ve got, is that their core audience is the nostalgia type of race fan but you can be handcuffed by that going forward. I think you can definitely understand your roots, play into those roots but also have to look forward. You don’t completely have to change the game,” said Denny Hamlin
The JGR star went on to explain how the game of baseball is the same it was 30 years ago, but that they’ve improved the experience by speeding things up and adding a pitching clock.
“You (NASCAR) almost got to figure out how you do that. Watch a race, make it look the same but how can you speed it up. That is one which is very tough to thread. I do think sports fans require more than what they used to. Asking someone to sit up in the bleachers for 4-5 hours. It’s a really tough ask no matter how much you love the sport,” added Denny Hamlin
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Denny Hamlin on wanting a shorter NASCAR Cup race at Nashville
The Nashville Superspeedway Cup race was delayed due to inclement weather. This, combined with the duration of the 400-mile race, meant it was after midnight when the race ended. Denny Hamlin came out on the Actions Detrimental podcast and explained why a shorter Cup race makes sense, as he said,
“So on a normal mile and a half that we run a 400-mile race, like at Michigan this weekend, that race will be two-thirds of the time this one takes because we’re running so much faster. It’s about lap time and speed versus mileage.”
“So at a track like this, it should be 300 miles, because you’re running a slower pace. In the time that you can run 300 miles at Nashville, you can run 400 miles at Michigan. So the math just doesn’t math to me. This is why this race, the math doesn’t math to me,” he added.
Hamlin explained how the fans at Nashville were great to sit for the entire duration of the race despite the delay. He also explained how the heat doesn’t allow for the race to be started earlier for an earlier finish.
