Denny Hamlin did not have a fun time this past weekend at Iowa Speedway. Beyond his own personal performance, he believes “everything sucked” about the Iowa Corn 350.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Hamlin said on Monday’s “Actions Detrimental” podcast. “I sucked, the car sucked, the tire sucked, the Next Gen sucks — it’s just everything. Everything sucked.”
Hamlin and many others in the field had trouble passing at Iowa. NASCAR conducted a tire test in June at Iowa ahead of Sunday’s race at the 0.875-mile oval. Based on the results of that test, NASCAR and Goodyear decided to go with a tire that had never been used before in a Cup Series race.
Tire fall off, there was hardly any. That left Hamlin frustrated throughout the day.
Denny Hamlin takes strong stance on problem NASCAR has to fix after Iowa
“If you can do it at a short track, that should be like the eye-opener,” Hamlin said. “OK, we’ve really got to fix this. Goodyear’s really done a good job all year long of trying to implement softer and softer tires. It’s just this one, I don’t know how they got where they got on this tire. And I’m sure there was a reason for it. But when you look at the lap times and it was just a flat ass, level, no drop-off in 50 laps. It’s like I don’t know what we expect.
“That means the tire is so hard that it just takes dramatic amount of downforce to push that tire into the racetrack and get it to grip. Nobody but the first few cars have enough air to do that.”
Hamlin pointed out how important it is for NASCAR to put out a good product for the fans attending these races. That didn’t happen Sunday, in his opinion.
“You want to make it better, for sure,” Hamlin said. “Until we get the front of these racecars on the ground instead of a foot off the ground we’re going to continue to have the same problems, and that is when we get behind someone we’re just going to plow.
“The attitude of the cars are wrong. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, please fix it, it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Fix the attitude of the car, it’ll make them better in traffic. More overbody, less underbody. If you want the same amount of downforce put it on the overbody, take it off the underbody. God dangit, it drives me crazy.”
