Denny Hamlin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are searching for answers to all the questions that arose from the former’s race-winning restart at Richmond Raceway last weekend.
On the latest episode of The Dale Jr. , where last weekend’s victor at Richmond joined the show for a bit, Earnhardt Jr. asked Hamlin where NASCAR should go from here, and whether there’s a viable solution to the matter.
“I’m not really sure, honestly. I mean, I think that — we’ve just gotten so smart, when it comes to the drivers. I mean, in understanding how to get good restarts. How to take advantage of the system. We’ve really got educated on that,” Hamlin explained. “And it’s through people like Josh Wise and whatnot, that educate these drivers on, ‘Hey, here’s the rule. And here’s how we’re going to get around that rule.’ You know, ‘If you’re P2 or P3, we’re gonna roll up on these guys. You’re gonna carry that speed, and you’re gonna be able to take over first place entering turn one.’ And so as, as we come up and we keep getting smarter in those situations, then the leader then needs to counter with his own strategy, to throw those guys off. So that’s what I was trying to do, is throw those guys off and say, ‘Well, I know what your plan is. I can see it half starting, and I’m not going to let you dictate this restart.’ And so, I was trying to go early in the zone. I was not trying to go before the zone.
“I can see that through video and on TV, it looks, it looks one way and it felt another in the race car. I can tell you that for sure. I’m looking all over the place. I can barely see anything in my dash. But I can’t see that I’m four or five foot earlier, whatever it was. Like, it was really small. But I don’t know what they can do, other than make the zone bigger, because otherwise everyone’s just kind of continue to creep towards the leader as we approach the zone. And the zone is so small, in the sense of you know, they know that if you go early, we’re going to time it perfectly there. If you go late, we’re going to time it perfectly there. So it’s, other than if you made the zone bigger, and I think they experiment with that. At one time and then they cut it back. I think they had a mess during maybe the Roval or something. I’m not really sure what track it was. But yeah, I don’t know what you do other than, you know, it’s kind of a — it’s a zone. That’s all I could say, it’s a zone.”
Hamlin makes a good point in how he was reactive to the drivers behind him, but all Earnhardt Jr. wants is a little clarification, and a potentially expanded restart zone.
“NASCAR did expand the restart zone, I think middle of last year, or coming into last season, they doubled it. So that would be a great conversation to have,” Earnhardt Jr. rebutted. “Maybe the restart zone, you know, could go away or there could be a line you know, coming through turn four, that you can’t start — you can’t start before that line. But then you have you know, you have several several hundred yards, all the way to the flag stand, to go whenever you wanted.
“And to your point like, if you’re the leader of the race, you want the advantage. Maybe they put the leader out there by himself, you know, and you double file behind the leader. So I thought about the restart, you know, maybe it’s not so much NASCAR clarifying what needs to happen going forward with the current situation, current restart box and all that. But maybe they could change it. Maybe it just does need to evolve a little bit. Physically, the restart zone itself could change.”
Continuing, Hamlin asked Earnhardt Jr. if NASCAR needs, ‘to be reactive about this,’ to which Earnhardt Jr. stated his belief that the inconsistencies and the can of worms Hamlin opened up is something he’d have an issue with.
“I worry — yeah, maybe we don’t need to get crazy and change s—. But I think that NASCAR certainly has to step in and go, ‘Well, we need to clarify what’s fair, what’s a good restart and what’s not.’ Because I thought you had to go in the box,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “NASCAR is now saying it’s whatever, you know. And so it was so, if NASCAR doesn’t say something in the next drivers meeting, or send out a bulletin to teams or whatever, I think this could get crazier. Right?
“And then what’s going to happen is, and we’ve seen this many, many times, somebody’s going to do exactly what you did three months from now and get penalized. Right? And then it’s going to be, ‘What the hell? It’s inconsistent.’ So that’s the only thing I’m worried about.”
Alas, it remains to be seen if NASCAR changes anything about their restart zone, but Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows if you give a driver an inch, they’ll take a mile. We’ll see what the governing body decides to do moving forward.
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