Denny Hamlin has said this frequently but his 23XI Racing team and Joe Gibbs Racing are true alliance partners as part of the $8 million a year the former pays to the latter in exchange for all technical data.
But Hamlin says, and he did again on Monday on his Actions Detrimental podcast, that the information flow goes both ways.
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“We’re always privy to what they’re doing as well as they know what we’re doing,” Hamlin said on the show.
This was part of a broader conversation about how 23XI is so much better than JGR right now, at least in terms of winning races, with Tyler Reddick winning four of the first six to open the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season.
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Would Denny Hamlin consider racing after his current contract ends?
What determines the deviation in set-up choices once JGR and 23XI ends up with the same information packet?
“It starts about a week and a half to two weeks in advance,” Hamlin said. “The teams will start coming up with a baseline setup. Like, ‘here’s the general shock, springs, weights of the car that we think is correct’ and then as they run sim and simulation models, it will continue to evolve and as they get more information, it just starts to evolve and then the drivers send the teams down a certain path of ‘what I want my car to do.’
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“So I think that we probably … I wasn’t aware that they were in a different place, like a far different place … far, far away from where we were until like the weekend. But again, we’re all just guessing.”
How often does JGR driver Denny Hamlin look at what 23XI is doing?
“I don’t look at setup sheets or anything like that,” Hamlin said. “It’s always different for every team, certainly on any given week. I don’t have time to then, ‘Alright, I’ve locked in my setup, let me see what other people have come up with.’ I have done it post-race before and said, ‘Okay, that person was successful with that. Let me run that. Let me see what that feels like.’ That probably will happen today, but generally speaking, I just focus on what I need because at so many of these racetracks, I have a really good understanding of the feel that I need in my car to go win.”
And in the case of the first six races, 23XI has just done a better job of guessing what set-up needs to be loaded into the cars.
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