Reactions to the NASCAR Cup Series race at Iowa on Sunday were mixed. It was a compelling enough race, but there wasn’t a whole lot of actual activity toward the lead in the closing third of the race.
Part of that has to do with the tires, Denny Hamlin explained. He wasn’t a fan of the compound used for the track at Iowa.
“It’s the yo-yo effect you see at Martinsville. No one can pass,” Hamlin said on the Actions Detrimental Podcast. “You can’t pass the 30th-place car. That is the problem we’re talking about and that is what we have to fix. It’s that the leader looks like superman because he can run half throttle and just hold everyone off. Chase Briscoe at Pocono.”
Because the tires had very little fall-off, there wasn’t much passing. Strategy came down more to fuel than anything else. And because there were so many cautions early in the third stage, everyone in the front of the pack ended up being fine on fuel.
It led to a ho-hum win for William Byron, who sits atop the NASCAR leaderboard once more. Hamlin, meanwhile, was very irked at the tire setup.
“If you can do it at a short track, that should be like the eye-opener,” he 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 wasn’t sure whether it’s Goodyear or NASCAR making the final car on the tire compound for each race. But the decision-making needs work, he said.
“I don’t know. I can’t really say who makes the call on that,” he said. “I do know that they had a tire that dropped off 2.5 seconds in 25 laps. So you would think like there’s somewhere in this there’s a happy medium to be had. How do you go from nothing to 2.5 seconds? Somewhere in here is a mix, right?
“And even if you have a tire, hell this one corded in 60 laps. So it had zero dropoff until it cords. So it’s just, I don’t know. This is not a good tire combination for this track.”
Hamlin bemoaned the fact that NASCAR doesn’t have all that many races in the Midwest. The fans that do come to Iowa often do some from the neighboring states.
The driver of the No. 11 pointed out how important it is for NASCAR to put out a good product for the fans making that kind of trek. That didn’t happen Sunday.
“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.”
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