Denny Hamlin disagrees with Kyle Larson on rear-view camera, air-blocking issue
Denny Hamlin said on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast that mirror driving “will not go away no matter what” after Kyle Larson suggested after Sunday’s Würth 400 at Dover Motor Speedway that NASCAR should get rid of the rear-view cameras in the Next Gen car.
“Mirror driving has been around for a really long time,” Hamlin said. “And mirror driving means that someone catches you and when you hear them say, ‘He’s mirror driving me.’ If I’m running my line and I wanna be on the bottom, but you’re catching me and you’re running the top, eventually when you get close enough, mirror driving says, ‘OK, I’m just gonna go to the top and run that line now.’ But you waited until I got there to do it. That’s mirror driving. Mirror driving and aero blocking is the same.
“I saw Kyle Larson I think said, ‘Well, if they took the camera away.’ For me, I looked at my camera a few times during the race, but not very often unless I was just checking my gap on a restart. So, that’s certainly not gonna fix it. As long as we have spotters telling us where to go, which we gotta have those. … You’re not gonna keep people from doing what they know is the best way for them to win or protect their position.
Denny Hamlin on aero blocking debate: ‘I won so there’s going to be b****ing’
“So, it will not go away no matter what. The only way you can get rid of this is to make it to where there’s lap time variance. That second car is just so much faster than the first car that he’s gonna get around no matter how much you aero block. You shouldn’t be able to swerve in the corner and hold somebody off. You gotta have a bigger variance speed of cars. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to get rid of this in the long run.”
Hamlin, restarting second on the penultimate restart with 72 laps remaining in the race, got ahead of Larson when a crash coming off Turn 2 forced a caution. He retained the lead on the final restart with 62 laps to go and from there, went into playing defense against a charging Larson. Though Larson got within a few car lengths of Hamlin in the closing laps, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver held on to win his third race of the season and 54th in the Cup Series.
Hamlin said that the discourse surrounding aero blocking took off because he found his way to victory lane at Dover.
“I think that I won so there’s going to be bitching,” Hamlin said. “It was the restart at Richmond. It’s just always something.”