Denny Hamlin fires back at NASCAR fans calling for wet weather tires on bigger tracks: 'Totally against it'

NASCAR surprised a lot of folks last week when, with 82 laps remaining in the USA Today 301, the organization made the decision not to call the race there with inclement weather looming over the track but instead opted to test out the new wet weather tires in the sport.

Not only did the wet weather tires save the race, they made for quite an interesting finish.

Suddenly, fans all over the place were calling for the wet weather tires to be used in various locales to help ensure race continuity even with some weather on the track. Not so fast, said Denny Hamlin.

“Really to me I cannot stand social media saying, ‘Oh now we should explore this on bigger tracks,'” Hamlin said on the Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin podcast. “Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That’s as fast as we need to be going in the wet weather tires. These walls hurt, people.”

Hamlin was adamant that the mechanics behind the wet weather tires can only really work on shorter tracks. Or, if not shorter tracks, tracks with a relatively low speed into the corners.

He doesn’t believe they’d be very functional on a superspeedway, for example.

“It’s different on short tracks. I try to explain to people that we can feel the edge of the car on short tracks,” Hamlin said. “We’re only running, I don’t know, 90 miles an hour or so in the corner at New Hampshire. So we can feel the car when it starts to slip and then we correct it. On a bigger track, if you run 140 mile an hour corner speeds, the minute you slip and lose grip, you’re going to do what Kyle Busch did. You’ll correct, BAM, nose straight into the wall head on.

“Like absolutely not. We do not need to be doing this on any bigger race track than what we did right there. Or not just in size, but any track that has a faster corner speed than that I am totally against it.”

Hamlin explained why NASCAR’s move to go to the wet weather tires was debated, even by drivers in the cars at the time, but why it was ultimately the right move.

“It can be a dangerous situation if you allow us to put drys on, which we know will be faster if the track is indeed dry,” Hamlin said. “Loudon New Hampshire is one of those tracks that’s very, very difficult to see whether it is dry or not because the corners are so very black. It looks like it’s wet all the time, even when it’s dry. So I don’t think that there was a clear, defined dry line that NASCAR could see that would — or at least multiple grooves of it — to allow more than one racing line in the dry. So they wanted to keep it; they knew that we could race wet weather tires in the dry but not dry tires in the wet. You know what I mean?

“So you know while it may not be optimum to run wet tires in the dry, you still can do it. But, again, the repercussions of putting dry tires on in the wet is that your car just goes in the corner, slams into the wall because the track is still wet.”

Sunday’s race at New Hampshire worked out pretty close to perfectly thanks to the wet weather tires. But it’s OK to leave it at that, according to Hamlin.