Denny Hamlin frustrated with lack of passing in Next Gen car: 'We can't even reach the bumper'

Denny Hamlin ran in the top-five during the final laps of Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway before a caution with three laps to go sent the race into overtime.

Hamlin struggled to make passes before the caution, hung up by Austin Cindric who wasn’t on the lead lap. Frustrated by his inability to get by Cindric, Hamlin went on a rant about the Next Gen car during Monday’s “Actions Detrimental” podcast.

Hamlin, who finished P11 after opting to pit ahead of the overtime restart, said that “the racing needs to be fixed.”

"If we do nothing, then shame on us. We deserve whatever is coming to us in the long term."💯

Listen to Actions Detrimental with @dennyhamlin now. 🎧
Apple: https://t.co/FabxIV5lJ0
Spotify: https://t.co/dHkKjkrGFL
Web: https://t.co/mTxa7mrgGm pic.twitter.com/HbEEe5C1lE

— Dirty Mo Media (@DirtyMoMedia) April 8, 2024

“So, now you’ve not only created the Next Gen of cars, you created a Next Gen of drivers that all drive the same,” Hamlin said. “Because it’s clear the optimum way to drive it. So, how are you going to create passing? You will not. We can’t even — at the end of that race, I was trying my damnedest to knock Austin Cindric out of the way. He was holding me up bad. I don’t know how many laps down he was, maybe one, maybe two. Anyway, he was laps down in the middle of guys battling for a race win. I couldn’t get to him to knock him out of the way. I’m trying to knock this guy up the racetrack. I can’t do it. Can’t reach him. So instead, I have to just sit behind him and let the laps just go away.

“And so, that is a problem. That’s why we don’t have the cautions, the wrecks, anything that we used to have from back in the day. We can’t even reach the bumper of the cars. The racing needs to be fixed. … If we sit back and do nothing, then shame on us. We deserve whatever’s coming to us in the long run.”

Denny Hamlin explains strategy ahead of overtime restart

Hamlin led 66 laps and won Stage 1, his second stage victory of the season. As for his team’s strategy to pit ahead of the overtime restart, they determined that he wasn’t going to win if they restarted fourth on old tires.

“We were just trying to make a call there to drag some others down with us. But with the tire wear not being much of anything it’s probably a stretch to think others were gonna pit with us, but that was our strategy,” Hamlin said. “We knew we weren’t going to win, we were trying to do anything we could to win.

“So, Chris’s strategy is ‘We’re not going to win if we restart fourth on old tires.’ So, pit, try to drag seven, eight cars if we could possibly do that. Nobody else pitted. So, everyone else with old tires just finished up front. We did all we could, we made our call last week and great pit crew last week got us a win and this week just didn’t work out.”