Denny Hamlin predicts 'lot of wrecks' at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, compares it to Pocono
Denny Hamlin believes that the Cup Series race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday will be a little chaotic for drivers. On the Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin talked about the race track and compared it to Pocono Raceway.
“It will be a track-position type racetrack, Hamlin said about Indy. “It’s going to be wild on restarts. I think you’ll have restarts very similar to Pocono where guys are trying to fit it in spots that are not there.”
Hamlin went on to say that the track in Indianapolis is more narrow than what the drivers saw at Pocono this past weekend. “Pocono at least has two and a half to three legit lanes. If you put the cars side-by-side-by-side of each other, it’s three lanes wide,” he said. “That means that’s actually two lanes wide when you’re actually racing because you got to leave a little bit of room.
“Indy is one lane. And when I say one lane, it’s one lane. …We all know being on the outside is not going to be preferred at that place. You’re gonna want to be on the bottom, and then what’s going to happen is we’re going to go down these long straightaways, and everyone’s going to try three-wide bottom. Everyone’s going to try to merge, and usually you’re probably going to see a lot of wrecks late.”
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Denny Hamlin really wants to win the Indianapolis race
The Brickyard 400 returns after three years of NASCAR racing on the infield road course. This is one race Hamlin wants to win since he’s never had a victory the Indianapolis oval track.
“I want to win it bad,” Hamlin said on the podcast. “I also know that I need to control what I can control, do my job on the racetrack, off the racetrack. This is gonna be a race that can be frustrating. You can have a very, very fast car and if you put that fast car in 10th place, it’s gonna be tough. It’ll be tough to come back from that. It comes from executing right when you unload to the checkered flag. I just got to make sure I do my job to the best of my ability and if we do, we’re gonna have a great shot. But I wanna win bad.”
On3’s Nick Geddes contributed to this story.