Denny Hamlin puts NASCAR leadership on blast for made-up stats

NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer appears on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio every Tuesday, recapping the biggest topics from the previous weekend’s race. This past Tuesday, Sawyer said he was unsure what NASCAR needed to do to fix the current superspeedway package. Sawyer cited the 67 lead changes that took place at Talladega Superspeedway, which Hamlin believes are made-up stats.

Hamlin said on Monday’s “Actions Detrimental” podcast that NASCAR brings up the numbers to “make itself look good.” He added that they lose credibility by not listening to drivers and hardcore fans’ criticisms of the superspeedway package.

Denny Hamlin fires back at Elton Sawyer

“When you had Elton go on [SiriusXM] last week talking about superspeedway racing and say, ‘I don’t understand, what do we have to fix? Look at the stats we have this week, we had 67 lead changes and whatever else,’ I think you lose some credibility with the fans,” Hamlin said. “And I think the fans have a low morale right now due to their lack of faith in the competition leadership. I think it’s a tough position they’re in, right. But I think they should probably cancel the whole coming on the radio. I know why they’re doing it. I know why NASCAR comes on every Tuesday morning and says, ‘Let me tell you why we did this, tell you why we did that.’

“Appreciate that transparency from them, but when you go in there and you brush off what every driver said and has said for quite some time with the superspeedway package. … I just think NASCAR created its own stats to make itself look good. When they created a green flag passes stat that didn’t even include the start/finish line — it was just an invisible however many noses go ahead each other at any invisible point on the track and we’re gonna count that as a pass, I’m sorry, you’re just making something up to look better.”

NASCAR’s Elton Sawyer defends quality of racing after Talladega, pushes back on criticism from Denny Hamlin, fans

Hamlin was one of several drivers who complained about the difficulty of passing at Talladega. Late in the race, not one driver pulled out of line to make a run. The field stayed 2×2 to the finish, with Austin Cindric narrowly edging out Ryan Preece for the win.

The race was not well received by fans on social media. But Sawyer also saw the crowd at Talladega cheering and standing on their feet. He saw four-wide racing which included 67 lead changes. 

“When you’re sitting in race control… [you can see] our fans standing on their feet. We’re four-wide, in some cases five-wide, back to single file and our fans are standing up and cheering. And then you go look at the metrics. And you look at the stats after the race and you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers,” Sawyer said. “When we look at all of that, what are we trying to fix? What’s not going the way we would like it? I get it when we start talking about short track packages when we have a guy that leads 400 some laps of a 500-lap race. OK, we’re gonna do our best to try to get to work on that and figure out what we can do.

“But when you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers, I’m not real sure what we’re going to work on there. But as always, we wanna get better. We want to have 70 lead changes, 25 or 30 different drivers that lead races. That’s a lot of words there, but the short answer is we’re always looking at our product. Whether it’s superspeedways, road course, intermediate or short track, we’re always looking at it and trying to make it better.”