Denny Hamlin suggests change NASCAR could make with option tire compounds

As NASCAR continues to experiment with the soft option tire, drivers are becoming more familiar with the benefits and drawbacks. And for some, that has led to an interesting point of view.

Denny Hamlin is one such driver who loves the new option tire but isn’t necessarily a huge fan of the way it’s been implemented so far. The biggest issue is that there’s a huge degree of variance in the usage of them, in part caused by the anticipation of caution flags coming out.

At Phoenix, for example, drivers were given two sets of the option tire for the length of the race. When to use them was up to the drivers.

Most opted to wait to use both sets in the third and final stage of the race. Some went earlier.

But what if NASCAR did something like allowing teams to use the option tire only on the left side of the car? That might remove some of the wide swings in performance while still gaining some of the desired effect. Hamlin’s willing to hear out that argument.

“Yeah I mean that’s interesting. I think if you did that I don’t know that you would have the effect that is what it’s intended to do, right?” Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast. “You want, we’re trying to create fall-off in lap time. Lap time variation is kind of a catalyst to overtaking. But if you start then doing some hybrid, well we’ve got hards on the right, softs on the left, I don’t know that you’re going to achieve what you’re hoping to achieve.”

Leaving the hard compound tire on the right would, in theory, keep them up and running longer than the soft option tire on the left. That’s not what NASCAR should be looking for, Hamlin said.

“We need the right-side tires to really take a sh*t. Wear the rubber out, get the tread off it, then once you get down to the core of the tire it’s really hard and it’s going to be really slick,” Hamlin said. “That’s what we’re trying to do. And I think if you ended up putting harders on the right, softers on the left, you would have a somewhere between result. But I think what’s making this so great is the result is a big difference between the two.”

There was about a half second worth of lap time between the soft option tire and the hard prime tire over the weekend at Phoenix. That’s a monumental difference, where strategy really starts to come into play.

NASCAR hasn’t yet hit the happy medium where it’s got the soft option tire strategy totally figured out, but it’s getting closer. Hamlin, though, knew early on the experimenting with the tires would be a winner for the sport.

“I knew it right away at the North Wilkesboro All-Star race, when we had that option tire there and we ran it,” Hamlin said. “I couldn’t hardly get unbuckled out of my car and there was a Goodyear representative there and said, ‘What have we got? Is it good? Better?’ I was like, ‘The tire is great. Tire is great. Great job. We need more of this.’ And that’s what they’re doing. They’re bringing it more.”