Denny Hamlin thinks lack of stage breaks at road courses can lead to 'boring' races

Denny Hamlin made some fascinating points on the lack of stage cautions at road courses.

While NASCAR utilizes stages at every other track, on road courses they’ve done away with stage cautions, instead opting to go green unless an accident on the track merits the yellow flag. The thought process is it takes so long to get going after a yellow flag on a road course, that it’s not worth it to throw some artificial cautions.

Well, sometimes you have incidents like Sunday’s race at Sonoma, where there’s a lot of riding around under green, and not a lot of passing. Hamlin believes that can lead to some boring races, and he made his thoughts known on this week’s Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin.

“Well that’s a good point. We would’ve, since we were leading the race, we would’ve probably pitted and gave up the stage points, and then there would’ve been guys that wanted to get stage points, so that would’ve flipped them to the back, and then we would’ve flipped back towards the front. I would’ve rather had a shot to win than stage points, for sure,” stated Hamlin. “But the way we’re doing with no stage cautions now, it actually lets the race play out more naturally, and so you don’t have this flip-flopping. But the race has the potential to get boring. I mean, it does.

“You know, I know that [Kevin] Harvick was one that really kind of advocated for this no stage breaks, and I totally get the reason for it. It allows you to determine your own strategy, which that’s why those guys flipped that caution on us. Is they played a different strategy than we did and it paid off. I totally get that, for sure. But you have a chance with no stage breaks of this thing just going green, green, green. I mean, had the caution not come for that tire, we could’ve been caution free — well, and then you had my wreck. So there was not much else to it.”

A stage caution would’ve worked out beautifully for Hamlin on Sunday, who was leading much of the beginning of the race, only to have an accident and come in last when it was all said and done. Regardless of his gripes with Sonoma, in all likelihood, Hamlin would’ve had a much better day with cautions.

Nevertheless, Denny Hamlin makes some solid points, but sometimes it’s nice not to have two artificial cautions during the race. But the risk of a boring race does certainly get run in that case.