Denny Hamlin’s brake situation at Iowa Speedway appeared so dire on Sunday prior to the race that he effectively forced NASCAR to call his bluff.
Hamlin, alongside fellow Toyota alliance stablemates Chase Briscoe, Riley Herbst and Bubba Wallace, each spent extended time in the garage to make pre-race changes. Those changes were detailed in the stories below.
Hamlin and Briscoe wrestled their cars to finishes of fifth and sixth respectively and the current Cup Series championship leader detailed his weekend within his Actions Detrimental podcast.
“We tried to run something a little bit different, not unknown,” Hamlin said. “Other teams have run it quite a bit before. I wanted to lean a little bit on 23XI. They had been pretty strong at this track over the last year or so.
“I kind of wanted to lean on their setups a little bit more this time around since I hadn’t had success at this racetrack quite yet. I hadn’t found what that ‘good feel’ is around here yet. So, I needed to put someone’s set up that has run well and then let me learn from there.”
The conclusion that Hamlin and crew chief Chris Gayle was they wouldn’t go out of their comfort zone during the Chase for the Championship so this weekend was it.
“And yeah, just realized pretty quickly that it was not going to work for me,” Hamlin said.
In hindsight, Hamlin said his team is under the conviction they simply had a ‘bad batch’ of brake pads ‘simply because everything else is the same for all the other cars.’
Hamlin said his brake pressure was just erratic. There were times he had pressure, especially after a caution when everything cooled down but there were also times he had effectively 10 percent brake pressure during green flag runs.
NASCAR rules do not allow teams to change brake pads until after the race starts, which would be a lengthy behind-the-wall change. Teams can change calipers, albeit being sent to the rear for the start of the race.
Gayle changed the air cooling ducts in the No. 11 before the race, calling that a 50/50 solution. It ultimately didn’t work and Hamlin had to make do.
Gayle and 19 crew chief James Small both suggested that NASCAR needed to look at the brake pad replacement policy in the name of safety. Hamlin made a similar plea, even if he understood why the rules exist.
“And that’s their argument, right,” Hamlin said. “We do not want 36 teams having a qualifying brake pad and a race brake pad.”
Hamlin says he would have accepted any reasonable penalty beyond having to wait for the start of the race to go behind the wall.
“I told them I’d start on pit lane,” Hamlin said. “We have a major problem. And they were like, “That’s not the way it’s written right now.” And I said, ‘I know that. However, this is where common sense has to come into play that this is not for some strategic advantage. This is to hopefully keep my car from blowing a rotor or going into a corner dead straight and wiping someone or myself head on into the wall.’
“That’s what we’re trying to do here. So that’s where I wish there was an asterisk at the bottom of (the rule) saying, ‘But we will use common sense.’
Hamlin even nudged NASCAR by asking what would happen if they changed the pads anyway.
“They said, ‘Well, we would make up a penalty and it would be worse than what it would be if you just came in and changed them under green.’ And I was like, “oh, well, I guess I just need to go slower then.’
“If I lose brakes, I’m just going to put around the racetrack and end up however many laps down that I end up. So, they did acknowledge that they were willing to make up a rule.”
All told, Hamlin was adamant that this wasn’t some experiment in advance of the Chase for the Championship. He said there are others, like Tyler Reddick, who has been better at Iowa than he has been.
He just wanted to try something else that was a proven commodity for someone else.
“This has been run, I would say in combination, like 20 races and maybe more amongst all the cars, and that’s just the cars I know about,” Hamlin said. …My message to my team, and I’ll take responsibility for it, is that I can’t hit my ass with both hands at this racetrack so put someone else’s setup in that has been pretty good.”
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