Denny Hamlin wants to increase speed to improve racing at the Daytona 500

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Denny Hamlin has a plan for improving racing at Daytona International Speedway, and it involves going faster.

He already has spoken to NASCAR executives about it, too.

Hamlin shared his idea for fixing the Daytona 500, which has become a fuel-mileage event since the debut of the Next Gen car in 2022, with everyone else after celebrating his first victory as a team owner in “The Great American Race.”

“There’s a way, but we’re going to have to increase the speeds by a lot,” said Hamlin, who finished 31st in the 500 on Sunday but made it to victory lane with Tyler Reddick at 23XI Racing. “You’re going to make it where handling matters. That’s going to spread the field, that’s going to make it to where … it’ll look a little more like racing from the past.”

The latest iteration of NASCAR’s stock car is a safer version of anything previously seen in the series. But it also delivers slower laps at superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega and leaves cars bunched up like never before.

“As long as (NASCAR’s) insurance company is OK with it, you’re going to have to speed up the cars because right now we’re so planted in the racetrack that we could just run in this really tight pack,” Hamlin said.

Hamlin met with NASCAR earlier this week and discussed letting teams devise a racing package they could test during the exhibition Clash if it returns to Daytona next year. If it works, the tweaks could potentially be rolled out before 2028.

“You won’t see any fuel saving,” Hamlin said. “You’re just going to see people hanging on. That would be the only fix.”

Reddick’s crew chief, Billy Scott, was less confident that the fuel-mileage strategy would be altered.

“I doubt there’s a fix to it because we’re just going to figure out the next way to exploit it, and I don’t know that it needs to be fixed,” Scott said. “It would be like asking if you need to change how chess is played.”

With the evolution of the Cup Series car creating little chance of manipulating parts and pieces, teams now rely more on making up spots on pit road on race day. They put new tires on less often and try to save fuel by running less-than-full throttle. The end result is a scenario that takes less time to fill gas tanks during stops.

But it also can create lulls in the early and middle parts of race stages.

“On one hand, it’s good because our strategy worked out perfectly,” said 2023 Daytona 500 winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who finished second Sunday. “We stuck to it. It was brutal riding around there for a while. Not sure what the Toyotas were doing, but I think that made the race pretty boring there for a while for the fans. It was chaos after they pitted.”

Hamlin’s idea could work. It’s at least worth considering.

“Everybody is trying to react off each other and figure out a way to get in the front at the right time, and that depends on whether cautions fly,” Scott said. “… To me, from where we stand, that’s a very enjoyable part of it.”