Toyota Racing – Denny Hamlin
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Richmond Raceway – April 12, 2019
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin was made available to the media in Richmond:
DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 FedEx Ground Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
Do you come here with the sense that you have a homefield advantage?
“I don’t know that there’s any advantage for sure, but I certainly feel like I know what I need out of the car to be successful here I’d say. Just searching for that feel is really what you do every time you come here. Especially the races that we’ve dominated here, that’s a special type of feel that you have to have in the race car. Getting it out of the car especially through all the rule changes and balance changes is the biggest task. This is kind of our wheelhouse of tracks you could say for sure.”
Do you feel like the guy to beat at Richmond?
“I’m not sure to be honest with you. Our cars have been running really good. We’ve been finishing really well and running really well every single week. Certainly probably on the short list I’d say.”
Are you, Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano in a theoretical ‘Big Four’ or is it still too early to tell?
“It’s just too early. I think that you really need to get into the summer months and allow some of these teams to really make adjustments. I think we’ve seen really even from the West Coast Swing, the Hendrick cars in particular have made some pretty good strides. I think that that’s going to continue to swing. Teams are going to make gains over the next couple months. It takes a little time. Any time you have a major rules package change there’s always a few teams that hit it right off the bat. It just takes other teams a little bit longer to catch up once they see what you’re doing. Really by the late summer, everyone will have seen what they need to see and they’ll have caught up and the field will be closer than ever then. Then you can kind of determine who is what.”
How do you feel coming into Richmond this year as the defending Daytona 500 winner?
“It’s great. I’ll always love coming to this race track. It is home. It’s one that I’ve been to many, many times even when I wasn’t racing. It’s certainly the home track for me. It’s just exciting because I know that I very well could have a great weekend ahead of us and really focus a lot of my efforts on how can we go out there and dominate the race, not just win but dominate. That’s been the primary focus for the last five days and hopefully we put it all together for tomorrow night. When I come home, it’s a special feeling for sure.”
How different does this season feel versus last season?
“It’s just different in general. Everything is different. A lot of personnel on my race team has changed over the offseason. It’s not just the crew chief. There’s a lot of key people that have been changed and so I think that really it’s a revamped team all around. All new pit crew members. Everyone is new on the pit crew, so I feel like it’s almost an expansion team of Joe Gibbs Racing. We’ve really mixed in a lot of different guys and certainly the relationships are all still growing. I’m really excited to be running as good as we are this early in the season which is kind of uncharacteristic of our 11 car anyway. Certainly to have wins early, running up front every week, it’s a great feeling knowing that we haven’t even got to our potential yet.”
How does the rain impact things in preparation for the weekend?
“I think we did a good job of managing our first practice. Chris (Gabehart, crew chief) decided to go out there and use two sets of tire and really focus on nothing but race trim in the first practice. I thought that we had a decent car there. I feel like we did a good job managing. We’ve done everything – we predicted the rain correctly and now we’re either going to qualify or we’re going to start second. Either way I think we’ll be pretty good and we’ve executed so far this weekend pretty well. We’ve just got to put it all together tomorrow night and not make any mistakes and we should be up front.”
What did you come up with, with your crew chief Chris Gabehart during your meeting about speeding on pit road?
“It is a risk, reward. I’ve always pushed things to the very edge. When I came into the sport I remember having conversations with (Mike) “Wheels” (Wheeler) and Mike Ford and they said ‘alright, the speed limit is 35’ and they said ‘yeah, but they give you a five mile per hour buffer’. I remember my rookie season and I said ‘well, why do you set my tach(ometer) at 35, why not at like 39.9?’ and they’re like ‘sure, we can start doing that,’ and I beat everyone on pit road like badly for a year. So I’ve always been the guy to kind of always get to the edge and find that edge and now there’s just not as big a reward because everyone is dealing with tenths of a mile per hour now. Everyone sets their stuff as high as they can. It has its rewards and it has its downfalls. Texas I had a speeding penalty and then I come into pit road on the final stop and I had Clint Bowyer right behind me and I continued to push and it got me a 2.5-second lead leaving pit road. I mean there’s a balance to it. It certainly has its rewards to be aggressive but there is a time and a place for it I do believe. The speeding penalties that we’ve had this year – we’ve had three – two of them have been really unique anomalies. It hasn’t been just kind of straight line. It’s been accelerating or decelerating into the box. There’s some things that definitely could get cleaned up. If you look last year, we had I think four penalties after Talladega and then we didn’t have any for months and months and months. Historically, I do speed early in the season and I typically get it cleaned up by the end of the year once I get more data points and understand where my limits are. Certainly it’s mistakes that I don’t want to have happen because it hurts the team. Obviously last week it hurt our strategy coming out on pit road there with the lead and then having to go back to 20th is not ideal. I’ve put my team in a hole where it’s put us in tough strategy moments through the year so far but we’ve had the speed and everything to rebound from it.”
Are you going to change your pit road strategy this weekend with the speeding?
“Sure. It’s something I really wanted to focus on in happy hour. Chris (Gabehart, crew chief) actually saw that the rain was coming so he had me make a couple of runs there right in the first practice. It’s something that we do every week, but certainly I’m more cognizant of it. Not that I wasn’t before, but you certainly want to hedge down to it’s okay to be a tenth or two slow.”
How has your relationship been off and on the track with your crew chief, Chris Gabehart?
“It’s been really good. I feel like our communication just gets better every week and we start to understand each other more and more every week. I’ve put a lot of trust in him that whatever he says do, then that’s what I go out there and do. He sets the game plan and it’s up to me to go out there and execute that game plan that he sets out. It’s a good relationship. He’s on it. He would definitely – no learning curve I feel like with him. He’s be on it. I’ve been super impressed with the things they’ve done, the calls he’s made, the setups on the race car. Everything he has done for our race team has been a big, big help and for me personally.”
Does it help to have the Joe Gibbs Racing playbook with Kyle Busch who has multiple wins this season?
“Playbook of what? (Joe) Gibbs (Racing)? I certainly know I’m with the team that I want to be with and obviously when Kyle (Busch) has the success that he has, you know you’re in very similar equipment. That doesn’t mean we all drive it the same or are able to drive it the same, but yes it’s a big plus to have the teammates that I have, especially the long established ones like (Martin) Truex (Jr.) and Kyle that have been in the sport for such a long time that when they come to these race tracks, they really know what they’re looking for and any time you kind of get off track, they are the ones that you really lean on. Erik (Jones) is quickly learning it as he goes. It’s an advantage I believe to have the Gibbs – Joe Gibbs and probably the best driver out there on your side.”
What did you learn at Texas that you can use moving forward at other 1.5-mile tracks?
Texas is one of those race tracks where you were able to run wide open through one of the corners consistently throughout a run. You won’t really see that again until we get to maybe Kansas and maybe Michigan as well. You can’t really bunch all of the mile-and-a-half (tracks) and say that they’re all going to be the same. This package is going to be good, really good on specific tracks like Texas, Michigan, Kansas, but it’s going to have its downfalls on the other tracks – possibly Charlotte and the other ones where if you have to let out of the gas, it’s tough because of the big wake. There is no draft per say. I think the strategy comes into play as a driver on those tracks. What line you want to be, especially going on the backstretch after a restart. You have an option to go high or low. That’s where the drafting aspect comes in and the driver puts himself in the line he wants to be in. Other than that, you really don’t use any technique from a Daytona or Talladega so it’s kind of its own beast.”
What are your thoughts on qualifying and the new five-minute rounds this weekend?
“We’re worried about it frankly. Especially in the first round. If you average it out, they’re going to have to get through eight cars per minute. If you run three laps, which you typically do in the first round, that’s a minute. That means that eight cars are going to have to be on the track at one time, plus you have to get a new round of cars in once those are done, so that takes an extra 30 seconds. Some guys are going to get screwed and it’s going to be bad. There’s going to be people pulling out in front of each other so that part of it is going to be pretty tough. The mathematics, to me it just doesn’t work. I don’t know whether we’re trying to fit into a TV window or what it might be. I’m sure there was thought put into that five minutes in the first round, but at this track eight cars on the track at one time, it’ll be tough for some guys. It might be good for fights. You might see one of those (Daniel) Suarez, (Michael McDowell) things.”
What do you anticipate the racing to be like at Talladega with the changes and with the spoiler? Is there a possibility of some tandem draft element coming back?
“I’m not sure. You’d probably have to ask the guys that did test it. I talked to (Kyle) Larson. He was there. They tested at Daytona and just through our talks I don’t even think he knows honestly what to expect. He said that they really had to add a lot of spoiler and even some wickers on the car to get down to the speed that they were hoping. I don’t know. It certainly – to me there’s been three types of legitimate types of superspeedway racing and this could create a fourth. There was a way that you drafted with the old car before the Car of Tomorrow. There was the tandem that was a type of superspeedway drafting that took a certain technique and strategy and then the package that we have today where it kind of has that bubble effect. I don’t know which one it’s going to be a mix of and I’m interested to see when I get there.”
You were really good at tandem racing. Is that something you would embrace?
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I wasn’t a huge fan of the tandem just simply because you relied on someone else to drive your car. If you were leading, you were relying on – you were just holding the wheel. It was like those chain races in the local short tracks where one car’s got the brakes, one’s got the engine and the guy in the middle is just along for the ride. That’s pretty much what it is. It definitely is tough. I wouldn’t be a fan of the tandem racing, but who knows how it all turns out. I don’t think it will be tandem, but I’m not sure to be honest.”
