Make a decision Denny Hamlin What happened to him on Sunday that cost him a chance to win the Pocono Cup Series race? NASCAR experts Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The athletic He talked about the race in The disassembly podcast and was asked if a stage win for Hamlin prevented him from winning Actor Ryan Blaney became an actor in 1963.
“I’m sure Hamlin’s team thought if we got the tiebreaker point, we’d fuel up and have a great chance in the race,” Gluck said of Hamlin’s Stage 2 win of the Cup Series race at Pocono. “They weren’t saying we were going to sacrifice our strategy, but Blaney at the same time said we were going to give up the stage points here since he’s now seventh in the standings.
“… He says, ‘I don’t care that much about moving up. I’m not racing for points, I’d like to get this win. ’ I understand why both teams did it. You need playoff points, Blaney, and you also feel like you’re not going to win the stage. Do you really need a couple of state points? You might as well try to go for the win.”
Bianchi also understood Hamlin’s strategy. “I didn’t have any problem with it,” Bianich said. “I felt like if I heard it correctly and understood it correctly, I felt like they had more fuel than everybody else, just a little bit. And they thought that if this race plays out the way it has, we’re not going to have a bunch of cautions, we’re going to end up being in a better position because we’re going to have to save as much as possible, and maybe some other guys ahead of us will have to.
Denny Hamlin had a big comeback on Sunday
“…And then we got a series of cautions at the end, and that removed any doubt about whether anyone would make it to the finish on fuel consumption. It seemed like the cautions played against them a bit. I didn’t have any problems with their strategy. I think they laid it out perfectly.”
Despite failing to win, Hamlin was happy to be back in the top five after finishing outside the top 10 in the previous five races. “We were in a bit of a slump,” Hamlin said after the race. “For about a month and a half we were terrible in our results, not our performance. It feels good to have at least one solid day coming out of here. I just care about winning, but still, this kind of bounce back is something that at least makes you feel a little bit better.”
(tags to translate)Denny Hamlin
