Denny Hamlin was doing everything he could to lead the Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway before the rain came in. While speaking about Sunday’s race on the Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin expected NASCAR to end the race due to the rain that moved in the area.
“We definitely knew that rain was imminent,” Hamlin said. “[Chris Gabehart] told me that it was going to come around lap 245-250 if things stayed green. Once Stage 2 ended and we won Stage 2, he said, ‘Alright, you’re going to be back in traffic let’s just say eighth or 10th. What are you going to need?’ I said ‘I think I need to be freed up a little bit.’ He’s like ‘Just so you know, you got about 50 laps to do this.’
“And then we had another quick caution. It was like I don’t know probably the third Kyle Busch caution maybe or something like that. …But then that number just keeps going down.” Hamlin then said that he was racing to lap 215 because of the cautions that were called by NASCAR. He also said that Gabehart told him that he could smell the rain.
“At the time we were racing really really hard for the race, win, and you could see drops on the windshield,” Hamlin explained. “It’s like ‘Oh no.’ You knew it was coming really quickly, which is why you saw us being all so aggressive those 10 laps or so that we got to race after Stage 2.
Denny Hamlin praises NASCAR for not rushing the drivers at New Hampshire
There was a two-hour rain delay before NASCAR decided to have the drivers race on wet tires. Hamlin could not get things going after the restart as he finished 24th. Before the rain came in, Hamlin was in third, and had NASCAR called the race, it would have been the sixth top-five finish in his last eight races.
Hamlin also talked about how NASCAR made the right move by not having the drivers immediately back on the track after placing the wet tires on the cars. “Well, could you of? Yes. Would it had been risky? Extremely yes, because we knew that heavy rain was coming,” Hamlin said.
“When we pulled on pit road and we stopped in our pit stalls, there were big drops coming down. We’ve already said that we don’t have windshield wipers, OK that’s fine. But we can’t race during heavy rain and so, we’ve seen that isn’t good and visibility, we didn’t have any mud flaps on the cars, so we don’t have anything to help with spray, so I think generally speaking they made the right call to let’s just let this rain pass and then go after it after that.”
On3’s Nick Geddes contributed to this story.
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