Using the perfect meme to sum up his feelings, Denny Hamlin posted a GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio from The Wolf of Wall Street clapping on X after NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell introduced changes to reduce the frustratingly long periods of racing under yellow flags.
Fans and drivers had begged and criticized NASCAR for months, asking it to fix its caution periods. But after the Brickyard 400’s fiasco two weeks ago, NASCAR finally decided to act. It introduced a new stage-break procedure to reduce long periods of caution laps and eliminate back-to-back yellow flags. At Iowa Speedway on August 9, veteran journalist Jordan Bianchi couldn’t help but ask Hamlin why he thinks it took NASCAR so long to do this.
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Hamlin defended NASCAR, saying per Frontstretch, “It’s hard to think of everything. I mean, every rule change that you implement, it’s like you never know what the cause and effect is.”
O’Donnell himself, while announcing the changes on August 6, admitted that NASCAR doesn’t yet have a clear idea of what impact they will have. For now, they have simply responded to a change fans wanted, with Iowa serving as a good test.
Hamlin further insisted that while the problem had always existed, it wasn’t something NASCAR took very seriously until now. But once it was identified, a solution was found. He compared it to how, in sports like basketball, there are shot clocks installed to give teams a time limit to attempt a shot and keep the game moving. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver feels that’s what NASCAR is also looking to do.
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“It’s certainly going to be better for green-flag racing, and it’s only going to come into play a handful of times, but it certainly will be better when it does,” Hamlin added in the same interview posted on Frontstretch’s YouTube channel.
The Brickyard 400, in many ways, felt like the breaking point for the NASCAR community. At the end of Stage 1 in Indianapolis, Kyle Larson crashed, and the field was under yellow for 14 minutes before getting just a single lap of green-flag racing before the stage ended and they went right back under caution for the scheduled stage break, which lasted another 14 minutes.
Then, with three laps left in Stage 2, Daniel Dye hit the wall. But instead of the stage ending then and there, they raced under yellow for those three laps and then had to continue pacing through the entire scheduled stage break, wasting another 21 minutes.
That was almost 50 minutes of yellow-flag action in a crown-jewel event. O’Donnell had to respond and made sure something like this would not happen again.
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Now, if there’s a crash with 10 or fewer laps left in the Stage, NASCAR will call it over. The caution period will serve as the official stage break, with the race leader set to receive the green-white chequered flag along with the yellow when they return to the start line.
For Hamlin to defend NASCAR means a lot, because he’s been very vocal against their caution periods. After Martinsville this year, he went on his Actions Detrimental podcast to declare that NASCAR had to find a way to shorten them up. He recalled how a single car wreck in the O’Reilly Auto Parts series with minimal debris on the track still brought up a large period of racing under the yellow flag.
It’s a win for Hamlin and the NASCAR community as a whole. How these changes take shape will become clearer with time. As Hamlin admitted in Iowa, there could be new problems that arise. But for now, there’s optimism.
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