“I Gotta Hand It to Them” – Denny Hamlin Applauds NASCAR Hours After Making a Public Plea of “Do Not Do This”

If you had to bet your money on a NASCAR driver who consistently remains critical of any missteps or mistakes by the governing body, chances are you won’t look beyond Denny Hamlin. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver has always been quite vocal and outspoken with his criticisms, his questions, and his suggestions. One such suggestion Hamlin recently made ahead of the Chicago Street race, which by all accounts, turned out to be a massive success, apart from a few questionable decisions.

But had NASCAR taken Hamlin’s advice, who knows what the reception of the race would’ve been?

Denny Hamlin urged NASCAR to not race on Sunday

The suggestion from Hamlin was to not race on Sunday considering the torrential rain in the city, which ended up hurting the Xfinity race proceedings while looking set to derail the Cup race schedule too. So before the green flag dropped, the 23XI Racing co-owner took to Twitter and urged NASCAR to postpone the race.

“We cannot control god. What we can control is our decisions and reactions to unforeseen circumstances. Please @NASCAR. Do not do this. We have too much positive momentum around this weekend to change the narrative now,” Hamlin tweeted.

Of course, NASCAR ‘waited out the storm’, and the race took place on Sunday itself, going into the evening, turning out to be quite a success. Hamlin too was aware of this, that he was wrong, and he was happy that he was wrong.

We cannot control god. What we can control is our decisions and reactions to unforeseen circumstances. Please @NASCAR . Do not do this. We have too much positive momentum around this weekend to change the narrative now.

— Denny Hamlin (@dennyhamlin) July 2, 2023

Hamlin applauds NASCAR and admits he’s happy to be wrong

Speaking in a post-race interview, Hamlin claimed he has to hand it to NASCAR for pulling off what they did. “They just waited it out, waited it out, couldn’t wait any longer for obvious reasons, raced then in reasonable conditions,” he said. He mentioned how there was one part of the track which was questionable, where he ran into Alex Bowman.

“But other than that, it was a reasonable track,” Hamlin claimed. “I just thought they made the right call by waiting … hats off to NASCAR and Chicago for being patient with it. You just couldn’t ask for much more given the circumstances they were thrown in.”

When asked if he was happy to be wrong, the #11 driver conceded, “I’m definitely happy I was wrong. I was wrong about, if we chose to race in those conditions when it was pouring, that was not going to be good.”

He applauded NASCAR for waiting out the unsafe conditions for racing and added that they indeed raced at the right time.