Denny Hamlin weighs NASCAR’s options for overtime debate

Sunday’s Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway featured a record five green-white-checkered attempts and 31 laps completed past the scheduled 300.

Several cars including Denny Hamlin, who led for the first few overtime attempts, were running on fumes and some aggressive racing caused caution after caution. The ending to the race has sparked a debate: Should NASCAR limit the amount of overtime restarts allowed?

Hamlin weighed in on Monday’s “ Actions Detrimental ” podcast and argued for NASCAR to go back to allowing just three attempts.

“I don’t know. It’s either you have unlimited green-white-checkereds or you don’t,” Hamlin said. “I know for a while, we had three attempts. I could have lived with three attempts. … There was a big pileup on the backstretch, there was multiple cars down there that needed towing and all that. Like yeah, we probably burned a lap and a half to two laps because they gotta clean that up. The rest of the time, you gotta allow for cars to pit.

“So, you gotta have your quickie cautions, you gotta have your choose, all those things. You’re gonna have a minimum of two laps and that’s just the bare minimum, you went and opened up pit road the first time by and they don’t do that because usually the pace car doesn’t got it. So, that’s three laps at minimum each caution is gonna be. Add it all up, next thing you know you have 6-7 lap cautions, and you have cars running out.”

Should NASCAR change overtime rules?

NASCAR introduced overtime in 2004 and since then, has tinkered with the rules. From 2010-15, NASCAR allowed up to three green-white-checkered attempts. Under the current format, overtime is two laps with an unlimited number of attempts to get to the final lap under green flag conditions. When the white flag is waved, the next flag ends the race. The unlimited attempts part of the rule came in 2017.

Race-winner Joey Logano offered his take on NASCAR Overtime, a rule he sees no problem with.

“You know, any time you have your car is running out of gas, there’s a caution, you get going, they wreck because everyone is out of gas,” Logano said. “You’re re-firing on old tires, everyone is sliding around. You can kind of see it coming a little bit. But, gosh, I don’t know, I think you just keep doing it. That’s the rule, you keep doing it.”

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