Denny Hamlin Thinks NASCAR Needs The Playoffs, Just A Different Kind
Denny Hamlin is one of the members of a committee that’s been giving NASCAR feedback on potential changes to the current playoffs system, which held its final meeting of the year last week.
Despite the growing enthusiasm among NASCAR fans for a return to a full season points system without a playoffs, he doesn’t think that will happen and said his personal preference is to continue with a postseason of some sort.
“I think you need a little bit of both to make everyone happy,” he said.
Word is the frontrunner for an updated playoffs is to continue with 10 races, but have two three-race rounds with eliminations and then decide the champion over the final four races based on points during the round.
“Obviously the bigger the sample size, the truer the champion’s going to feel, but there certainly needs to be an element there, you know, that keeps it exciting all the way to the year-end,” Hamlin said, conceding that a full-season system could still achieve that.
“Certainly, if you run it 36 races there’s an opportunity for it to be exciting naturally in that way without resets and cut offs and things like that,” he said.
As for how many races there are in the final round, he thinks four would be an acceptable number.
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“My number one preference is just the more races to decide a champion, the better, I think the better it’s going to be. Certainly anything more than one is a gain, more than three or four is a bonus,” he said.
NASCAR executives will be taking the latest feedback into consideration, but have the final word on what will happen and aren’t expected to announce anything until after this year’s championship race at Phoenix in November.