“Another thing if I’m the CEO of NASCAR, when you look at the length of the races, the math doesn’t math to me. … While you’re running the same laps, the mileage is the same, the Whatever 400, but if you’re running a slower pace, it takes you longer to get to that 400 miles.”
For that reason, Denny Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast that he would have preferred the Cracker Barrel 400 to have been the Cracker Barrel 300 on Sunday night at Nashville Superspeedway.
The race lasted three hours and thirty minutes on Sunday, and ended at 11:25 p.m. CT following a delay of nearly an hour and a half due to passing storms that evening in Lebanon, Tennessee. The average race there at lasted over three hours and the shortest was basically a three hour race.
Because most intermediate track races are 400 miles, Nashville is too, but it’s actually a flatter 1.3-mile track, meaning laps are slower than a traditional 1.5-mile.
“So on a normal mile and a half that we run a 400-mile race, like at Michigan this weekend, that race will be two-thirds of the time this one takes because we’re running so much faster,” Hamlin said. “It’s about lap time and speed versus mileage.
“So at a track like this, it should be 300 miles, because you’re running a slower pace. In the time that you can run 300 miles at Nashville, you can run 400 miles at Michigan. So … the math just doesn’t math to me. This is why this race, the math doesn’t math to me.”
Even without the rain delay, Hamlin says this race would have ended at close to midnight eastern time, which he doesn’t believe is the right direction.
Of course, Hamlin also said the race couldn’t afford to begin much earlier either, because it was so unbearably hot in the middle of the afternoon and evening, which is why this race was moved to a nighttime start in the first place.
It’s also true that sporting events start in prime time for television reasons as well.
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