Before recording his Actions Detrimental podcast each week, Denny Hamlin goes back and reviews the race broadcast for the stories of the week, and that means sharing a frustration with race fans from this past weekend at Watkins Glen International.
All the missed crashes and incidents.
That includes Cody Ware crashing with nine laps to go, severely damaging both his car, and the fencing in Turns 6 and 7, which most in the industry believed warranted a caution.
“I mean they didn’t follow a few wrecks that happened, that’s for sure,” Hamlin said on Actions Detrimental. “But NASCAR has to get better with that. Like I’ve seen their control center at their production studio. There’s absolutely no excuse… you have cameras pointing in every direction of this racetrack.
“For you not to see Cody Ware destroyed in that final corner… holy cow, man. They need to say something about that. Not just, ‘We’ll look at it. We’re always looking to improve.’”
Because NASCAR has cut numerous officials and replaced them with a series of cameras across most races, there are some blind spots that seem to cause crashes not getting picked up by either the television partner or race control.
It’s becoming a theme.
“Take some accountability on this one,” Hamlin said. “This was not acceptable.”
That means NASCAR and FOX in this case.
“It’s on both of them. It’s on both of them,” he said. “There’s a director somewhere in there in FOX’s production studio that’s looking at all the cameras. Surely there’s got to be someone.”
Again, Hamlin pointed to the lack of track stewards compared to previous years, and a correlation in incidents that just don’t get picked up.
“NASCAR has these monitors and they have cameras pointing pretty much at every, it should be every corner,” Hamlin said. “I know I’ve seen it on ovals, they’ve got every corner and every angle kind of (set). Because they just don’t have the track workers that they used to have, because they’ve cut. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And so there’s these 16 monitors, it could be 24, 36. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of monitors looking at the racetrack from all these different things to see things that necessarily are not being shown on TV.
“Somewhere there has to be multiple (officials), it can’t be one person. I’m sorry, you can’t look at 24 monitors at one time. There has to be multiple people looking for dramatic events that’s going on that could be a hazard. Call it in. And then it’s got to get called to the next guy and then to the next guy. But you can’t just like, ‘Oh, we didn’t see that.’ No.”
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