Sitting in the grandstands at Southside Speedway, Denny Hamlin didn’t squirm in his seat or squall for a hot dog like so many youngsters his age. Instead, he studied the short-track racers who were giants in his eyes, even if their fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s didn’t extend beyond the Mid-Atlantic racing circuit.
“I soaked it all in because I aspired to be at that level when I was a kid,” recalled Hamlin, who was 5 when his parents took him to his first race in Midlothian, just west of Richmond. “I thought, ‘If I could just be the local track champion, my life would be made!’”
Now 37, with a Daytona 500 victory on his résumé and legions of stock-car racing fans of his own, Hamlin still draws on the short-track skill and cunning of childhood heroes Wayne Patterson, Roy Hendrick, Eddie Johnson and Bugs Hairfield whenever NASCAR’s 36-race Cup Series turns toward home.
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Just three short tracks (ovals less than one mile around) remain on NASCAR’s schedule since the sport’s explosive growth of the 1990s, when officials abandoned small, county-fair-style raceways in rural North Carolina in favor of gleaming new superspeedways with luxury suites and twice the seats in Fort Worth and Las Vegas.
Two of those remaining short tracks are in Virginia: Martinsville Speedway, the tiniest at 0.533 of a mile around, and Richmond Raceway, which has served as Hamlin’s unofficial NASCAR home track since Joe Gibbs Racing gave him a start in the sport’s top ranks in 2005.
For Hamlin, Saturday night’s Toyota Owners 400, the first of the season’s two races at Richmond, is a homecoming on two levels: It’s 20 miles from his home town of Chesterfield, and it represents a return to the style of racing he knows best.
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“It’s a lot different than the other tracks we run,” Hamlin said when asked what it takes to excel on Richmond’s three-quarter-mile, D-shaped oval. “On the bigger tracks, you’re wide open; you just use the gas. On the mile-and-a-half tracks, you use very little brakes. But on short tracks, it takes a lot of finesse of when to gas, when to brake. Sometimes you have to do both at the same time.”
That’s because there’s not much straightaway between the 1,600 left turns of a 400-lap race on a three-quarter-mile oval. The near-constant accelerating, braking and turning exact tremendous punishment on a race car’s tires, brakes and handling. And there’s where the art of “babying” the machine comes in.
“There are different ways to go at it,” explained Hamlin, who has earned nine of his 31 Cup Series victories on short tracks. “You can be really aggressive and fast at the beginning of a race by abusing the car. Or you can baby it and be gentle with the gas, the steering and the brakes, and it makes you faster the longer you go.”
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Saturday’s event marks a return to night racing at Richmond’s spring event. Track officials hope the change will help stem a steady decline in attendance.
Richmond hardly stands alone on that count. Attendance has dropped at all NASCAR tracks in recent years, and many venues have removed grandstands in response. Richmond has done so aggressively, scaling down to roughly 60,000 seats from its peak capacity of 109,000 in 2008. Nonetheless, many seats were empty for the 2017 spring race, which was run on a Sunday afternoon.
Hamlin applauds the return of night racing. All three of his Richmond victories have come in the fall race, which has traditionally been run at night.
From a driver’s perspective, stock cars handle better at night because the track temperature is cooler, which helps the tires stick to the track. From fans’ perspective, racing is simply more exciting at night, with sparks flying off the rotors, occasional flames flickering and the bright paint-schemes shimmering under the lights.
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Add the element of close-quarters, short-track racing, and it amounts to a fan favorite, said team owner Joe Gibbs, who fields the No. 11 Toyota driven by Hamlin, as well as the No. 18 of points leader Kyle Busch and two other Cup cars.
“We’ve got all kinds of racing in our sport — restrictor-plate racing, road courses, superspeedways and short tracks,” Gibbs said in a telephone interview. “But if you ask our fans, they want and love short-track racing. They’re going to say Richmond, Bristol [Tenn.] and Martinsville because there’s a lot of action going on.”
Hamlin tuned up for Saturday’s action Thursday night at Langley Speedway in Hampton, where he battled teammate Busch and regional racers to win his annual 200-lap charity race, the Denny Hamlin Short Track Showdown, for the second time. Hamlin was just 16 when he made his competitive debut on Langley’s 0.395-mile oval.
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“It’s a way for me to give back to local short tracks,” Hamlin said. “We’ve continued to increase the purse each year, so it’s a big deal for the late-model drivers that are currently racing now not only to race against me and Kyle, but it’s a good payday, too.”
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