Denny Hamlin fires back at NASCAR after Cody Ware wreck: 'This was not acceptable'

With fewer than 10 laps remaining in the NASCAR Cup Series race at Watkins Glen, Cody Ware wrecked hard. He wrecked so hard that fan photos from the track showed significant damage to one of the walls above a tunnel.

Yet NASCAR didn’t throw the caution flag. It left many stunned, though the broadcast didn’t show many replays or angles of the wreck initially.

Some drivers were fuming. Including Denny Hamlin, who weighed in Monday on the Actions Detrimental podcast.

“I mean they didn’t follow a few wrecks that happened, that’s for sure,” Hamlin said. “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.'”

Hamlin demanded accountability following the Cody Ware incident at Watkins Glen. He said NASCAR needs to take full ownership of absolutely blowing a potential safety issue.

“Take some accountability on this one,” Hamlin said. “This was not acceptable.”

That fans didn’t see as much of the Cody Ware incident — which might have been the hardest impact of the day — was also an indictment on the FOX broadcast crew. Had the broadcast shown the wreck, would NASCAR have been more likely to throw the caution flag? Hamlin was asked just that question. He wasn’t sure.

“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.”

The bottom line is that incidents like the Cody Ware one do represent an actual safety issue for drivers. Hamlin was in disbelief.

“Because he was sitting… did you see the cars that were going by him?” Hamlin asked aloud.

Then the veteran driver of the No. 11 car explained why it was so jarring that NASCAR didn’t throw the caution flag on the Cody Ware incident. Simply put, there are too many eyes on the track for something like that to be missed.

“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 (people), 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.”