Denny Hamlin addressed the meeting during the Monday episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast.
“They’re going to really focus on tires and tracks,” Hamlin said. “… Goodyear was there. Obviously, they hear us loud and clear on what we’re trying to achieve. The biggest difference with Next Gen versus Gen 6 is that the loads are significantly lower than what they were. Really on the left sides is the big place where we really need to get the tire wear working a bit more on Next Gen is the left side wear. So, they’re going to try to get really aggressive at some tracks. They got some tire tests coming up and they showed us the schedule for that.
“They [NASCAR] definitely said publicly last week, and they said it to us that horsepower is just not an option for various reasons. If we’re going to keep the horsepower, we should definitely in my opinion work on getting rid of the shifting. In order to do that, they’re going to need to make the upper RPM slightly higher or else we’re going to be running just way too low RPM in the middle of the corner. I certainly think that shifting is not helping at all on the short tracks, but beyond that, it looks like we’re going to focus on tires to fix the short tracks.”
That also means NASCAR is done tinkering with various aerodynamic solutions, from reducing downforce through the spoiler and rear diffuser, and going all in with Goodyear on finding a fix through the tire compound.
