Denny Hamlin Demands “Accountability” From NASCAR and Fox Sports Over Watkins Glen Mistakes

The 2026 Cup Series race at Watkins Glen saw Shane van Gisbergen surviving some wild moments to overcome a 29 seconds gap with 18 laps left to win his maiden top division race of the season.  Some mistake from NASCAR in the final laps played a key role in the result and that left Joe Gibbs Racing veteran Denny Hamlin fuming.

On the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast the No:11 Toyota driver highlighted how both the sanctioning body and Fox Sports made a mistake by not spotting the massive Cody Ware wreck with ten laps left in the race too late. This resulted in them not calling a caution, despite the damages to the car as well as the track barrier.

I mean they didn’t follow a few wrecks that happened, that’s for sure. 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.’

Denny Hamlin said on his podcast.

There is no excuse to justify the mistake according to Denny Hamlin and he demanded the broadcaster as well as the race director to take accountability. NASCAR and Fox have multiple employees in the production studio watching the race and if they had spotted the incident when it happened race should’ve played out as it should.

Take some accountability on this one. This was not acceptable… It’s on both of them. It’s on both of them. 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.

Denny Hamlin added via Actions Detrimental.

Denny Hamlin calls out NASCAR over lack of stewards on track

One of the key reasons behind the mistake is the changes the sport made to how many stewards they are employing during race days. Unlike in the past, the numbers were reduced drastically as they were replaced with multiple camara’s.

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.

Denny Hamlin said.

Further talking about the point, he highlighted how there should’ve been multiple people monitoring the races and should have spotted the dramatic wreck, which could’ve caused a hazard. The veteran is clearly disappointed with the decision-making process of the team.

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.

Denny Hamlin added.

The comments from the JGR driver are on point and shows how the whole garage is frustrated with the lack of consistency in decision from NASCAR during races. It would be interesting to see how everything is going to playout for the sport in the coming years.

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