Hamlin waits for his shift to end in Phoenix

“I wish NASCAR would really come up with a ban on that,” Hamlin said on Friday at PIR. “There is no reason why we should be shifting on a one-mile race track. This is a short track, not a road course. Make the gearing so we cannot shift because it’s just dumb for us to have the option to be able to shift.

“Everything that they’re trying to do with the whole gear rule and less horsepower, it throws that all out the window when you’re able to go out here and shift. It will be an option and people will try to do it. I’m sure late in the runs it will be effective, but it’s just with the gear taken out and the horsepower, we’re just lugging off these corners and you’re just flat-footing it.

“As a driver, it’s tough to be able to race that way so we’re having to shift to try to get up off the corner. Hopefully looking forward we can change it to where you don’t have to do that.”

With Phoenix hosting the final race of the Eliminator Round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup at Phoenix, this weekend means a little more.

“This is a very important race when it comes down to the championship,” Hamlin said. “You want to make sure that you come here and be prepared to try some different things and obviously with the testing policy, this is going to kind of work out as a test weekend for us to try to make sure we’re good when we come back here in November.”

Hamlin survived the elimination-style playoff format last year as the field was whittled down from 16 drivers to four. He reached the Championship 4 at Homestead, before ultimately finishing third in the final standings.

If it wasn’t for an untimely accident at Atlanta Motor Speedway that led to a 38th-place finish, Hamlin just might have opened up the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season with three straight top-10 finishes.

The 34-year-old led off with a fourth-place finish at Daytona and scored a fifth-place finish at Las Vegas last weekend.

“We’ve been a top-five car every week and it’s a shame that we made a mistake at Atlanta and spun out, but we were top-five for sure going to finish there, I thought,” Hamlin said. “We’re top-five, but we’re still just a little behind on speed from where we need to from the 4 and then the Hendrick cars, but it’s all about for us trying to find that little bit of extra speed. We’re way closer than what we were with our 11 team at this time last year.”

For Hamlin, the new rules package has its pros and cons.

“It’s really tough to say, I wouldn’t think this rules package would suit me and my style particularly. I’d rather have 1,000 horsepower than 700. The less downforce I would say probably does suit me a little bit better, but I think we’ve just kind of optimized where we’re at.”

The four-car Joe Gibbs Racing team is without Kyle Busch, who is sidelined indefinitely following a compound fracture to his right lower leg and a mid-foot fracture of his left foot from an accident in the NASCAR XFINITY Series opener at Daytona.

Hamlin filled in for Busch in his No. 54 XFINITY Series Toyota last weekend and will make additional XFINITY starts in Busch’s absence. But he is eager to have the team’s original Sprint Cup lineup together.

“It’s a shame because we just had our driver lineup right where we wanted it with the four of us and we felt like this was going to be a good thing,” Hamlin said. “… Obviously David (Ragan) has done a great job, but we’re excited to get Kyle back just as soon as we can just for the reason that this is the four-driver dynamic that Joe (Gibbs, team owner) put together and we hope to bring our race teams, all of them, up to a higher level. Right now we’re just missing just a little something.”

Hamlin said Busch is not only missed from a chemistry standpoint, but as a valuable resource for information sharing.

“You definitely miss that feedback and really you miss it more during the week than the weekend,” Hamlin said. “… We miss him more during the week listening to how his race went, how we can improve upon that. He’s an important part of it. Until the fourth car came this year, he was 33 percent of the information that went through that race team and it’s just a little different there without him for sure.”

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