Chase Briscoe, Riley Herbst, Bubba Wallace, and the entire Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing alliance faced the same problem. Iowa is the fastest short track on the circuit, and it does not give brakes time to cool. The rotors spin too fast, the straightaways are too short, and when that pad clamps down, the heat builds in seconds. They used the same pad compound at 20 races before this without any issues. However, Iowa just found the limit. Denny Hamlin went straight to the NASCAR hauler. He wanted to change the pads but NASCAR said no. What happened next is where it gets interesting.
“I said, ‘What if I just tell the team, nope, I will not go on the racetrack with those brake pads?’” Hamlin wondered on the Actions Detrimental podcast. “‘Absolutely not. I’m too old to be hitting this wall head-on. Absolutely not.’”
NASCAR strictly bans teams from changing parts after qualifying. Officials enforce this rule because they do not want teams using a special, lightweight “qualifying” pad for speed, and then swapping to a “race” pad later. Even though Hamlin argued this was a safety emergency, NASCAR fired back with a massive threat.
“They said, ‘Well, we would make up a penalty, and it would be worse than what it would be if you just came in and changed them under green.’”
Hamlin’s response was about as defiant as it gets without actually walking out.
“I was like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I just gotta go slower then. If I lose brakes, I’m just gonna putter around the racetrack and end up however many laps down that I end up.’”
So why did his brakes fail? It came down to a bad setup and a bad batch of parts. Because Hamlin usually struggles at Iowa Speedway, he borrowed an aggressive car setup from 23XI Racing.
“We tried to run something a little bit different, not unknown,” said Hamlin. “You know, other teams have run it quite a bit before. I wanted to lean a little bit on 23XI. They had been pretty strong at this track over the last year or so. I hadn’t found what that good feel is around here. So I needed to put someone’s setup that has run well and then let me learn from there.”
His team also believed they received a “bad batch” of brake pads from the manufacturer.
Out of options on the pads, crew chief Chris Gayle tried something overnight. He swapped the brake cooling ducts to push more fresh air onto the rotors. It was not an approved change. NASCAR caught it Sunday morning and dropped Denny Hamlin almost all the way to the back of the 36-car grid.
The fix did not even solve anything. By Lap 3, the brakes were gone again. Denny Hamlin broke down exactly why Iowa was such a problem when the same pads had been fine everywhere else.
“With it being the fastest short track on the planet, it doesn’t have long straightaways to cool, but it has fast speeds that are trying to clamp down on that rotor. So it creates heat really, really quickly.”
In places like Nashville or North Wilkesboro, the lower speeds mean the rotors are not spinning as fast when the pad hits them: less energy, less heat, no problem. Iowa sits in this specific spot where the speed is high enough to build heat instantly, but the track is short enough that nothing ever cools down.
So, Denny Hamlin started last, with brakes that were basically decorative. Yet, somehow, he drove all the way to an incredible 5th-place finish. His Toyota teammates managed to survive their brake issues as well. Chase Briscoe battled to a strong 6th-place finish, Bubba Wallace grabbed 12th, and Riley Herbst fought his way to 21st.
It was one of the more remarkable drives of his career, and he knew it. He also said, only half joking, that he would retire on the spot if he ever had to go through that again.
