“We’re not employees of NASCAR”: Denny Hamlin on unionization of drivers amid Ricky Stenhouse fine and Kyle Larson waiver saga

Denny Hamlin was recently asked by a fan about his thoughts on having a driver's union in NASCAR. The fan mentioned that NASCAR is the only major sport without a union as he asked Hamlin why it hasn't been developed yet, especially considering "the arbitrary nature of Stenhouse's fine, Larson's waiver issues."

The fan asked Hamlin the question through the medium of his podcast, "Actions Detrimental".

Hamlin responded by saying he didn't know the answer as he shared his thoughts on the subject.

"Evidently you have to, if you think you deserve to be a union, I think you have to, see we're not employees of NASCAR. We're just teams. There's a lot of red tape there ... you would have to go to the labor force or union or something like that and say, 'Hey we feel like we're being treated unfairly collectively. Will you look at this and certify us?'" Hamlin said [at 1:21:05].

The Joe Gibbs Racing driver claimed that nobody in NASCAR is raising the subject of having a union, even though there's an underlying desire to have "a bigger seat on the table" regarding key issues. Hamlin continued that on issues like the next media deal or any future revenue matters, teams need to "lock arms better than what we're doing."

With that said, Denny Hamlin pointed to how things generally take place in NASCAR between the teams and the decision-makers.

Denny Hamlin unsure if NASCAR needs a union, but points to what the teams need to do

Speaking during the same episode of "Actions Detrimental", Denny Hamlin mentioned that while he hears NASCAR promoting the idea of being more collaborative "all the time", it never comes into action.

"It's always what is best for their end of the deal and then we get what they tell us we're going to get. And that doesn't seem necessarily fair, but its been the way it's been for a long time and you've had a lot of owners that have been in the sport for a long time that has accepted that as being such," Hamlin added [at 1:23:11].

He claimed that forming a union takes time and that creating change takes time. Hamlin wondered if NASCAR teams need that big of a change to begin with.

But what they do need, as Denny Hamlin described, is something for them to "legitimately lock arms" and work on things together so that by the end of the ongoing charter agreement talks, they're in a better place to do that.

Denny Hamlin also opined that all the stakeholders in the garage want the sport to grow. And until they all can work together to do that, they won't be able to achieve that.

Having said that, he added that to do that, they'd have to convince certain people to bring a change to their methods of doing things that have been done in a particular way for the last 75 years, something for which Hamlin sarcastically wished good luck.