Denny Hamlin wants everyone to get ready for midweek NASCAR races

The top secret drivers council Hamlin is part of apparently isn’t so secret that he couldn’t talk about what they were discussing.

The idea of midweek NASCAR races appears to be picking up steam. So says Denny Hamlin, who apparently is in a position to know.

Hamlin told NBC Sports that he is part of a “secret council” that includes “industry leaders, the track presidents, the team presidents, NASCAR,” and allows drivers to talk to them all in one place about the schedule. The discussions that have taken place have even broached the idea of midweek races, though only for certain parts of the NASCAR schedule.

It also sounds like Hamlin would be in favor of trying them out.

"How can we do that? Let’s start it now, so I think there are some big things on the horizon. … I see it within the next couple of years: You’re gonna see something Wednesday, Thursday."

The thinking that Hamlin put forward is that midweek races could make sense during the summer, when there is less competition from other major sports.

"I think this time of the year, no basketball, no hockey, no football, we’ve got to be crushing it. We need to be at the forefront and we need to be on TV as much as we can. I think this is a great time for us."

The counterargument would be that even on weekends, NASCAR has little competition from other sports from about the second week of June, by which point the NBA and NHL playoffs are over, until football starts up again in mid-August. This year was a rare exception, since the World Cup is being contested.

Still, there’s definitely some teeth to the idea that NASCAR hasn’t been aggressive enough in changing things up when it comes to the schedule. Dates shift around some, and occasionally a track gains or loses a date, but that’s about it. Trying a midweek race would be a much bigger swing, the kind the sport needs to take every once in a while in the face of steadily declining viewership.

Would tracks buy into the experiment? That might be the real wild card, since they would have to be convinced that fans would travel on something other than the weekends during the summer. Though that could be a lot to ask, since most people take their vacations between and August, it might not be a dealbreaker for most.

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It’s not accurate to say NASCAR has nothing to lose by trying it, but the potential gains seem to outweigh the risks. If midweek races get a shot and they bomb, everyone can simply go back to weekends the next season, and you won’t need to convene Hamlin and a secret council to do that.