When NASCAR announced the Garage 56 program in partnership with Hendrick Motorsports, there were some questions and a few raised eyebrows. But of all the critics and criticism, perhaps the one from Denny Hamlin echoed the loudest.

The Joe Gibbs Racing driver, who is also co-owner of the 23XI Racing team, questioned the whole thing from different fronts.

One of those was the way it was announced without any prior knowledge to the other Cup teams or owners. But his key concern lay in the fact that through this process of developing a racecar fit to compete for the win at Le Mans, Hendrick Motorsports could gain an advantage over their NASCAR rivals in the coming season.

So after what Chad Knaus, the Vice President of competition of HMS, recently said of their Garage 56 entry, it seems Hamlin’s fears could soon turn into a reality.

Chad Knaus claims the Garage 56 car is “nuts”

In a recent conversation with Dale Earnhardt Jr, Knaus opened up on his impression of the Garage 56 racecar on the racetrack. In doing so, the former crew chief also joked if he’d unintentionally revealed something which he shouldn’t have.

“Let me tell you something, I was at the back straightaway here watching this car go through the back straightaway chicane; the Le Mans chicane back there, and it’s nuts how fast it goes through there,” Knaus said. “It’s nuts.

“It was going through there almost as fast as a Corvette GT3 car.”

Just as he finished this, Knaus joked if he had said something he wasn’t supposed to say, “I don’t think I can say that, can I say that? I just leaked it.” 

But then he carried on with his impression of the racecar HMS developed with NASCAR on the Next Gen platform of the Chevy Corvette. “It was so big and goes through there so well,” he emphasized.

“I’ve never seen a Cup car transition through that sequence of turns as well as what this did.”

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What did Denny Hamlin say about the Garage 56 program?

When the announcement of the special program was made, Denny Hamlin first hit out on how the communication was done, or rather, how it wasn’t done inside the garage.

“Finding out through a press conference is not OK. We have too many people in place, NASCAR has too many executives for that to have slipped through the cracks,” Hamlin said as per SpeedSport. “Not that it slipped through the cracks, but like, where’s the transparency of it?”

Having said that, the veteran then calibrated his criticism on the potential performance advantage aspect of the program.

“I do not see any way possible that they will not have an advantage and [HMS] is a team that already has won more races than anyone this season with the Next Gen,” he described.

Hamlin claimed that from the perspective of a team owner, he is “concerned” over the advantage aspect. In fact, he claimed his stance on this subject is pretty rigid.

“You cannot convince me right now that it won’t be,” Hamlin added.

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