TALLADEGA, Ala. >> The day opened at Talladega Superspeedway with NASCAR executives holding an all-driver meeting.

It was regularly scheduled and mostly mirrored a lengthier meeting held earlier this week between NASCAR and the smaller drivers’ alliance. The topics included safety, rules and procedures and anything the drivers wished to discuss.

Based on the last few weeks, the list of driver gripes might have been plentiful.

“Certainly I think that there’s a lot of negative talk in a short amount of time,” said Denny Hamlin, pole-sitter for Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway.

NASCAR has withered a blistering six weeks of sinking television ratings, controversial penalties — some strangely adjusted during the appeals process, others not — and some sub-par racing that has drivers screaming for changes to the second-year Next Gen car. Those calls were increased after last Sunday’s race at Martinsville Speedway, where drivers got out of their cars grumbling that passing was nearly impossible.

“We have a way of making things sound a lot worse than they really are,” said reigning Cup champion Joey Logano. “We give you our feelings in the moment, but I think when you take a step back and look at where we are as a sport, as a whole, and the racing that we have, it isn’t that bad.”

Next up is Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway, which snaps a month of one road course race and three short track races — four venues scheduled to entice viewership with racing that differs from NASCAR’s typical intermediate-sized speedways. But the road course race at Circuit of the Americas in Texas was a chaotic crash-fest, short track stops at Richmond and Bristol had mixed reactions, and finally Martinsville, which didn’t produce the action the audience expects.

Now drivers are asking for more horsepower, tires that wear off faster and to eliminate shifting. According to Kevin Harvick, who makes his 800th career start, they also ask for the outlandish.