Denny Hamlin seemed to have it all Sunday at Martinsville.
Until he didn’t.
Suddenly, after 292 laps of absolute domination, Hamlin was left standing in the pits like a guy who just discovered someone stole his lunch money in high school. He swept both stages for the ninth time in his career, led a race-high 292 laps, and along the way passed none other than Richard Petty on the all-time laps-led chart at Martinsville. Add a personal record for the most laps led through the first seven races of his Hall of Fame-worthy career, and you’d think this was the kind of day legends are made of.
But apparently, even when you do everything right, that’s not enough.
Normally, when a day like this slips away, it’s mechanical—tires, brakes, or some other piece of metal deciding it’s had enough. Or the paperclip-shaped “quaint little” Martinsville Speedway suddenly swallows cars whole, like a tiny asphalt monster with a taste for dreams. Sure, some chaos happened, but none of it touched Hamlin. No, in the end, it was sheer brains on pit road—Chase Elliott’s crew chief Alan Gustfason making the right call—that left Hamlin watching, jaws tight, while the Hendrick driver celebrated nearby.
When asked if there was anything he could have done differently in that final stage, Hamlin didn’t even flinch.
“No. He did a good job controlling the pace there. Just really came from that bad restart—just not much more that I could have done there. I felt like we gave it our all.”
After it was over Hamlin was already trying to figure out if it was indeed, something on the car. Not that it mattered.
“I thought I had a loose wheel,” he said. “We will check it out. Just felt similar to Darlington, so we will check it out here. Just felt like the wheel was loose on that last run, but either way—just there are some races that get away from you in your career, and this is certainly one of them.”
And that’s Martinsville in a nutshell. You can lead 292 laps, sweep the stages, break records, and still end up with nothing more than a story to tell. For Hamlin, Sunday was a reminder that in NASCAR, sometimes it’s not the guy who dominates, it’s the one who times it perfectly—and Sunday, that was someone else’s day.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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