Denny Hamlin is discovering one of the great truths of NASCAR’s new/old Chase format: You can spend months being very good, win the regular-season championship, enter the playoffs as the top seed and still find yourself wondering where the hell all your points went.
Hamlin arrived at the Chase with four wins, the regular-season title and a 25-point advantage over Tyler Reddick. It was the sort of cushion that suggested the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota had done its homework.
Then NASCAR remembered that none of that really matters once the Chase starts.
Darlington was first. Hamlin has won there five times, so it seemed like a fairly sensible place to begin his championship assault. Instead, things went sideways. An 18th-place finish cut his advantage to 12 points.
Still, he had the points lead.
Then came Gateway.
The good news was that Hamlin avoided the sort of carnage that turned several other Chase contenders into expensive pieces of modern art. The bad news was that he wasn’t particularly fast. A ninth-place finish was hardly disastrous, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of result that makes the rest of the garage nervous.
Hamlin wasn’t shy about explaining why.
“Not a great day for sure,” he said. “I wasn’t good on restarts. I couldn’t get the car to do what I needed to on restarts, and then obviously we had that bad stop which put us further back with a car that wasn’t very good on restarts and a driver that wasn’t good on restarts.”
There is something wonderfully brutal about that level of self-assessment. No excuses. No blaming the phase of the moon. Just a driver admitting that the car was lousy on restarts, the pit crew made things worse and he wasn’t exactly putting on a clinic himself when the green flag came back out.
“Just a bad combination,” Hamlin continued. “Needed others to have issues to get a good finish out of it.”
And, to some degree, that is exactly what happened throughout the Chase field.
Hamlin leaves St. Louis still sitting atop the standings, but his once-comfortable lead has been reduced to just nine points. With eight races remaining, the margin is now less a safety net and more a particularly thin piece of string.
The obvious question, then, is whether the pressure is beginning to get to him.
“No,” Hamlin said.
That answer might sound like the sort of thing a driver says while internally screaming into a helmet, but Hamlin actually has a reasonable argument.
“We are so fortunate. We were not strong last week, and this week we were not strong, and still, we maintained the lead,” he said. “With all of the tracks coming up, we have a good notebook on.”
There is also a potentially important wrinkle. Gateway was the first Chase race featuring a new package, and Hamlin’s team hadn’t exactly been setting the world on fire with it there all season.
“This was the first one where we were coming back with a new package,” Hamlin said. “We haven’t been good all year with this package at this track for the first time.”
So Hamlin’s championship defense hasn’t exactly begun with fireworks. It has been more like watching someone carry a full pint of beer across a freshly polished floor: awkward, tense and increasingly dependent on everybody else not bumping into him.
But he’s still standing.
“I feel like we’ve been given a second chance,” Hamlin said. “We just have to go and be better now.”
That’s the bit that should concern everyone else.
Because if Hamlin and the No. 11 team actually become better over the next eight races, that six-point lead could suddenly look a lot less pathetic.
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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