Denny Hamlin went to Phoenix Raceway with a championship to chase and a car capable of winning. He left with a 28th-place finish, a 31-point deficit and the sort of Sunday afternoon that makes a driver wonder whether he should have stayed in bed.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was running inside the top five in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Chase race and believed his No. 11 Toyota had the speed to contend for the win. Then a right-rear tire decided it had endured quite enough, and Hamlin’s afternoon went spectacularly pear-shaped.
The tire failure came in the final stage, forcing Hamlin to limp toward pit road while trying to keep his wounded Toyota pointed in roughly the right direction. He knew something was wrong, even if he couldn’t do much about it.
“No, just a corner before I felt the car bottom out,” Hamlin said. “I knew at that point definitely had a tire. At that point trying to hang on and somehow try to get to pit road.”
Unfortunately, getting to pit road was only the beginning of his problems.
Hamlin lost a lap after the incident, but a caution for Cody Ware on Lap 223 offered a possible escape route. As the first car a lap down, Hamlin was in position to receive the free pass and get back on the lead lap.
There was just one small problem. While limping his Toyota onto pit road, Hamlin was caught speeding on entry. That made him ineligible for the free pass and prevented him from taking the wave-around, leaving him to restart at the tail of the field, one lap down in 31st.
In the space of a few laps, a potential contender for victory had become a man trying to salvage whatever scraps of his afternoon remained.
Hamlin restarted on Lap 230 and spent the remainder of the race fighting from deep in the field. He eventually finished 28th, hardly the sort of result a championship contender wants with the season approaching its business end.
The frustrating part was that Hamlin believed the car had become good enough to win.
“The beginning was not great, and once we got back in traffic, I thought the second half of the race we were really strong,” he said. “Could contend for the win. Just right there with the 19 when the tire blew for third.”
That makes the result sting a little more. Hamlin wasn’t nursing an uncompetitive car around the track, hoping to stumble into a decent finish. He believed he had a shot at victory before the tire failure turned his afternoon into an exercise in damage control.
“Definitely not ideal,” Hamlin said. “But, yeah, what can you do?”
As it turned out, Hamlin did get a little help from the championship leader. Kyle Larson also suffered a late tire failure, crashing out of the race and finishing 34th. Larson’s disaster allowed Hamlin to cut 18 points out of the deficit, reducing the gap from 49 points to 31.
That sounds helpful until you remember Hamlin finished 28th himself. This was less a championship charge than a case of making the best of someone else’s misfortune while suffering a fair amount of your own.
Hamlin now heads to Talladega Superspeedway with three races remaining before a champion is crowned. The opportunity is still there, but the margin for error is shrinking, and the next stop is a superspeedway where a driver’s afternoon can be ruined by circumstances entirely beyond his control.
Asked how he felt about the championship picture, Hamlin offered a fairly straightforward assessment of what his team needs to do.
“I mean, I feel like just need, when we got a good car, like the second half of the race today, to finish well,” he said. “We just haven’t finished.”
And therein lies the problem. Speed is useful, but trophies and championship points tend to require a driver to make it to the finish line without his tires attempting an unscheduled departure.
Hamlin has three races left to make up 31 points on Larson and get himself back into serious championship contention. Phoenix offered a chance to make a substantial move. Instead, he got a flat tire, a pit-road penalty and a result that left him needing another opportunity.
Talladega is next, which means that opportunity could arrive in spectacular fashion. It could also disappear in a cloud of sheet metal and bad decisions made at 190 mph.
At this point, Hamlin will take his chances. He just needs the tires to stick around long enough to give him one.
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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