Denny Hamlin’s bad Playoff luck started before the postseason even began and didn’t let up at Watkins Glen. It puts Hamlin, who has 54 career wins but is still hunting for his first championship, in danger of an inglorious first-round exit from the Playoffs.
After qualifying second at The Glen, the second of three races in the first round, Hamlin qualified 22nd and was caught up in a first lap incident when Corey Lajoie and Kyle Busch came together, collecting Hamlin and others. After extensive repairs, the No. 11 team was able to secure a 23rd place finish.
“Great effort by this FedEx Toyota team to keep us in it,” Hamlin said. “Obviously the car is just destroyed, so to finish 23rd – I guess there is a positive. We were certainly in a worst spot most of the day, and luckily, we had some attrition there at the end that helped us out.”
The poor finish means Hamlin finds himself just six points above the Playoff cutline leaving Watkins Glen and heading to the final race of the round at Bristol Motor Speedway, where the four drivers below the cutline at the end of that race are eliminated and fail to qualify for the Round of 12. This dire position isn’t just the result of one bad race for Hamlin, though.
Ahead of the penultimate race of the regular season, Toyota Racing Development, engine builder for all the Toyota teams, self-reported to NASCAR that it had accidently disassembled Hamlin’s Bristol-winning engine. The rule book requires all race-winning engines to be torn down by NASCAR as an extra inspection. However, to encourage cost-saving, engines are reused, so they are only inspected at the end of their life cycle and tuned by TRD prior to reuse.
TRD acknowledged that the oversight was entirely their fault, saying that they accidently treated the engine as a non-race winner since it was brought back in a later car that did not win. Regardless, since NASCAR was unable to tear down the engine, Hamlin’s team was assessed an L2 penalty, though they were given the lowest penalty possible in the rule book – a deduction of 75 regular season points and ten Playoff points.
While those Playoffs points are the only ones that directly carry into the postseason and impact Hamlin’s current points predicament, the loss of regular season points impacted Hamlin’s finishing position in the regular season standings, and drivers in the top ten at the end of the regular season get progressively fewer Playoff points as a reward.
So, despite the Playoff points from three race wins (which give a five Playoff point bonus), six stage wins (which give a single Playoff point bonus), and a sixth-place finish in the regular season standings, Hamlin only entered the Playoffs at Atlanta with a ten-point advantage to the cutline after the deduction for his penalty.
A small advantage like that to the cutline means that the first round is no longer as easy to advance through as it otherwise would have been, but Hamlin’s team didn’t seem to accommodate for that. After a 24th-place finish at Atlanta with no stage points to bolster it at Atlanta, Hamlin said he wasn’t really concerned because his team had set out with the goal of just getting 20 points from the race, a suprising nonchalance despite a slip in the points.
Despite finishing one place better than he did at Atlanta, Hamlin continued to slip in the points at The Glen – his recovery to 23rd still cost him a slip from entering two points above the cutline to leaving six points below.
And Bristol is a good track for the team, since Hamlin scored one of his three wins at it much earlier in the season. However, that win came amidst a highly unpredictable softer tire, and drivers have said that Bristol is now somewhat unpredictable this year as NASCAR experiments with compounds. Nonetheless, Hamlin is happy to be going back to the track.
“I feel like we can go there and win. We are going to an oval – back to a normal track,” Hamlin said. The races in the first round consisted of superspeedway-style Atlanta and the Watkins Glen road course. “We can control our own destiny there.”
But the twenty-points-only attitude is gone, and Hamlin knows he needs to go for a win or a big points haul. Asked whether it was possible for his No. 11 team to advance on points at Bristol, he was flippant about the likelihood.
“Yeah, if you run in the top two or three all day, absolutely,” Hamlin said.
- Changes to the ROVAL make getting to the Round of 8 even harder - October 10, 2024
- Grant Enfinger locks himself into the Truck Series Championship with confident Talladega win - October 4, 2024
- No Playoff driver is safe heading to Talladega - October 3, 2024