Denny Hamlin’s strategy to stay out of the wrecks at Atlanta all went wrong when he got in the last one. But it was just the culmination of a bad strategy gamble that meant the No. 11 car never saw the front of the field all day.
The weekend started poorly for Hamlin, as he was nearly two seconds off the pace in qualifying and last on the starting grid. The team traced the issue back to faulty plug wires in his engine, which they were able to replace, an unapproved adjustment following qualifying with no penalty since the car was already at the back of the grid.
Crew chief Chris Gabehart and the team decided that the tail-end starting position could guide the strategy for the day. While teammates Martin Truex and Ty Gibbs, who also replaced their plug wiring as a precaution and incurred the penalty of starting from the tail end of the field, chose to charge up to the front as quickly as possible, Hamlin hung back.
It was not an atypical strategy for Hamlin, who has made a habit of running in the rear in superspeedway races to avoid wrecks. And it’s certainly worked in the past – Hamlin has three Daytona 500s to his credit, after all, so he knows how to draft.
But at Atlanta, the big wrecks just didn’t come, and the strategy meant that Hamlin missed out on any stage points to bolster the ten-point advantage over the cutline that he entered with.
Ironically, though, as he finally tried to mount a charge in the closing laps, the wreck finally happened, and it caught him. As Ross Chastain was shoved into the wall with a bad push from behind, Bubba Wallace got into his left-rear and the field stacked up behind them in a chain reaction. Hamlin was collected beside the No. 21 of Harrison Burton, a fellow Playoff contender.
“Just saw cars turning sideways in front of me,” Hamlin described his view of the race-ending incident. “Tried to avoid wrecks all day and just got in the last one.”
When the caution flew to end the race, Hamlin ended up finishing 24th with no stage points to boot. As a result, Hamlin leaves Atlanta just two points above the provisional cutline, a loss from where he started.
Hamlin wasn’t too concerned with the day, for his part. A superspeedway-style race to start the Playoffs is a wildcard, and to avoid all wrecks until the last one still ensured the 11 team had a reasonable day.
“I thought at the very end we got the Mavis Tire Camry kind of where it needed to be, but by then, you were kind of dealing with a log jam of a couple of lanes that are kind of blocking things and you couldn’t go much of anywhere, so I just tried to avoid the wrecks,” Hamlin said.
“I was trying to get 20 points out of the day. That was my goal – just get 20 however we could, obviously, starting in the back didn’t help with that. We did the best we could, and then got in a wreck that probably cost us eight to 10 spots or so.”
As for whether he was concerned about his points position heading into the final two races of the Round of 16, before four drivers get eliminated, Hamlin said he wasn’t.
“No, not really,” he answered. “I did what I wanted to do and that was lay in the back most of the race, and try to see what attrition came about, again – 20 points seemed really possible, but came up a little short of that today.”
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