Denny Hamlin spent much of Sunday’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway looking like a man who’d been handed a bucket of problems and told to get on with it. He did exactly that, clawing his way back to a fifth-place finish. Unfortunately, the NASCAR Cup Series Chase doesn’t award bonus points for surviving a day that tries its level best to ruin you.
Hamlin didn’t win, and while fifth was a respectable recovery, Kyle Larson still walked away with the more valuable result in the battle for the championship.
Larson increased his points lead over Hamlin from 40 to 49, leaving the Joe Gibbs Racing driver with more work to do as the Chase rolls on.
It certainly didn’t begin well for Hamlin. A slow pit stop early in the race sent him tumbling down the order, and a safety violation only added to the general misery. He finished Stage 1 in 15th and at one point found himself mired in 31st.
For a driver trying to run down Larson for the championship, this was hardly the sort of afternoon he’d ordered.
But Hamlin wasn’t about to accept his fate and spend the rest of the afternoon sightseeing.
As the field returned to green on Lap 87, Hamlin began working his way forward. Larson took the lead, while Hamlin fought his way into the top 10. And over the radio came a message that suggested the No. 11 Toyota driver had rediscovered his appetite for trouble.
“You let these motherf’rs know I am on my way,” Hamlin declared.
Subtlety, clearly, was not on the menu.
Hamlin backed up the words with action. On the Lap 122 restart, he tagged Larson, sending the championship leader up the track. Christopher Bell took the lead, followed by Ryan Blaney and Hamlin, while Larson dropped to seventh.
It was the sort of moment that suggested Hamlin might yet turn a miserable afternoon into something considerably more interesting.
Starting just behind Larson later in the race, Hamlin again went underneath him entering Turn 1, getting the No. 5 Chevrolet loose and sending Larson back to fifth by Lap 141.
Hamlin had clawed his way out of trouble and put himself in position to fight near the front. But the late-race pace of his Toyota ultimately kept him from making a serious run at the win.
“Just the long run speed, and obviously tanked there the last 15 laps or so,” Hamlin said. “Just didn’t have the long run speed that we needed. I thought the short run was okay. It was decent.”
The changing conditions didn’t help, either.
“But I felt like we were a lot better when it was daytime, and then once it cooled off and the track got a little bit faster, we just lost the edge that we had.”
There were still questions to answer on pit road, where Hamlin’s earlier problems had helped turn his afternoon into an exercise in damage control.
Asked about his pit-stall placement and the interference situation, Hamlin pointed to the importance of qualifying and pit selection.
“Just putting on the sign there. Not really sure, but I feel like just I wish we would have qualified,” Hamlin said. “I certainly felt like we could have got a little better pit selection there and wouldn’t have had the 88.”
Hamlin also acknowledged the cooperation of Connor Zilisch and his team during the race, thanking them for working with his crew when the pit cycles required it.
The fifth-place finish was a recovery, certainly. But in a championship fight, recovering from a bad day is only half the job. The other half is making sure your rival doesn’t leave with an even better one.
Larson did exactly that.
Hamlin knows the solution isn’t particularly complicated, even if putting it into practice at 180 mph is another matter entirely.
“We’ve just got to execute better, be a little faster, all of the above,” Hamlin said. “But ultimately we’re giving it all we’ve got right now.”
That may be true, but the scoreboard doesn’t care how hard you’re trying. Hamlin salvaged a fifth-place finish from an afternoon that threatened to go spectacularly wrong. Larson salvaged a better championship position.
And with the points gap now at 49, Hamlin needs more than another spirited comeback. He needs to start taking chunks out of Larson’s lead.
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.
- Denny Hamlin salvaged his Sunday, but Larson stole the silverware - October 11, 2026
- Chase Briscoe tells the Chase field to shut up and listen - October 11, 2026
- Alex Bowman’s overcorrection comes with with two very expensive passengers at Charlotte - October 11, 2026