Denny Hamlin’s Tackle Box is Full of Challenges

LAS VEGAS, NV - OCTOBER 19: enny Hamlin (#11 Joe Gibbs Racing Yahoo! Toyota) climbs from his race car after qualifying for the South Point 400 NASCAR Cup Series playoff race on October. 19, 2024, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Las Vegas, NV. (Photo by Will Lester/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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Denny Hamlin conceded Saturday that he has a lot going on as both a veteran driver for JGR and the 23XI Racing team owner. But Hamlin says he’s just fine with all the balls in the air. The driver of the No. 11 JGR Toyota has three wins on the season but that last trophy came 22 races ago (at Dover, Del).

He enters this round of the Playoffs, ranked sixth (eight points out of the fourth-place transfer position) among the eight Playoff drivers. He’s earned three top-10s in the first six Playoff races – a best showing of fourth at Bristol, where he won this Spring.

He has a 12.5 average finish at Las Vegas and is one of four Playoff drivers (also Larson, Joey Logano and William Byron) to have won at all four remaining tracks.

But as busy as Hamlin is managing a busy life, he says he prefers and thrives in that pace.

“I don’t know if I do better, but it is just what I choose, right? “ said Hamlin, a 54-time winner in the series. “I’m a work-acholic in every way, shape and form. It is just what I like to do. I like to set goals and then figure out how the process to achieve those goals, so it is self-inflicted in some instances, but in others, things pile on and you have this going on and that going on, what have you, you just put it in the tackle box, and it is stored away in its own little section, when I have to address it, I go back in there and open up that section of the tackle box and I work on that problem.

“I’d like to think my tackle box is pretty deep, and certainly, got a lot of storage in there. At my age, it is still something that I love to do, there is not a lot that I would like to eliminate from my daily life. As time goes on there is always going to be things that pop up that you just don’t plan for, but it is how do you react in those situations, and how do you manage them.”