Denny Hamlin was the first to tell everyone that Sunday at Darlington wasn’t on him.
He played a role, of course, but he gave all due credit to his pit crew for getting him out with the lead from third before overtime even if suggesting that his role was keeping them in position all race to have a shot.
Hamlin never wavered in his efforts and easily could have but that isn’t his all-in style. Or is it, A11-IN?
Candidly, if you want to know what it looks like to check out as a veteran at Joe Gibbs Racing, look no further than Martin Truex Jr., respectfully. Truex did not spend much to any time doing simulator work and wasn’t even a frequent in-person attendee to debriefs at the end of his tenure.
Truex was on that boat long before he bought it.
Hamlin, at the same age as Truex, is not only doing his simulator work but also contributes to the entire organization when it comes time to what he does in that room.
“I do most of the sim work for all the cars,” Hamlin said. “My job, I’ll be back in there tomorrow, working on this racetrack, working on tires, things like that. But I’m doing it for every team. I don’t know. I only trust myself to do it. I don’t know why. That’s just the control freak in me, to want to have everything absolutely perfect.
“I put a lot of work in. It’s not just for myself. It’s for the benefit of all Joe Gibbs Racing. They reap the benefits of the work that I put in through the week.
“Yes, they don’t love it as much as probably I do, but I enjoy the process of being good at it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m not going to win these races on raw talent anymore. I’m going to have to outwork people. I’m going to have to look at things that maybe other people aren’t looking at. I’ve learned to win it more with my mind than I have with my talent.”
His team owner recognizes it, too.
“I’ve told the story, I mentioned it the last time I talked about Denny,” Gibbs said. “I went to him at Watkins Glen two years ago. He struggled with road racing. They went as far as putting other setups on his car. That guy went to work in the sim and worked as hard as he could. He set on three poles in road racing.
“You get somebody that age that still has the drive to get it done, I think Denny has a real drive, and I think we’re fortunate to have him.”
So now that Hamlin has back-to-back wins, thus proving that he is not going to simply go away because Chris Gabehart was taken from him, it’s now time to start exploring what else there is for him to accomplish.
Sure, there’s the championship carrot that gets dangled in front of him, but so much of that is luck-based right now, too. And Hamlin says it too, that for him, it’s just about winning races and that his legacy will be defined on the track based on how many times he got to Victory Lane.
He’s 11th right now at 56 and next up is Kevin Harvick at 60, and 61 would put him in sole possession of 10th on the all-time list. That’s a carrot too and it seems tenable too.
And the closer he gets to that goal before the playoff starts, the more it helps chase that other carrot too.
“I want to get it as soon as possible ’cause you never know when you don’t race anymore,” Hamlin said. “I think these wins early in the season certainly are beneficial to getting some pressure off for Playoff points. Certainly makes me feel good to keep piling on those wins.”
Race quality?
What did you think about the race?
That questions gets asked a lot every week but this one had kind of a nuanced answer because there were two things that played into it on Sunday.
First and foremost, William Byron and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 team absolutely stunk up the first three-quarters of the race until they were forced to surrender the lead under green flag pit stops but their pursuit of a perfect race was pretty compelling.
It’s something that hasn’t been accomplished since the 2001 restrictor plate race at New Hampshire in which Jeff Burton led every step of the way. If you’re not going to get a compelling race, at least, get a historic moment, right?
But then the final 100 laps turned into a compelling race because Byron did not come out ahead of Christopher Bell and Ryan Blaney nearly won the race by driving through the field on a run-long strategy that eclipsed the overcut strategy employed by Tyler Reddick.
It turned into a Richmond race at the end and that was downright compelling too.
With that said, it is frustrating because the single source supplied NextGen has absolutely made NASCAR’s historic best tracks its worst tracks and vice versa. Short tracks, which Darlington has a lot of those characteristics, alongside road course have been marginalized by the Seventh-Generation’s aerodynamics and horsepower/weight ratio.
Intermediates, with its wider racing surfaces, have become the best product.
“Where you see the best Next Gen racing is at tracks that have a lot of grip, that has a tire that’s got a lot of grip, and everyone’s running a lot of throttle,” Hamlin said. “What happens is then you see a lot of side drafting and bump drafting. Just keeps us bunched up.
“At a track like this, it’s just a big Richmond where sometimes it’s, like, the mechanical side of it, you just can’t overcome it when the person out front has the clean air. He has such an advantage. You have to have multiple 10ths of speed faster than them to challenge them and pass them. There’s not multiple tenths spread out between first and 30th on speed.”
How to fix that is still an open question but despite all the good work done by Goodyear over the past year, Sunday was still a reminder that these cars still have a long way to go to put its best foot forward across the schedule.
Wither throwback?
Is Throwback Weekend overdone and overplayed?
Yeah, probably.
Is there still much to enjoy about it?
Yeah, probably.
So ultimately, that’s the reason to keep doing it.
For reasons articulated by owner-drivers Hamlin and Brad Keselowski on Saturday, it’s hard in this era to get buy-in from sponsors who are on fewer and fewer races over the course of the season and do not want to give up their branding initiatives for one of those investments.
That’s why the Xfinity Series gets a greater buy-in, where the investment is less tangible and that’s to say nothing of a car that more closely resembles the cars they’re throwing back to in the first place.
For example, the best version of a throwback race actually takes place in the CARS Tour every August at Hickory Motor Speedway where drivers change their numbers and frequently identically mimic the schemes they are throwing back to.
But as for Darlington, there are no shortage of people who enjoy the concept, buy the diecasts, and use the race cars as a moment to bridge the gap between generations of fandoms. What does it hurt to keep on keepin’ on as long as there are teams who want to partake?
