William Byron led the first 243 laps but did not win.
Tyler Reddick inherited the lead with a gutsy short pit and did not win.
Ryan Blaney pit long and ran down Reddick but did not win.
Somehow, through all of those factors, it was Denny Hamlin that emerged victorious for the second NASCAR Cup Series race in a row on Sunday at Darlington Raceway. Hamlin didn’t even truly feel like he was going to win that race until Turn 2 of the final restart.
Unlike the week before, where Hamlin conceded, ‘we kicked their ass, I kicked their ass,’ this was more of an overall team effort in which the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 unloaded with a seventh-place car. The driver had it running inside the top-five more often than not but the pit crew ultimately secured the deal this week.
For one, crew chief Chris Gayle had Hamlin on the long run strategy that Blaney nearly won with but they were not quite as good in traffic on it. However, it did get them in the top-five for the final pit stop and the over-the-wall crew kicked their asses this week.
Jack: Joël-Alexandre Bouagnon
Rear Change: Deven Yourker
Front Change: Austin Maloney
Carrier: Dylan Dowell
Fueler: Kenneth Purcell
That isn’t to say Hamlin didn’t play a factor.
“I knew coming in third, I was going to have to have my best roll (speed) of the day,” Hamlin said. “My fastest speed coming into the box. I needed to put it perfectly on the sign so they didn’t have to adjust.
“I needed to stack tenths and tenths and tenths on my side of the job. Once I got into the pit stall and they dropped the right side, I knew ‘oh boy, this is going to be a heater.’
“The two-car length lead (Ryan Blaney) had on us, I don’t know what that equates to, it’s probably a second of total time (and) I have to make up some. When you stack all that together, you end up going from third to first.”
Hamlin says he has told his team to not be offended when he says on Monday — during their weekly the debrief — that they had an eighth-place car because his rebuttal would be that Christopher Bell had a few of those when he won three in a row earlier this season too.
He also conceded that there were races he’s had won in the past where the caution didn’t go his way like it did on Sunday.
“This is truly a team sport,” Hamlin said. “When the pit crew has a green-white-checkered and do what they did at Richmond a couple of years ago and go from third-to-first, this is like their Super Bowl. That is their moment to like show-out. … It’s great that they got their due.”
What does Hamlin get out of it?
“It still shows up the same in the stats column,” Hamlin said. “No one will ever remember years from now. They’re just going to remember that we won Darlington and they’ll forget why, which is unfortunate for them.
“It’s great the team got me one here. Now, like I said to Chris Gayle, if we can win races where have a 7-10th place car, I feel good about executing when we have the best car.
“Obviously, our pit crew is well and capable of keeping us up front. I can still do it at a high level. I like our outlook to win a lot of races this year.”
No history here
The story became how Denny Hamlin and his No. 11 pit crew stole one because this very much looked like a race that might have been a history making performance from William Byron, crew chief Rudy Fugle and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 team.
They led every lap into the final 100 when finally they were forced to come down pit road under green and surrender their advantage. It was the timing of when Fugle called Byron in that likely was the difference.
The No. 24 team more or less intended to split the stage in half but Byron rejoined the race behind Christopher Bell instead of in front of him and it was over from there.
“It sucks,” Byron said. “I’m sure it will sting a lot tonight. There’s still a lot of positives. It stings in the moment for sure.”
Where did this one get away from Fugle?
“We had us coming out in front of (Bell) period and our cycle didn’t work out the way it was supposed to and we ended up on his rear bumper instead of his front bumper,” Fugle said. “We had all that stuff calculated-out and knew exactly what our gap was and what we were going to do and we just came out on the wrong side of their bumper.
“So then we burnt our tires off, and got held up, which got our car tight. I think it would have been a different race for sure, if that didn’t happen, but it didn’t work out.”
That was largely the interpretation of his driver, too.
“For us to execute like that, it was looking like it was going to be a perfect race,” Byron said. “We were going to lead every lap. I was really proud of that.
“Those guys could be aggressive on the other side of the green flag cycle, we lost control there. Once we lost control, [it was] too late in the going to kind of get back up there.”
For what it’s worth, Hamlin can relate to what Byron and Fugle feels right now too.
“I think at Richmond, I led all but 13 laps and had flat tire at the end,” Hamlin said. “I get how it feels. It sucks. Only I finished twenty-something that day. It’s painful.”
Track position
The conversation about this race in terms of the focused on pit crews and strategy was the result of the near impossibility to pass on equal tires this weekend.
Ask Kyle Busch:
Additionally, Bell spent about a third of his race simply trying to stay ahead of Byron just to stay on the lead lap. He started 17th and his car just never handled properly in the middle of the pack and went backwards.
He got a lucky caution for a Brad Keselowski loose center lock lug because he hadn’t pit at the time of the incident and suddenly came off pit road just outside of the top-five. Sniffing clean air for the first time, his car came to life and Bell could barely articulate why.
“My car drove awful,” Bell said. “It drove terrible. The green flag dropped and I was in the back and clearly nearly went a lap down. I was complaining to Adam (Stevens) and he was making adjustments but we suddenly inherited track position and my car flip flops.
“I went from being super tight to super loose and went from better on the long run to … all I had was the short run at the end of the race. I have no idea.”
So was this normal Darlington during the NextGen era or was this race excessively track position dependent?
“Yeah, this was completely normal,” Bell said. “This place, frankly a lot of the tracks we go to and even Martinsville last week, once you get through the pit stops and restarts, you’re just in line and riding until the car in front of you makes a massive mistake or someone stars struggling really bad but for the most part, this race is the perfect example.
“I was running outside of the top-25, flipped the field, put me in the front and maintained my position.”
It’s a familiar refrain at this point but Hamlin says this is just another example of NextGen racing in that everyone has the same car and is going the same speeds:
“Man, we’re all just running so equal,” Hamlin said. “I don’t know how else to say it, but we’re just so close. The field is so close. It is. It makes it really, really difficult.
“Very similar to last week, like, we’re all kind of falling off at the same rate through the run, right? We got two seconds of dropoff here, that’s good but we’re all doing it at the same rate because the cars are all so very similar.
“Once the tires really, like, wear out, we pit. That’s where typically you’ll see a huge disparity in speed between the cars. Very similar to last week, where right when you’re getting to see some comers and goers, everyone kind of pits to save themselves.
“Yeah, the field is tighter than it has ever been.”
Decisive moment
It’s also true that Ryan Blaney had the race won after an impressive decision by crew chief Jonathan Hassler to run long but also the driver to get through traffic.
The race was over and Blaney overtook Hamlin, Byron, Bell and then Tyler Reddick, who was leading by virtue of an aggressive undercut.
“I felt really good about kind of the pace I needed to have and how my car was going to fall off,” Blaney said. “And honestly, when I got to fifth, I was like, ‘Damn, he’s really far away. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get there.’
“But those guys just hit a cliff and I just never did. I kind of kept trucking, and when I got to second, it was like, nine to go. I kind of had tongue out for four laps, but then I’m like, all right, I think I’m going to have enough and he started hitting the fence and stuff like that.”
Hassler did his part too.
“Yeah, I mean, I think that was really kind of our only play from where we were running to maybe have a shot to win or a good finish,” Hassler said. “We weren’t going to pit early when those other guys pitted and get to the lead. So, we just kind of chose to do something different, and it worked out.”
It worked out until it didn’t.
As soon as Blaney completed what appeared to be the race winning pass, Bubba Wallace got into the back of Kyle Larson and the resulting spin led to overtime.
The immediate reaction was that Wallace might have done something to give teammate Reddick or team owner Hamlin new life. But remember Wallace and Blaney are best friends too.
Larson throttle and brake trace show that the damaged 5, which crashed earlier in the race, slowed in a way he did not the lap before and Wallace had nowhere to go.
Michael Jordan, who co-owns 23XI Racing with Hamlin, and owns the cars driven by Wallace and Reddick went to shake hands with Blaney after the race.
Blaney ribbed Jordan and said ‘if only your boy didn’t spin out Larson …”
The 2023 champion said the race was decided.
“If the caution didn’t come out, I thought we had it won easily,” Blaney said. “We were so much faster on newer tires. It was a great strategy call running long. Those guys short pitted and they were struggling real bad, and I thought if we could have just got off of two with the lead and the caution didn’t come out, I thought I was gonna kind of ride off into the sunset.
“That’s just not how it worked, unfortunately. We lost the lead on pit road, lost a front row starting spot and never had a shot.”
The Penske No. 12 team has had some challenges on pit road too. They routinely lose spots and
“The group’s perfectly capable,” Hassler explained. “We’ve just got to clean it up, and we’ll be there, hopefully, sooner rather than later.”
