Denny Hamlin has been here before.
He arrived at Champions Week in Downtown Nashville with his right arm in a sling following off-season arthroscopic shoulder surgery that could have delayed the start to his next racing season. In 2019, he had an identical surgery on his left shoulder.
Hamlin was dealing with some lingering pain since halfway through the playoffs and he scheduled the procedure for the week after the season.
“It was planned,” Hamlin said on Thursday. “It wasn’t planned to be how bad it ended up being. It’s something I planned to have fixed in the offseason.”
But again, this feels kind of like old hat at this point.
“Three years ago, I did (surgery for) a left shoulder bone spur, and this was supposed to be just a bone spur as well,” he said. “But I knew that I messed it up pretty bad Vegas week, and then since I ran the rest of the season after Vegas, it just continued to do more damage, and now it’s certainly going to be a little longer than what was anticipated.”
Hamlin said the issues with his shoulders is genetic and not the result of any racing incidents. The damage being worse than anticipated does leave his availability for the season-opening non-points Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in doubt.
“I’m a long, long way from where I need to be,” Hamlin said. “I thought I was going to have a three, four-week recovery like I did before, but I came out knowing I had a ton of damage that needed to be fixed.”
The Clash is February 4, two weeks before the points-paying opening Daytona 500, the biggest race of the season.
“I think it will change my off-season a little bit, going from trying to work on some tracks that I have been so-so at in the simulator. That probably is just not going to happen now. It changes some things and certainly, probably, the first laps on track will be whatever we do in February.
“I don’t know — do we need to analyze the Clash? Maybe when the time comes because from what I’ve heard, they don’t want me loading it for three months. Obviously, that timeline does not line up.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.