His race was finished, but Denny Hamlin didn't want to get out of the car. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver sat inside his No. 11 Toyota gathering his thoughts, trying to come to grips with the fact that another Sprint Cup event on his home track -- one he had dominated until only 19 laps remained -- had gotten away from him.

A year has passed since that gut-churning moment at Richmond International Raceway, one where native son Hamlin seemed to be cruising to a long-awaited first victory at the .75-mile facility until air began leaking out of a cut right-front tire (watch video). He stayed out on the track as if he couldn't bear to come off, until the tire finally blew out in Turn 3. Within a span of moments, he had gone from leading 381 laps to a 24th-place finish. A two-lap penalty from NASCAR for bringing out an intentional caution only added to the misery.

He was so close to a perfect weekend, with a pole and a victory in the Nationwide race the previous evening preceding his truncated run in the Cup race. Heading back to Richmond for Saturday night's event, it's impossible for Hamlin to put the experience completely out of his head.

"It definitely replays in your mind, for sure," he said. "There's obviously nothing we could've done. It wasn't like I second-guessed something that I did and I could've changed something to prevent us from not winning that race. It's just one of those things that bad luck strikes. The good part is knowing that we're going back to the same track hopefully with the same weather conditions, and we'll have a car that is just as strong. We're going to go back on the same setup and if it isn't as strong we're going to fine-tune it. Race tracks and races like that just slip away. It takes a little time to get over them, for sure."

For Hamlin, a native of the Richmond suburb of Midlothian and a product of the late-model tracks around central and southern Virginia, a Cup victory in his hometown seems overdue. His average finish of 8.83 on the short track is second among active drivers to Kyle Busch's 6.75. He finished second to Dale Earnhardt Jr. in his rookie season, and has placed third twice, including this past fall. But the statistics don't indicate how much it would mean to Hamlin to win there.

"I think him winning at Richmond would be like winning the Daytona 500 to him. It would mean what the Brickyard meant to Tony Stewart," said Jim Dean, a late-model team owner based in Fairfax, Va., who once fielded cars for Hamlin in NASCAR's weekly series. "That's where he grew up. I think it's real important to him. He's come close so many times. He ran second there to Dale Jr. his rookie year, he obviously dominated a year ago and came up short with bad luck."

How much does Richmond mean to Hamlin? Consider that he's won four times on NASCAR's premier circuit, and yet counts the Nationwide victory at Richmond last spring as the biggest of his career. Every trip back to Richmond means family and friends at the race track, and charity events like his celebrity race Thursday night at Southside Speedway, one of the area short tracks where he competed before Dean's contacts and a lot of luck earned him a chance with the Gibbs organization. A homecoming like that always carries expectations. But pressure? Dean doesn't think so.

“

It's just one of those points in a driver's career where he says that, 'This is the race that this track owes me.'

”

DENNY HAMLIN

"We always think that when people put pressure on themselves that it's a negative thing. I think he is motivated by it. I think he is inspired by it," Dean said. "But again, people always take that as negative. 'You put too much pressure on yourself,' that's the expression. Any pressure is too much pressure, so it's a negative thing. For Denny, it's not. He's not going to put pressure on himself that he has to do this or he has to do that. When he's in that race car, I promise you, how he drives that race car and how he handles that car during the race will have nothing to do with pressure. He's just too even."

Dean believes that even temperament -- an example of which, he said, was Hamlin's demeanor after Jimmie Johnson muscled past him in the final laps to win March 29 at Martinsville, another Virginia track -- will help him put the heartbreak of last season behind him. Hamlin recalls it like it was yesterday, remembering how he expected other drivers to eventually catch up, how surprised he was that his car was getting better while everyone else's was only maintaining. After the last pit stop with 30 to go, his car was better than it had been all night. He started pulling away from the field again, and even allowed his thoughts to drift to Victory Lane.

"I thought, 'This is it,'" Hamlin remembered. "At this point, I'm thinking, 'What am I going to feel like when I get out of the race car? What are my emotions going to be like? What am I going to feel? What am I going to say?' Those things run through your head while you're out there on the race track. It doesn't take but that split instance in that corner, you feel the right-front fall down, and it goes from joy to beating the steering wheel up."

Going through a corner, Hamlin said, he could feel air pressure in the right-front tire going down, and knew he was finished. He had some fleeting hope of a caution, but knew his chances of winning were doomed either way. Nobody else needed to pit. He was left to limp around the track until the tire eventually failed.

"It was just frustrating," he said. "You can't describe the emotion. It's just one of those points in a driver's career where he says that, 'This is the race that this track owes me.' This is the point where I say that this race track owes me, and that was the one for Richmond."

No question, the experience of last spring still eats at him. But once Hamlin slides behind the wheel Saturday night, Dean believes, all of those thoughts will fade away.

"I would tell you that from the time they say, 'Gentlemen start your engines' until the checkered flag waves, what happened last year won't have one single thing to do with any one corner at any single point in the race. It won't have any effect on him at all. None at all," Dean said. "Now, how he thinks about it after he gets out of the car privately to himself, or before he gets in the car, might be a little bit different. But I'll guarantee you it will not affect his performance in that race car, and it won't impact one single decision he makes when he turns that wheel."