Hamlin sees positives in his top-five finish Saturday

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- For a guy who finished third in a car that was good enough to win, Denny Hamlin was surprisingly upbeat after Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. Of course, who wouldn't be after never having finished better than 17th here in seven previous starts?

Two years ago, Hamlin was leading when he was hit by then-teammate Tony Stewart, putting both cars into the wall. In the 2008 Daytona 500, Hamlin led 32 laps but was caught up in a late-race crash. His last two visits to Daytona resulted in a strong car but a pair of 26th-place efforts, as he wound up in a pair of multi-car accidents last summer and failed to miss the Big One in this year's 500.

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Denny Hamlin was thrilled to come out of Daytona with a top-10, and comments on a relatively calm race.

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"Yeah, I don't know how to finish in the top 10 here," Hamlin said. "I can run up front for 95 percent of the time but can't finish."

If anything, Hamlin found Saturday night to be "relatively calm." Of course, when you're well insulated from the craziness that is restrictor-plate pack racing, that can be expected. And Hamlin never really found himself farther back than 10th at any point during the race.

"It was tough for me to tell because we were in the top five for most of the day," Hamlin said. "So the first five, six cars were content to run single-file for most of the day, so it made our day pretty easy for the most part. I didn't see a whole lot of battling back in the pack.

"Of course, the finish made it real exciting. But other than that, I thought it was a relatively calm race."

On the final restart, Hamlin would have liked to have had the help of teammate Kyle Busch. Instead, it was Jimmie Johnson lined up behind him.

"I knew it was going to be all about positioning and where you put yourself, and I felt good about being on the outside right there on that restart with about five to go," Hamlin said. "But I knew that my help from [Johnson] was going to be limited. I knew he was going to dump me just as soon as he could. He wasn't going to help push me past [Stewart], for sure."

And that was exactly how it played out. As Stewart and Busch pulled away, Johnson tried to go with them, but Hamlin was able to squeeze in between and follow Busch down the backstretch. And when Busch got a huge run on Stewart as the field came to the white flag, Hamlin knew what he needed to do.

"It obviously put me in a position to help my current teammate or my former teammate," Hamlin said. "So I'm going to help my current teammate. I felt like the best opportunity for our team was to stick with [Busch] even though I was going to give up the bottom [groove] and I knew I was going to give up a position to [Johnson].

"I felt like it was going to be two-by-two on the final lap, to tell you the truth. Kyle got that great run. He got to [Stewart's] quarterpanel so hard, it just bogged the 14 down so much that it let him clear off Turn 4 and I thought that was going to be the pass for the race right there."

But that's not what happened, as Busch wound up crashing after contact with Stewart's front bumper, which surprised Hamlin in some ways and not in others.

"Usually when you lead in the last lap, your percentile for winning usually is pretty good," he said. "But I'll tell you ... it's just like Talladega, when you've got new tires and guys are blocking and being aggressive, you're going to have contact and that's what happened."

Still, Hamlin was thrilled to finally get a finish worthy of his car's dominance.

"We had a great night," he said. "I don't think I've ever had a car this strong on a superspeedway. I'm proud of our whole team. We kept it in this whole deal with the pit stops, a strong car, led a bunch of laps and at least had a decent day."