Scheduled knee surgery turns into a celebration

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Denny Hamlin had hoped to spend the latter part of Monday beginning the first stages of his recovery from surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.

Instead, spending it celebrating in Victory Lane at Martinsville Speedway worked for him quite a bit better. In a wild one reminiscent of other memorable finishes at the storied half-mile track, Hamlin stormed from fourth to first in the final green-white-checkered melee -- winning for the first time this season on an afternoon when it seemed at first glance as if wily crew chief Mike Ford had given it away.

Somehow

Denny Hamlin had the lead inside 10 laps to go and gave it up to pit. But he charged from fourth on a green-white-checkered restart to pull out the victory at Martinsville.

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Hamlin, who led a race-high 172 laps, was setting the pace for the field when Jeff Burton, who had battled him up front most of the day, had a right-front tire go down and hit the outside wall to bring out the caution flag on Lap 493 of the scheduled 500-lap event. That left Ford with a difficult decision. Should he bring the leader in for fresh tires with less than 10 laps remaining, or let him stay out and maintain the most precious track position a driver can possess?

Knowing Hamlin was operating on old, slick tires that had 65 laps on them, Ford opted to have Hamlin come in and get four fresh ones. Kyle Busch, his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate who was running second at the time, followed Hamlin's No. 11 Toyota to the pits ... and none of the other top cars did.

"Those are the worst calls ever. That's the situation you hate the most," Ford said. "The thing during the day that you want to do is put a lot of cars down [a lap], so it makes that decision easy. And there were still 18 cars on the lead lap at the end of the day, which is quite a few for here. You know some of those are going to stay out -- because that is their shot to win. You know some of them are going to come if a few guys come in front of them.

"In this series, that is the hardest decision to make. Inside of 10 [laps remaining], what do you do? The leader, you can bet that his shot to win the race goes both ways, so everyone else does the opposite of what he does."

It looked at first as if the two JGR cars had just handed Monday's victory to Jeff Gordon, who had been running third and suddenly, unexpectedly, inherited the lead.

"I told Mike, for the record, that I never doubted him," JGR team president J.D. Gibbs said. "Off the record, up on the pit box, I was cussing him." (Continued)