Keselowski earns respect from Hamlin at Martinsville

With the No. 2 Team Penske Ford riding his bumper over the final 15 of 500 laps at Martinsville Speedway, Hamlin kept enough distance — and maintained his line on the low groove — to deny Keselowski a fair chance at a bump-and-run. Keselowski’s only option became outright wrecking Hamlin, and the man who drew the ire of so many in the garage last year didn’t go that route.

Instead, Keselowski managed one final, clean attempt to move Hamlin coming off Turn 4, an effort that sent the No. 11 Toyota a bit up the track but didn’t put Hamin in true danger of wrecking as he sped toward the checkered flag.

“It seemed like we could get to the lead pretty easily, and once we got to the lead, our car, our balance, changed quite a bit,” Hamlin said after winning for the fifth time at the 0.526-mile Virginia track. “But that allowed the 2 to get to us, and my strong suit all day was then his strong suit, and it put us in a tough spot. Obviously we had some great short-track racing those last few laps.

“Glad he chose the latter decision (to not wreck me) on that last corner, but that’s something that you build up, the respect from your competitors, and he’ll get that paid back to him.”

The “high road,” as Hamlin called it in his post-race interview, resulted in a second-place finish for the 2012 Sprint Cup Series champion, his best-ever at Martinsville, as well as future respect from the JGR veteran.

With a win already this year — which came the previous week at Auto Club Speedway, coincidentally on a last-lap pass — Keselowski and his teammate, Daytona 500 winner Joey Logano, are in win-or-bust mode for the remainder of the 26-race regular season. That didn’t affect how Keselowski chose to race Hamlin at the end Sunday, though.

“I just felt like I raced him the way I wanted to be raced and I guess that is what it is,” he said. …”I did everything I could other than wreck him. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I hit him pretty good a couple of times, so he did a good job and he chose not to wreck, which I give him credit for, and it was fun. I just had fun and I really don’t know what more I could have done other than just drove through him, but I felt pretty good about what I did do.”

What he did was record his fifth consecutive top-10 through six races this season. Excluding a 41st-place result following an expired engine in the season-opening 500, Keselowski’s average finish in 2015 is 5.0. He’s led laps in the past five races, including 18 in the STP 500.

The No. 4 of Kevin Harvick has been the class of the series through six races — he’s won twice, and his worst finish all year is eighth — but Keselowski and Logano have displayed speed more consistently than anyone outside the Stewart-Haas Racing shop, and the No. 2 in particular has shown a penchant for closing races with authority.

And Sunday’s showing in which Keselowski finished second, with Logano behind him in third, is a wonderful sign for the Penske program for when the series returns in October for a Chase race.

“It’s so early in the year. Right now, the 4 (of Harvick) and the 41 (of Kurt Busch) are the best on the mile-and-a-half tracks, and a championship always comes down to the mile-and-a-half tracks,” Keselowski said. “You look at the Chase and that’s just how it is, so the 4 and the 41 are the best cars there. We’ve all got some work to do to catch up to them, but there are six months at least until then and when the time comes, that’s when you need to be fast.

“There’s a lot of time to keep developing and pushing to get better and everybody will.”

MORE: