The summer break could not have come at a better time for Denny Hamlin.
Hamlin remains one of the NASCAR Cup Series’ most dominant drivers, but the problem is he hasn’t reached Victory Lane to prove it in over two months.
No one has led more laps in 2024 than Hamlin’s 772 circuits. The No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota has also spent the most laps inside the top 15 this season, per NASCAR’s loop data, and holds the second-best average running position this year at 10.75 behind Kyle Larson’s 10.16.
And although his three wins this season are still tied for second-best this year, Hamlin’s most recent victory was way back on April 28 at Dover Motor Speedway, 12 races and over three months ago.
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These observations prove only that Hamlin and the No. 11 team are victims of their own success, garnering exceedingly high expectations based solely on the elite performance produced over numerous seasons against the sport’s best, where Hamlin has found himself for years.
Hamlin has also been in the mix for at least three wins in the past four races. The 54-time winner appeared primed for a Nashville Superspeedway triumph until an Austin Cindric spin with two laps remaining in regulation triggered what became a five-overtime affair, running Hamlin to pit road for fuel and a 12th-place finish instead of a sure victory.
Two weeks later, Pocono Raceway produced one of the team’s cleanest races in weeks, with Hamlin restarting third behind Ryan Blaney and Alex Bowman with 23 laps to go. Blaney escaped with the lead and Bowman second. Hamlin managed to work past Bowman late in the going, but he ultimately ran out of time to catch Blaney, settling instead for a runner-up finish.
That top five marks Hamlin’s only top-10 finish in the past seven races — a stretch in which he has a 23.1 average finish, his worst seven-race stretch since 2013, according to Racing Insights. Yet in four of the past five races, Hamlin has led 21 or more laps. The results just don’t show it.
“It’s been some wonky races,” Hamlin said ahead of Pocono. “I mean … there’s been rain that really changed New Hampshire quite a bit from going to what we think is a race-winning car and leading and feeling like we were going to win to not. And then obviously Chicago just turned out the way it did. We were really good in the dry pace. I felt very good with where I was at there — went to rain. And then Nashville, we all saw what happened there at the end. So just yeah, some different finishes for sure.”
Then came the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where crew chief Chris Gabehart appeared to have Hamlin and the No. 11 team in prime position to score the elusive crown-jewel victory. That was until untimely cautions upended their strategy, plunged Hamlin back into traffic and ultimately into position to be swept up in an overtime crash en route to a 32nd-place finish.
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Therefore, the question is not whether Hamlin, Gabehart and the No. 11 team can position themselves to succeed; it’s when they will begin to close out wins again.
Enter Richmond Raceway, where the Cup Series returns from its two-week summer break on Aug. 11 (6 p.m. ET, USA, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App).
Hamlin is the most recent winner at the 0.75-mile oval, scoring the March 31 win after getting the jump on an overtime restart against teammate Martin Truex Jr. Hamlin also leads the series in short-track wins in the Next Gen car with four, including three victories in the last six such races.
His numbers at Richmond — the Chesterfield, Virginia native’s home track — are astounding. Hamlin’s 2,243 laps led are fourth-most all-time, only behind Richard Petty, Rusty Wallace and Bobby Allison and directly ahead of Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon — all of whom are Cup champions and Hall of Famers. (And oh by the way, Hamlin’s next win would be the 55th of his Cup career, tying him with Wallace for 11th all-time in NASCAR history.)
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Hamlin has also won at Richmond five times in his career, tied with Martinsville Speedway (another home track) for his second-most wins at one track, behind only Pocono Raceway (seven).
The 43-year-old will be quick to remind you past success does not guarantee the same results in the future. But with the No. 11 team’s level of performance — if not luck — in recent weeks, the optimism their results will soon represent their speed is hard to wash away. And make no mistake — Hamlin’s desire to pull into Victory Lane again somewhere soon still burns brightly.
“Where I’ve shifted my goals in the final years of my career is to try to get to a big win number, get inside the top 10 of all-time winners,” Hamlin said. “And so that’s the goal that I can achieve, week in, week out, right? I mean, certainly, you always have goals of trying to win a championship and that goes over a long period of time. But week to week, right, that’s what fuels me to continue to go to the race track and do this grind every week is to try to keep nailing down victories.
“To me, I think that when this is all said and done, all these different formats have changed, cars have changed over time, but the the wins still stand as equal. So I think that those are why I value them so much.”
In Year 19 of his Cup career, Hamlin never thought he would have achieved so much success — 54 wins, three Daytona 500s, three Southern 500 wins at Darlington and a Coca-Cola 600 triumph at Charlotte. But with opportunity at his hands for me, he can’t stand to see any others slip away.
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“I think certainly four or five years ago, my number would have been 50 — somewhere in that range,” Hamlin said of his final win total. “But as time has changed and you start to pick up your performance, you change your goals and so that certainly has changed. Again, I just feel so much more agitated by the ones that, like, we had one.
“You know, there were three this year leading inside five (laps) to go and a late-race caution just changed everything. So I think that if you want to get to those goals that you want to win, you’ve really got to capitalize on all the moments because you just never know whether our performance will continue to stay at this rate for the years to come — but you do know that you’ve got it now, so you try to capitalize.”