LAS VEGAS — A slow first pit stop had Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team playing catch-up all afternoon at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Crew chief Chris Gabehart swung for the fences to give Hamlin the best strategy possible to maximize their results, but their eighth-place finish in the opening race of the Round of 8 in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs left them fifth in the standings — first out, but a whopping 27 points beneath the provisional elimination line.
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“Yeah, just not a clean day,” Hamlin said. “That certainly kind of sums it up. You’ll have that. We’ll just do the best we can to to get the best finish.
“I thought Chris did a great job trying to get some sort of finish. Once we lost the track position early, he was doing everything he could to try to get it back through some alternate strategy. It goes long there, we fall back to the back. Just part of it.”
The setback came at Lap 33 during green-flag stops. While race leader Christopher Bell had an 8.8-second service, Hamlin’s stop totaled 13.4 seconds, slowed by a combination of Hamlin stopped short in his pit stall, sluggish service on the right-front exchange and trouble on the left-rear. In that cycle, the No. 11 Toyota fell from fifth to 14th.
After finishing Stage 1 in 11th, Gabehart had Hamlin stay on the race track on older tires at the start of Stage 2 rather than pit for fresh tires in an effort to gain clean air. That call ultimately didn’t pan out as Hamlin struggled and fell through the field and outside the top 20 for a time.
“I made a really aggressive pit call trying to trying to bail us out of that,” Gabehart told NASCAR.com. “Aggression is important in those moments, and it’s served me well. That was just a little bit too aggressive. But we buried ourselves after that, so it wasn’t the pivotal moment. It just didn’t do us any favors.”
Hamlin ultimately finished Stage 2 in 19th place before disaster in the pits struck again. Stopping short in his stall again, the left-rear wheel wasn’t completely tightened before the jack was dropped to signal Denny’s departure. Instead, he had to reverse the No. 11 car back to the stall for the team to make sure the wheel was tight.
Then came a vibration that Hamlin nursed for the next 20 laps until the subsequent caution, during which the team determined a wheel weight from the right front was “gone,” likely causing the vibration.

Trapped with a loss of track position again, Gabehart ultimately had Hamlin save fuel for the final 72 laps, utilizing the same strategy Joey Logano and Co. employed en route to the victory.
“One bad issue compounds the next decision, right?” Gabehart said. “Especially in the Round of 8 when you’re racing against such good teams, if you get buried once, you’ve really got to try to find a way out of that. There’s track position and clean air and all those things, restarts. We saw what restarts can do to some of these playoff guys. So yeah, one bad play affects the next. No doubt that pit call is just one where, you know, if I had to do over again, I would have been aggressive. I just wouldn’t have been quite that aggressive.”
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The No. 11 team left Vegas with zero stage points and a total of 29 points tallied.
“In the Round of 8, that’s not enough points,” Gabehart said. “I mean, eighth with no stage points is not going to get it done, certainly considering, the setback we had for ourselves there late in the season with a huge penalty. So not the day we hoped for. You’ve just got to execute cleaner than that in the Round of 8. We’re just not executing on pit road.”
Hamlin and Gabehart never gave up on the day, but Gabehart wasn’t ready to pat himself on the back quite yet.
“The 11 team’s not going to talk about resiliency when you got the 22 team, Paul Wolfe and Joey Logano over there who embarrassed everybody in that category there,” Gabehart said. “I knew the minute they got in [to the Round of 8] Sunday night post-Charlotte, I wrote them into the final four first. Write it down. Joey Logano is going to find a way. It’s that simple. That team — it’s a team sport, so I don’t want to single Joey out. I think it’s a testament to how they do business. I knew they were going to get in, and they did.
“So yeah, I’m happy that we were able to salvage an eighth, which is better than we had ran for 230 laps. … But it’s not enough in this round.”