MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Denny Hamlin dominated the day at Martinsville Speedway. But the winningest active driver at “The Paperclip” didn’t leave with his seventh grandfather clock.
Hamlin led a race-high 292 laps in Sunday’s Cook Out 400, but two late cautions took the lead away from the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, and Hamlin was never able to re-pass Chase Elliott, who drove away to his first win of 2026 while Hamlin finished second.
RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Martinsville
Hamlin radioed at Lap 356 of 400 that “I’ve got something going on with the rear of my car under braking.”
“It just felt different in the rear that run, so we’ll check it out,” Hamlin said. “But no excuses, we just got beat.”
Post-race debrief for the No. 11 team confirmed Hamlin’s suspicions.
“It looks like we had an issue with the left-rear wheel being a tiny bit loose — loose enough he probably could tell,” Gayle said. “There’s some fraying on the pins and some wear there, so it was definitely loose.”
Until that point, Hamlin was seemingly untouchable. William Byron worked past Hamlin for the race lead in lapped traffic at Lap 39, but six laps later, Hamlin drove right back by the No. 24 car. But track position, Hamlin said, ultimately proved too much to overcome, particularly battling instability in the rear of his car.
“It’s just the ability to have the cleaner air for the longer period of time made me heat my stuff up, which is what I did to 35 other guys for the bulk of the race,” Hamlin said. “So it just, once you run that dirty air for extended period of time, the car typically goes away.”
While dirty air was a factor, so too was added Goodyear rubber that was run into the asphalt throughout 400 grueling laps of competition around the 0.526-mile short track.
“We were a little tighter late as rubber got laid down,” Gayle said. “It was a little worse for us, harder for us to kind of get back through there as well. To be fair, Stage 1, you might hit it right off the truck. And then you start the race after everybody’s had three, four or five pit stops, everybody tightens up a little bit more, right? And so I think there’s a little bit of both of that going on.”
While disappointed to walk away without its second win of 2026, the No. 11 team was able to take solace in the new Chase format. Wins are no longer guaranteed tickets to a postseason run. Instead, the 16 highest point totals propel teams into the 10-race championship hunt.
But when a team has a car as dominant as Hamlin’s was Sunday, leaving Martinsville with anything but a grandfather clock is sure to sting.
“It’s just a gut punch to lead that many laps and not win the race,” Gayle said. “But that’s not really fair, right? If you do that consistently enough, you’ll win your share of them, and that’s about all you can control. I mean, it looked like we were having some issues on restarts, too, that Denny talked about a little bit. I think that was a choice with an engine setting that we ran that may have caused some problems and made it harder, so we could have helped ourselves there, too.”
The day wasn’t completely without controversy for Hamlin. In a battle for third with Ryan Blaney, Hamlin washed up off Turn 4 and ultimately ran Blaney into the outside wall.
“I got ran in the fence,” Blaney told NASCAR.com. “That was my perspective.”
WATCH: Blaney recaps Martinsville performance
Blaney, who ran inside the top five much on Sunday’s race, radioed the “toe’s knocked out of it” after the impact.
“I lost control off Turn 4, spun the rears and just got higher than I wanted to,” Hamlin explained.
Hamlin told MRN Radio he needed to go talk with Blaney about the incident to apologize. Blaney ultimately finished sixth but felt he could have fought for the victory if not for that run-in.
“It’s definitely unfortunate what happened,” Blaney said. “I don’t really think I deserved what happened. It was the first time we were around each other all day, so I’m pretty curious of why I got stuffed in there like that. But yeah, I mean, disappointing to not run better than what we did. But on the other side, proud of the day that we had and thought we could contend for the win, and that kind of took us out. But overall, proud of the effort and pace and just didn’t really work out.”
Told that Blaney thought the incident was unnecessary, Hamlin said: “I wouldn’t disagree.”
MORE: Cup Series standings | Cup Series schedule
The series is off for Easter weekend but will return at Bristol Motor Speedway with the Food City 500 on Sunday, April 12 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).