TALLADEGA, Ala. — Kyle Larson’s stunning late-race run to victory in Sunday’s YellaWood 500 left an unsettling quiet among his Chase challengers along pit road.
Most stunned, perhaps, was Denny Hamlin. He opened the afternoon within striking distance of The Chase presented by Mobil 1 lead, escaped from a big wreck to challenge for the win late only to end the day in eighth place and significantly worse in points.
MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega
Hamlin’s disappointment mirrored that of virtually everyone in the running for the championship except Chase leader Larson.
In an odd movement of numbers, Hamlin jumped from fourth to second in the playoff standings but lost 42 points to Larson and is 73 behind. Hamlin potentially can make gains next week at Martinsville Speedway, one of his best tracks, but twilight is falling on the season with only two races remaining.
Is Hamlin realistically out of the running for what would be his first championship?
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Hamlin said. After climbing from his car, he took a few minutes to recover from what had been a stress-filled day.
“The 5 (Larson) is on a massive run at the right time of the year,” he said. “If you asked me at the start of the day if I would take an eighth, I mean, probably. So, it’s just what we’ve got. It’s disappointing, but also like our day could have been a (expletive) ton worse.
“We didn’t get stage points. We tried. But it’s just a lot of games going on. It’s really, really hard, tough to do it.”
Hamlin’s car was banged up in the multi-car wreck on Lap 132, but he was strong enough to run in the top five late in the day.
“I got clipped,” he said. “It knocked out some of the front-end toe, and obviously hit the body. It was a handful, but it was at least serviceable. It wasn’t undriveable.”
Hamlin said NASCAR “did the best it could” with length changes to the Talladega stages. “Obviously, it worked in the last two (shorter) stages to where you didn’t have to worry about the fuel mileage. Unfortunately for us, they designed a car that’s just got so much drag in it that it’s not — the racing was just definitely different.”
In the mad mix near the finish, Hamlin was running second to Ricky Stenhouse Jr. but couldn’t hold onto a top five.
“I went with Ricky,” Hamlin said. “I was committed to stay with Ricky because I knew he was going to do what was best for him and not what he was told to do. Then I got clipped on the inside.”
Stenhouse said he had a rearview mirror filled with Hamlin. “I know Denny wanted to move forward,” he said. “I had him behind me and I felt like I was in great position. It just kept breaking up there down the backstretch after I took the lead. The lines were breaking loose. They kept running into each other, but then I was kind of a sitting duck.”
Larson charged to the inside and won the race.
On a day when Chase challenger Joey Logano flew through the air, others slammed hard into the outside wall and big wrecks either eliminated or damaged Chase contenders, the post-race computers churned out numbers that resulted in grim calculations for everybody except Larson.
Following Hamlin in third place in the standings is Christopher Bell, 74 points back. Bell spun trying to enter pit road early in the race, hit the inside wall and damaged his car. He finished 35th. Joining him in the lower regions of the finish order were Ryan Blaney (38th), Tyler Reddick (37th), Logano (34th) and Chase Briscoe (33rd). Blaney, Logano and Briscoe left the race after accidents, and Reddick limped home with significant damage.
In the end, Larson, who had raced 58 times on drafting tracks without success, was the only one of the leading championship contenders to leave Talladega with a strengthened title position.