MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell chipped into Kyle Larson’s point lead Sunday at Martinsville Speedway. The problem is they needed to level the gap instead and left dissatisfied.
Errant pit strategy in Stage 1 of the Xfinity 500 ultimately put Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team behind from the jump, compounded by a mid-race spin and left-rear damage, leaving the veteran driver with a sixth-place finish, 70 points behind Larson heading to Homestead-Miami Speedway in the final race of The Chase presented by Mobil 1 on Nov. 8 (3 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“I’d say it’s kind of the story of The Chase, where we just didn’t capitalize on the speed that we had,” Hamlin said.
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Crew chief Chris Gayle opted for a strategy that left Hamlin on track for all 130 laps of Stage 1, a strategy the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team implemented as well to shadow the No. 11 team. The majority of the field, however, chose to split the stage and pit midway through instead. Those fresher tires blew by cars like Hamlin’s and Larson’s, leaving Hamlin 17th at the end of the stage and Larson 23rd, one lap down.
“It came down to the first stage. That was an absolute killer for us,” Hamlin said. “Obviously, our strategy did not work out. Staying out, it just had no tires left, and obviously lost all of our track position, and then got to start Stage 2 at the tail because it was a caution that just was poorly timed for us.
“We just fought the track position. It took all day just to get it back, and then obviously the damage didn’t help at all either. So it’s just tough day, but it was kind of a microcosm of a bad last nine weeks.”
In a post-race interview, Gayle agreed Stage 1 made all the difference but explained the thought behind his decision, including comparisons to early race leader Ryan Preece in the No. 60 RFK Racing Ford.
“We knew it was a tiny bit faster to one-stop it probably the way it was, but you’re always wanting to know what (tire degradation) looks like during the race,” Gayle said. “And honestly, we thought we had deg pretty close to the 60 early on, and so you got to that point where there’s lots of caution protection by not pitting right there. So if you get a caution at any point in that time before the last 12 laps of that, 15 laps of that, we were going to be in good shape. And then it looked like our deg was OK.
“And then when some guys started passing us late, the deg just really fell off. Like I don’t know if the tire was gone or what — there was still rubber on them, but they were pretty worn after that. And so then our deg just fell off a lot more, and you were in that no-man’s land. Well, now you can’t come and pit because you’re really at the risk of (going) two down.
“So you had that window of optimum just before, or a tiny bit late optimum. And at that point, when we were looking at it, we still thought, OK, well, this is going to come out worst case P3 to P5 for us, and if we had a caution anywhere before that happens, we’ll be in an OK spot. And then when we fell off that hard at the end of the stage, it didn’t matter.”
That left Gayle “somber” by the time the checkered flag waved, with his No. 11 car 21 seconds behind race winner William Byron.
“Seventy points is hard to overcome at Homestead,” Gayle said. “Obviously, Stage 1 leaves a bitter taste in your mouth because I think the rest of the race, we played out pretty well and clawed back, but it doesn’t matter, right? Like you needed to effectively win today or it wasn’t going to necessarily matter a whole lot.”
Christopher Bell, on the other hand, was on the right strategy from the jump with crew chief Adam Stevens. He never quite got all the way to the lead, but early speed surged the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota up the pylon and into the top five, appearing as a legitimate contender for the race win.
“At least (for) me inside the car, I think it fooled me to thinking I was better than I was,” Bell said. “And then yeah, once we restacked, I was kind of another pedestrian car.”
A series of unfortunate events at Lap 198 began to upend Bell’s day and led to a 10th-place finish, one lap down. Bell was on pit road at that time when Carson Hocevar spun exiting Turn 4, drawing the first caution flag for incident in Sunday’s event. Bell was able to remain on the lead lap, but Bell was penalized for speeding on pit road, forcing him to restart from the tail end of the field instead.
Just 10 laps after the restart, Bell received a bump from Joey Logano entering Turn 1 while Bell was also alongside Hamlin. That contact spun both Bell and Hamlin, putting Hamlin’s left-rear bumper into the wall. Both rallied from the incident for top-10 finishes, but Bell exits only slightly closer to Larson, 67 points back entering the season finale.
MORE: Logano makes contact that spins Bell, Hamlin
The numerous missed opportunities throughout the course of The Chase left Stevens feeling “terrible” after another disappointment at Martinsville.
“We just haven’t put together nine races, and I mean now we need lightning to strike two ways to get something out of it in Homestead,” Stevens told NASCAR.com. “We just haven’t had a clean nine races and weren’t our best today, but we were OK. But OK is not enough. When you stack a couple OKs on top of some of the not capitalizing on the good runs we’ve had, it just doesn’t add up to a championship.”
Bell agreed and points to mistakes long before Martinsville that cost them a far better chance opportunity of winning the NASCAR Cup Series championship next week at Homestead.
“Today we had a lot of positives, a lot of negatives, and it probably shook out where we should have,” Bell said. “We didn’t lose the championship by any means today. We lost the championship a couple of races earlier. Talladega was a big one. Gateway was a big one. The steering issue at Vegas was a big one. So yeah, we didn’t lose it today. We lost it earlier in the in The Chase.”
Hamlin and Bell did swap positions in the points standings on Sunday: Hamlin entered second, 73 points out while Bell was third, 74 points out; Bell leaves Martinsville second, 67 points behind Larson and Hamlin is third, 70 back. But the emotions before and after left a disappointing familiarity at their doorsteps as each pursue their first NASCAR Cup Series championship.
“I mean, felt like I did going into Martinsville,” Bell said. “We already know.”
“I mean it’s unrealistic for sure,” Hamlin said. “[The deficit] needed to be in the 40s — something like that — to be somewhat viable. But we’ll go there and do the dog-and-pony show mid-week and act like we can do it. But we just didn’t capitalize. Not a Chase we capitalized, and certainly did not execute to our best ability.”