MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Chris Gabehart had that feeling, something he estimated he’s had maybe a half-dozen times in the six years he’d spent as crew chief for Denny Hamlin’s No. 11 Toyota. Gabehart’s title has changed this season, but even in his new role as Joe Gibbs Racing’s competition director, he couldn’t shake the feeling that shadowed him this weekend: He liked the cut of the No. 11 team’s jib, and just knew that Hamlin would be Sunday’s race winner.

So moments before the field inched off pit road for the start of Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series showdown at rugged Martinsville Speedway, Gabehart leaned into the cockpit to get Hamlin’s ear and share his feelings — that feeling — even as he saw the veteran driver’s eyes roll. Hamlin, after all, had come so close in recent years at one of his home-state tracks, but the empty cupboard in the win column here had weighed on him each season since 2015.

Still, Gabehart persisted.

“I said, I got it today. It’s you, it’s you,” Gabehart recalled. “And I told all of them. I said the 11 is winning today. And he says, ‘Your batting average for that’s like 10%.’ I said, ‘Bullcrap. You know it’s way better than that.'”

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Roughly three hours later, Hamlin embraced Gabehart alongside the Victory Lane stage and confessed: “You’re right. It’s way better than that.”

Hamlin stirred up the nostalgic aura of the days when Martinsville wins flowed like water and grandfather clock trophies sprouted like spring flowers for the No. 11 team, dominating Sunday’s Cook Out 400 for his first NASCAR Cup Series victory of the season. The win was validating on a number of levels for both Hamlin and JGR, affirming the changes the organization made in the offseason, buoying the spirits of new No. 11 crew chief Chris Gayle, and providing a real-time referendum on whether the oldest driver in the Cup Series field could still do it.

Hamlin answered the last question with a resounding exclamation point, leading 274 of the 400 laps and pulling away from all would-be challengers down the stretch to prevail by a convincing 4.617 seconds. “Certainly felt like the old days,” said Hamlin, who became a six-time Martinsville winner in collecting his 55th Cup Series triumph, tying him for 11th on the circuit’s all-time win list with NASCAR Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace.

Wallace was 47 years old when he snared that final victory — in this springtime race at Martinsville nearly 21 years ago — and he retired one season later. Hamlin is 44 and every bit the elder statesman in the current-day Cup Series garage, and though he has fewer driving days in front of him than behind him, the JGR vet says his competitive bent hasn’t wavered — whether it’s racing, basketball, golf, pickleball, you name it. Brandishing an “11 Against The World” flag in a post-race stance that was equal parts triumphant and defiant drove that point home; Hamlin can still turn back the clock — grandfather or otherwise.

“I mean, I probably am the king of irrational confidence,” Hamlin said. “I mean, generally speaking, I know that when I’ve got the car to do it, I can be the best, so … I haven’t felt like I’ve held back the car at any point. Certainly, I’m not immune to understanding that Father Time is undefeated. Everything that I need to be good to be a race car driver is still really sharp. I feel like it hasn’t happened yet. It will, but not yet.”

Hamlin’s driving career may not have many drastically new chapters ahead, not for a driver who has spent his entire 20-year career with the same organization. But this season has already thrown a doozy his way, with Gabehart’s promotion leading to a new voice atop the No. 11 team’s pit box for the first time since 2019.

Hamlin expressed his initial shock this past offseason, shortly after hearing the news that one of the garage’s longest-running driver-crew chief pairings would be dissolved. Insert Gayle, who was already a longtime JGR hand primarily working with younger drivers, and he spoke openly before the season began about the pressures of accepting such a high-profile role with a proven winner.

So as the laps counted down Sunday, some of those nerves came through with Gayle’s fellow pit-box inhabitants anxiously and collectively tapping feet in hopes that no cautions or other late-race maladies would halt Hamlin’s charge, so much so that the crew chief joked that he needed to install a damper to reduce the shaking. The checkered flag’s arrival brought a sense of relief, both for Sunday’s race and the early assessment of the team’s season-long goals.

“Probably me more than anybody else, right? I’m the only one that’s changed,” Gayle said. “They’ve won races previous to me. If anybody is going to have pressure on them, it was me. I think anytime you have change, there’s that concern. They haven’t shown it to me, the team hasn’t. I’m sure in the back of their minds, human nature is, ‘Are we going to win as much as we did before?’ We’re doing some changes here. How is this all going to work?

“It’s great. I feel like we’ve worked well together. But for sure to get that first win out of the way and get it done early probably relieves them all, myself included.”

Gabehart’s message to Gayle at the outset was to immerse himself in the No. 11 team’s culture, gain an understanding of how the group works, and then learn how he fits best within that dynamic. Victories go a long way toward earning that sought-after trust, and Hamlin singled out Gayle with an emphatic note of thanks on the team radio on the cool-down lap.

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But the overall changes appear to have mostly taken as well. Gabehart now has oversight of all competition aspects for all four JGR cars, and the organization has won four of the season’s first seven Cup Series events — three in a row by Christopher Bell and now, one from Hamlin.

“So there was obviously a lot of stuff that went on in the offseason that was, I think everybody understood it made a lot of sense, but there was a lot of … it was hard on a lot of people and not an easy decision for myself, and certainly left Denny and some others kind of wondering, I’m sure,” Gabehart said. “But, man, it is nice to be racking up wins and have cars as fast as they were today. I think at one point, the JGR/23XI cars would have been top six if you blocked them up front, they’d have stayed there. But I would be lying if I said at Phoenix (where Hamlin was runner-up) and again here I wasn’t cheering the loudest inside for the 11. You know, Denny’s the one who gets a lot of the credit and the accolades. He’s the face of it. But the reality is that 11 team was special, special to me. Took a lot of years to build it, the chemistry and the camaraderie and for them to come out and finally win a grandfather clock after 11 years is a big deal to me. So just super proud of them.”

When Hamlin last won at Martinsville in 2015, Gabehart was a team engineer with the No. 11 crew. He made his crew chief debut in the Xfinity Series for JGR the following year, then joined the Cup Series rotation with the No. 11 team in 2019. That meant he missed out on the track’s grandfather clock prize, a time-worn tradition for Martinsville winners since the mid-1960s.

For the second time this weekend, Gabehart had that feeling.

“I will get a clock,” Gabehart said, adding with a laugh, “and he is buying it.”