There was an air of confidence around Denny Hamlin before the Chase, which quickly turned to desperation in Las Vegas. With just three laps to go in stage one, Hamlin was chasing down Ryan Blaney to finish the stage in P3, and he made an uncharacteristic mistake. His No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota slipped out from under him while he overdrove it in an effort to steal a single point.
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Not only did he fail to get the extra point, but the overdriving in that moment left him out of stage point contention completely. Hamlin finished 16th and picked up 22 points. On a day that his JGR teammate won, the Hamlin mistake proved to be even graver than initially perceived, and it’s beginning to feel like another season of almosts for Hamlin.
“I think that there is a sense to me that feels like when you listen to Denny speak, especially after he hasn’t been to victory lane, he feels defeated to me before you even get started with the weekend,” said Kevin Harvick on his Happy Hour podcast. “And even after he qualified on the pole this week, you listen to his interview, it’s like, well, now we got to put all the pieces together. It’s like there’s always that little bit of hesitation.”
Hamlin’s Chase hasn’t gone to plan. 18th in Darlington, 9th at Gateway, and 8th in Bristol showed an upward trend for the JGR veteran, but he couldn’t capitalize on tracks suited to him and the Toyota.
Kansas was better, yet still. Hamlin finished 3rd and picked up 51 points. Kansas crucially was the start of a three-race stretch of intermediate tracks. JGR and Toyota were supposed to be the frontrunners at these tracks. But it was Kyle Larson who flipped the narrative with a maximum (76) point day. Hamlin did, however, say that he was targeting good days at the three intermediate tracks and that for him meant 50-plus-point days. While he achieved it in Kansas, Vegas was a big letdown.
Hamlin entered Las Vegas Motor Speedway as the winner of the two previous races at the track and also took pole in qualifying. From there, he made the mistake he did. On a track where he should have been dominant, those missed points will be ones he rues going forward.
“It’s tough when you get into this time of the season, and especially when you’ve been through as many of them as Denny has been through that haven’t gone your way, for it to not just instant be like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’” Harvick said. “I think that one thing that makes you believe that it gets to him a little bit is when you see these moments with Denny now. Very easy to do in the Gen 7 car and just have it get out from underneath you, but not something that we see ever from Denny Hamlin.”
“It’s these moments just now they’re starting to pile up, or five weeks in and they’re piling up, right? Uh, with those mistakes and the pit crew and the situations that we’ve gone through and with the 11 cars,” Harvick added. “So yeah, I mean it’s not the same type of confidence that we saw 10 weeks ago, and it’s not the same when something goes bad.”
What’s worse than things going badly for Hamlin is that his closest rival is capitalizing on all of it. Kyle Larson, who entered the Chase without any wins, has two of them now, and he’s got a 40-point lead at the top of the table.
Larson in the No.5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet has literally laid out the blueprint for what a championship run requires. He was 7th entering the Chase, 55 points down on Hamlin. So in five races, Larson has made up 95 points on Hamlin. And he achieved that through a 5th-place finish at Darlington, two wins at Gateway and Kansas, and two second-place finishes in Bristol and Vegas.
More importantly than finishing high up, Larson has picked up stage points galore, and that has proved how stage points are such a crucial denominator.
Larson picked up nine stage points in Darlington, 18 at Gateway en route to his win, 11 at Bristol and in Kansas he won both stages before winning the race do he picked up 20 stage points. In Vegas, Larson pitted early to make an adjustment, which sent him a lap down. He did recover to finish 10th in stage two, picking up one point. Larson has a total of 59 stage points in the Chase.
Hamlin started strong with 16 stage points in Darlington before he managed just five at Gateway and eight in Bristol. Kansas was a solid day with 17 stage points, but in Vegas he managed none.
Despite a second-place finish in Vegas, Larson could only add 14 points to his lead over Hamlin. That was on the back of the lack of stage points. If Hamlin has to make a comeback to win the title, he will need hefty stage point days ahead as well as wins.
Charlotte would be a good place to start. Hamlin won the Coca-Cola 600 in 2022, and Larson won it the year before in 2021. They are entering the next race on the back of finishing third and fifth, respectively, in a rain-curtailed race earlier this season, which Daniel Suárez won.