Richard Petty had a fairly clear picture of what Denny Hamlin needed to do at Martinsville. Start up front, make the most of a track where he has been competitive, and put real pressure on Kyle Larson’s championship lead. When Hamlin won the pole for the penultimate race of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, Petty thought the opportunity was finally there.
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Instead, the afternoon became another example of how quickly a title opportunity can slip away. Hamlin recovered from a difficult opening stage and a mid-race incident to finish sixth, but Larson still walked away with a comfortable points advantage. Petty did not hide his disappointment when discussing the result on the Petty Racing Recap.
“I figured if Denny was ever going to show anything, it was going to be at Martinsville,” Petty said Hamlin’s pole position only raised his expectations. “When he started on pole, I said, ‘Okay, they’ve got their stuff together, and the 5 car is going to be hard-pressed to gain any points on him.’”
For a while, the race seemed to be following that script. Petty recalled that Hamlin looked okay through roughly the first half of the opening segment. But the advantage did not last. Hamlin and the No. 11 team had elected to stay out during the opening stage rather than pit for fresh tires, and the decision cost them track position. With the stage staying green, the cars that stopped gained the advantage while Hamlin fell back and missed out on stage points.
Larson made the same call and paid an even heavier price, dropping a lap and ending Stage 1 without points. That should have offered Hamlin and Joe Gibbs Racing an unusually valuable chance to close the gap. Yet Hamlin could not turn the opportunity into the kind of points swing the situation demanded.
A later incident involving Joey Logano further disrupted his afternoon, although the No. 11 driver managed to recover and finish sixth. Petty initially wondered whether Hamlin had finished seventh or eighth, but Dale Inman corrected him.
The King’s verdict was blunt: “That was really disappointing.”
The frustration was not simply about Hamlin failing to win at Martinsville. It was about the timing. Larson had been vulnerable, and Hamlin had started from the best possible position to make him pay. Instead, the No. 5 team recovered to ninth, limiting the damage from a race in which Larson had spent part of the afternoon a lap down. Hamlin gained only three points on Larson, while Christopher Bell gained seven. The two JGR drivers needed much more.
Hamlin has since acknowledged that his team did not make the most of its chances during the Chase. On Actions Detrimental, he said the No. 11 group “didn’t do their job as well as we could have,” pointing to execution, decisions and missed opportunities. He did not suggest that the team lacked speed; rather, he felt its results were similar to the regular season but its execution was not good enough across the nine-race stretch.
That admission gives Petty’s disappointment another layer: Martinsville was not an isolated bad break, but another weekend in which Hamlin needed more from his team and did not get it.
The championship picture is now stark. Larson left Martinsville with a 67-point lead over Bell and a 70-point advantage over Hamlin. With 76 points available in a perfect race, Larson needs only nine points at Homestead-Miami Speedway to secure his third Cup Series title. Hamlin has already described his own chances as “unrealistic,” and the numbers explain why.
Petty has adjusted his expectations accordingly. When Inman turned the conversation toward Homestead, Petty said he was no longer concentrating on who would win the championship. His attention had shifted to the No. 11 and No. 20 cars and which one would finish second in the standings. He also felt the driver in fourth was too far back to make a meaningful challenge.
His advice for Hamlin and Bell was straightforward: focus on the car directly ahead. If the two JGR drivers are racing one another for the runner-up position, Petty believes they should concentrate on that battle rather than spend energy worrying about the rest of the field.
As for Larson, Petty sees little reason for the championship leader to take unnecessary risks.
“All he’s got to do is have a good start and he can stop halfway through the race and still win a championship,” he said.
It was an assessment of just how much room Larson has earned for himself heading into the finale.
That is what makes Petty’s reaction to Martinsville sting. Hamlin had the pole, Larson had a rare off-day, and the No. 11 still could not create a serious championship swing. Homestead may give Hamlin a chance to finish second in the standings, but the title window Petty expected him to use at Martinsville has all but closed.