Two weeks ago, Denny Hamlin’s championship looked ideally booked. Something that never happens in NASCAR, but let’s assume that for a moment. Here’s how: he had the No. 1 seed, a 25-point head start on the field, and a Chase schedule that basically read like a custom ‘Denny strength’ package. Now that lead is nine points. Nine. And the guy chewing through it is the same driver who broke Hamlin’s heart at Phoenix less than a year ago.
Let’s be clear about what this story is and what it isn’t. This isn’t a story about the No. 11 team falling apart. Denny Hamlin’s still leading. He still has eight races to work with, and a schedule that on paper still favors him. But something is happening here that deserves a skeptic’s look, because a cushion that size doesn’t evaporate on accident. It takes a driver getting hot at exactly the wrong time for the guy in front of him.
How a 55-point lead turns into nine
Denny Hamlin earned that head start the hard way. Four wins, 14 top fives, 17 top tens across 26 races, and an average Driver Rating of 100.6, the only number above 100 among the regulars. That’s what got him the fattest bonus in NASCAR’s new points reset: 100 extra points for winning the regular season, which put him 25 clear of Ryan Blaney when the Chase began. NASCAR’s own preseason model liked his chances too, calling him the strongest driver in the field at intermediate tracks and putting his championship odds right around 50-50 once you factored in a Chase slate stacked with tracks where he’s been great in seasons prior.
Then the racing actually started, and it hasn’t gone to plan. Christopher Bell won the Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington while Hamlin, who tangled with Michael McDowell late and banged up his toe link, limped home 18th. That knocked his lead down to 12 points, and over his own teammate, no less.
A week later at World Wide Technology Raceway in Gateway, Kyle Larson finally snapped a 51-race winless streak in one of the wildest finishes you’ll see all year, and Hamlin, who lost time on pit road on lap 199, could only manage ninth. That’s forty points gone in one race.
Do the math, and it’s almost hard to believe. Hamlin’s entire cushion over Larson was 55 points. Two races later, 46 of those points are gone. That’s not a slump situation. It’s just how things usually go for someone named Hamlin.
What actually happened at Darlington and Gateway
Larson’s turnaround wasn’t sudden, even if it looks that way from the outside. At Darlington, he started 25th after a rough qualifying draw and spent the whole night clawing forward. By the end, he’d led a race-high 99 laps and had a real shot at the win, until his crew chief, Cliff Daniels, made the call to keep him out on older tires during a late caution rather than pit with the fresher Toyotas behind him. It didn’t pay off. Larson faded to fifth. Daniels called it afterward a “pretty logical” gamble, and it’s hard to argue with the logic even if the result stung.
Gateway is where things really flipped. The race turned into an absolute demolition derby, 18 cautions, 87 caution laps, two separate overtimes before Larson finally cleared Joey Logano for good and beat his own Hendrick teammate Alex Bowman to the line by three-tenths of a second. He led 80 laps, won Stage 2, and got the shove he needed from Bowman on a restart with 13 laps to go. First win since Kansas back in May 2025. First time he’s been to victory lane in 51 races. And just like that, he jumped from seventh in the standings to second.
Denny Hamlin still leads. But the guy right behind him just showed everyone that his car has the speed to dominate long stretches of a race, whether or not it ends in a trophy.
Days earlier, Larson said that it would be “sick” to win the championship without a race win. Now, the win part has changed, and his luck might have, too.
The Chase changes the description
Here’s the part that’s harder to put a number on but matters just as much. All season, Hamlin’s growing points lead let him race loose. Chase stage points, take chances, shrug off the occasional bad day because the cushion could absorb it. That’s not how the Chase works. Every one of the 16 playoff drivers is still alive heading into Homestead, with no elimination rounds this time, meaning the whole thing comes down to who accumulates the most points across ten grueling races. That format rewards whoever peaks at the right moment far more than it rewards whoever had the best summer.
Larson picked up on that shift right away. Asked about Denny Hamlin’s rocky start to the Chase after Gateway, he didn’t claim to know exactly what’s going on inside the No. 11 shop, but he offered a theory.
“I don’t know if it’s because they were just racing free in the regular season, and now you’re trying to protect,” he said.
Take that for what it’s worth; it’s speculation, not a diagnosis. But Larson’s been on both sides of a points chase before, and he knows the psychology better than most. The leader has something to lose every single week. The guy behind him only has ground to make up.
Bristol shows up at an interesting time
Next up is the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday, September 19, the third round of the Chase. And if there’s a track built to let Denny Hamlin reset the narrative, it’s this one. Four career wins at Bristol, including a banging, 163-lap-led performance back in the spring of 2024. Short tracks have been his bread and butter for two decades.
Larson isn’t exactly a stranger to Bristol success either. Back in the spring of this year, he swept both stages and led a staggering 284 of 505 laps, only to lose it in overtime when Ty Gibbs, who’d stayed out on older tires during a late caution, held him off by five hundredths of a second, the closest finish at that track in 35 years. Larson wound up third behind Gibbs and Ryan Blaney. So no, Bristol doesn’t automatically hand Hamlin anything. It just raises the temperature for both of them, right when Hamlin can least afford another quiet Saturday night.
This isn’t a choking story
It would be easy to slap the old “Hamlin can’t close” label on this and move on. That’s lazy, and it misses what’s going on. Denny Hamlin has never really needed to make a big mistake to lose a title. More often, he’s done everything right and simply run into a driver who found something better in the two or three laps that mattered most.
Go back to Phoenix last November. Hamlin started on the pole, led a race-high 208 of 312 laps, and had a three-second cushion with four laps to go in the championship finale. Then William Byron’s tire let go, the caution came out, and the whole field scattered to pit road. Hamlin took four tires and restarted 10th. Several of his rivals, Larson included, gambled on two tires instead and jumped him.
Kyle Larson, who hadn’t led a single lap all day, held on to finish third and grabbed his second Cup title. Hamlin salvaged sixth. Nothing about that says he wasn’t good enough. It says how little a dominant afternoon can matter once a championship comes down to a handful of laps.
None of that guarantees anything repeats itself. Different year, different format, different circumstances entirely. But it’s a fair reminder that Hamlin’s weakness has never really been talent. It’s what happens when someone else gets the opportunity to turn the narrative in their favor.
He’s not the only one Denny Hamlin has to watch
Kyle Larson gets the headline, but he’s far from the only threat. Christopher Bell is third, 18 points back, after winning at Darlington and then getting swept up in a four-car wreck at Gateway involving Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick that dropped him to 19th that day. His seven runner-up finishes during the regular season tell you he doesn’t need a win every week to stay dangerous.
Blaney trails by 33 after a rough 35th-place run at Gateway, and Reddick sits 42 back following a 25th-place day. One bad race at a place like Gateway can undo months of steady work in an afternoon, and that cuts both ways for everyone in this field, Hamlin included.
That’s really the threat here. It’s not one driver getting hot. It’s a whole pack close enough that a single strong weekend, or a single disaster for the No. 11 team, can flip the entire picture. There’s still Talladega Superspeedway on the schedule later in the Chase, where track position and late-race chaos can wreck a championship run in about four seconds. Then comes the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval and the Martinsville short track before it all funnels down to Phoenix and, finally, Homestead.
History has a warning for whoever’s leading in September
NASCAR’s seen this exact story before. Back in 2011, Tony Stewart went into the Chase without a single regular-season win, then ripped off five victories in the final ten races, including Homestead, and tied Carl Edwards on points before winning the title on the tiebreaker. The lesson was never that leading in September dooms you. It’s that championships get decided by whoever runs strongest down the stretch, not whoever looked best getting there.
You see the same pattern elsewhere in racing. Kimi Raikkonen came from third in the Formula 1 standings to win the title at the final race of 2007. Sebastian Vettel did nearly the same thing in 2010, jumping from third to champion at the very last race in Abu Dhabi. Different sports, different points systems, same basic truth. Leading in the fall doesn’t mean much if you’re not leading in November.
Where this leaves things
None of this means Denny Hamlin’s cooked, and it would be wrong to read it that way. He’s still on top. He’s still got eight races left, several at tracks that suit him better than almost anyone else in the garage. His regular season was the best in the field by nearly every measure that matters, and the model that gave him roughly even odds to win it all wasn’t wrong about how strong his car has been. But a championship projection isn’t a trophy, and the gap between the two has already gotten a lot smaller in just two races.
What makes this genuinely dangerous for Hamlin isn’t the nine points by themselves. It’s how those nine points got there. Larson didn’t need a perfect start to close the gap down to single digits. He just needed one weekend where the speed and the opportunity lined up, and Gateway gave him exactly that. His team spent most of this season hunting for whatever was holding them back, and the last two weeks, a near-miss at Darlington followed by a win at Gateway, suggest they might have finally found it. Larson doesn’t sound rattled about any of it either.
“I don’t mind the struggle,” he said after Gateway. “I’m not scared of it.”
Denny Hamlin’s still the man everybody’s chasing, and that alone tells you what kind of year he’s had. But nobody hands out the trophy in September. It goes to whoever’s still standing when this thing rolls into Homestead in November, and right now, Kyle Larson has made that question a lot harder to answer than it looked two weeks ago.