Following Sunday’s race at Martinsville Speedway, Denny Hamlin is still looking for his first victory of the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season.
As the laps ticked away, Hamlin led a race-high 276 laps and had the speed to retake the lead on the final restart, but he couldn’t hold off Martin Truex Jr.
“I thought it was a matter of time,” he admitted. “With about 25 to go or so, he already got into my rear bumper, kind of beating the back end off. It was just a matter of time.”
He went on to say that during the penultimate run, Truex was just able to turn the bend better than the No. 11 team, eventually losing the race lead to his teammate with 14 laps remaining.
Despite the fact that he has yet to win a race, Joe Gibbs Racing’s driver has had a fantastic year. In the first eight races, he has seven top-five finishes and a 4.5 average result.
Even so, one or two cars have always been able to beat Hamlin in the last moments of every race so far.
“Yeah, I mean, we definitely would like to have more (playoff points), for sure,” he said. “But the way we’re running, we can win any given week. We’ve just gotten beat by one or two cars each and every week that have just hit the setup a little bit better than we did.
“But it’s hard to complain. I don’t know what the record is for most points scored in eight races, but I think we pretty much got to be there (laughter). We don’t finish any worse than third in every stage, obviously we’re finishing in the top three or four every race.
“Just keep building on that, look at the positives, try not to be negative. Wins, we’re getting closer. We’re getting there. We just got to — nothing saying we can’t win the next three races in a row.”
Hamlin is still in top place in the regular season standings, but he is eighth in the playoff rankings, trailing only this year’s seven winners.
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