Denny Hamlin began the championship weekend with a chance to win his first NASCAR Cup Series title after a consistently solid season that saw him in contention for the regular-season title at one point.
With 46 Cup victories – second all-time behind Junior Johnson – the soon-to-be 41-year-old racer is the winningest current driver without a championship on his résumé. He’s won the Daytona 500 three times, as well as races at Talladega Superspeedway, Darlington Raceway, and Bristol Motor Speedway.
And it appeared that Hamlin would finally get there as he appeared relaxed and confident heading into Sunday’s season finale at Phoenix Raceway, where he had two career wins.
Hamlin, who finished third in the championship race to first-time champion Kyle Larson, has yet to win a Cup championship. Martin Truex Jr., a teammate of Hamlin’s at Joe Gibbs Racing, finished second, while Chase Elliott, a fourth-place finisher for Hendrick Motorsports, finished fifth.
“I have to live with the result because I can’t change it,” Hamlin said. “Disappointed, absolutely, for sure. But I knew going into today I was going to need the race to go a certain way. If it goes the way it did last year, it goes green out, we’re probably winning. But it didn’t.
“Many of these races come down to green-white checkers or shootouts at the end, and that just wasn’t our strength and hasn’t been ever.”
Hamlin’s first checkered flag of 2021 didn’t come until the first of ten playoff races at Darlington Raceway in September, after winning 13 races in the 2019 and 2020 seasons. He won another playoff race in Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but with the previous seven champions all taking the checkered flag in the championship race, he’d have to win at Phoenix to claim his first title.
Larson and Elliott held the advantage on the short runs in Sunday’s race, while Hamlin and Truex had the advantage on the longer circuits. And that wasn’t something new, according to Hamlin.
“Those cars were just superior to ours for the second half of the year in every aspect on the short run,” he continued.
“But honestly, there’s just nothing else I could have done. There’s nothing else. I drove as hard as I could every lap. I didn’t have the speed for the first 20. It was evident in a lot of the restarts we had. It was actually overachieved in quite a few. But that was it.”
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