PHOENIX, Ariz: For the third consecutive season and fourth time overall, Denny Hamlin’s wish to become a NASCAR Cup Series champion came up short again in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix (Ariz.) Raceway.
The driver of the No. 11 FedEx Toyota Camry maintained a competitive pace throughout the race’s 312 laps and it seemed that after Hendrick Motorsports dominated a majority of the race, a crash by Anthony Alfredo at the beginning of routine pit stops in Stage 3 shifted the tide in the favor of Joe Gibbs Racing.
Hamlin’s teammate Martin Truex Jr. who was on pit road when the caution waved inherited the race lead for the Lap 256 restart. Over the next 27 laps, Hamlin showed that he had a better car than his JGR teammate and had closed within three car lengths of taking his shot at the race lead of the race, but a caution for debris at Lap 282 halted Hamlin’s progress and threw the race into the hands of the pit crew for the final stop of the race.
A good pit stop by Hamlin’s FedEx team sent him second off pit road for the Lap 289 restart.
A bold move by Truex on the restart dropped Hamlin to third and unfortunately a 23-lap sprint to the checkered flag wasn’t long enough for Hamlin to make a charge settling for his 19th top-five finish of the year and third overall in the NASCAR Cup Series championship point standings.
“I really liked where we were at with about 25 to go,” said Hamlin after the race. “We were just exceptional in the long run, which wasn’t too surprising, but started running the 19 back down there and got within a couple car lengths and obviously that debris caution changed a lot.
“Special congrats to (Kyle) Larson and his team. Those guys, any time you can win 10 races in a year, you’re absolutely a deserving champion. They did a great job on the last pit stop and got him out there, and it was just set sail after that.”
With his 17th full-time season in the NASCAR Cup Series complete, Hamlin didn’t have a whopping seven wins to his credit as he did in 2020, but solid season-long stats kept the 40-year-old driver in the headlines throughout the 36-race, nine-month season.
His third-place finish is his best Cup championship finish since finishing third in 2014, where he competed in 35 of the 36 races after missing the spring race at Auto Club (Calif.) Speedway with a sinus infection.
In addition to his two wins at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway and Las Vegas (Nev.) Motor Speedway, Hamlin delivered 19 top-five and 25 top-10 finishes and 1,502 laps led.
“Proud of my team,” added Hamlin. “Really great effort adjusting on the car all day, getting it so much better, and thank our partners in Toyota, FedEx, Coca-Cola, Jordan Brand. Just a really good year. A really, really good year, and things just didn’t pan out.
“We needed that thing to go green those last 25 laps, and it didn’t.”
For the model of consistency, Hamlin completed all but four laps this season. Of the 9,200 laps available, Hamlin completed 9,196 of the laps with three laps lost at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway in April during an incident in Stage 2 and one lap at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway where he ran short on fuel.
Hamlin realizes he doesn’t know how many more times he’ll be in the Championship 4 in the future, but the Chesterfield, Va. native reiterated that he left nothing on the table on Sunday afternoon and is at peace with his finish and points placement knowing there was nothing more that he could do.
“Well, you think about it, and I think about it, that this is a great opportunity,” sounded Hamlin. “This is the last generation of this car that I took a very good liking to over the last three years. We don’t know what the Next-Gen car brings. We don’t know will our team be as good. Like there’s just many, many question marks that happens after this.
“That’s why we really put so much emphasis on let’s try to win this, win this this year. 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.
“I have to live with the result because I can’t change it. Disappointed, absolutely, for sure. But I knew kind of 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. We knew that our percentage was low, and that was the case. 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.”
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
