DAYTONA BEACH Fla. – Denny Hamlin is a three-time winner of the DAYTONA 500.
Only two other drivers have enjoyed more trips to Victory Lane in the Great American Race—Richard Petty with a record seven wins and Cale Yarborough with four.
Hamlin scored his victories in 2016, 2019 and 2020, but since the advent of the Gen 7 race car in 2022, Hamlin has found it more difficult to win superspeedway races.
Part of the problem, he says, lies in the inability to qualify at the front of the field.
“Where I really feel like we’ve lost results on superspeedways, it is because we qualify in the back, and once the track gets log-jammed two-by-two or three-by-three, there’s nowhere to go,” Hamlin said on Wednesday during DAYTONA 500 Media Day at Daytona International Speedway.
Hamlin said his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team has made qualifying at Daytona a focus this year. The top two spots on the grid were to be settled on Wednesday night, with the rest of the field ordered according to the results of Thursday night’s Duel at Daytona qualifying races.
“We always said that qualifying didn’t matter at Daytona and Talladega,” Hamlin said. “That was true when you could really make a lot of moves; now it is really, really difficult. What I am just looking for is progression.
“If you look at all of the Toyotas, and we qualify on average 25th on these types of tracks, can we get that better? Can we move that number to 20th or 18th or something in the right direction to give ourselves a better chance.”
Asked what a fourth DAYTONA 500 win might mean to him, Hamlin was at a loss to explain.
“I can’t answer that,” he said. “I tried to figure out what it would mean to win one, and I didn’t have any idea until I won one, and I didn’t have any idea, until after I won two, what two meant.
“It’s all really, really hard to put into words—but the attention when you come back, you are in an elite class of drivers that have won this multiple times. It is just one of those things that stays on your resume forever.”
Source: Reid Spencer | NASCAR Wire Service
