Bristol, Tennessee — Denny Hamlin’s first Round of 16 in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs was a house of horrors, but there was one bright moment that helped the veteran overcome a big postseason disadvantage. A fourth-place finish on Saturday night, when Kyle Larson turned Bristol Motor Speedway into his own playground, provided Hamlin and the No. 11 crew with the run they needed, if not the one they desired.
Two of his Joe Gibbs Racing colleagues, Ty Gibbs and Martin Truex Jr., exited Saturday’s Bass Pro Shops Night Race with neither needs nor wants met. Both drivers were caught speeding on pit road at various stages during the 500-lap event, resulting in insurmountable gaps and early eliminations. Gibbs dropped from six points above the elimination line entering Bristol to miss the cut by 11 points; Truex’s championship eligibility in his final full-time season expired, and he missed the cut by 21 points by the conclusion of the night.
The only driver to overcome a pre-race disadvantage in the playoff standings was Hamlin, who improved from minus-six to plus-15 in the elimination race. Advancing was no easy task, especially after finishing 24th (Atlanta) and 23rd (Watkins Glen) to begin the three-race cycle.
“It’s just like, finally a decent run, right?” Hamlin stated on pit road after making it to the Round of 12 for the sixth straight year. “So, we’re either in the 30s or the top five, right? Simply put, I want to get back on track with winning, and I believe today is a solid step in that direction, followed by Kansas, where I am very confident. So I definitely feel like this is a reset. This is
Finishes of sixth and third in the stages allowed the No. 11 team to gain 13 points just over the halfway point, putting Hamlin’s name in green on the running playoff scoreboard. No. 11 crew chief Chris Gabehart informed Hamlin over team radio communications that the prerace disadvantage had been overcome, adding with a pep talk flair: “We’re going to win, so it doesn’t matter, but just so you know.”
Hamlin ran as high as second in the running order, so the winning prediction fell slightly short, but holding on for a top-five finish at one of NASCAR’s tougher tests was enough to get through the first round.
“Call me what you want, but my first emotion is, I’m mad we didn’t win at my favorite track,” Gabehart said with a laugh. “I mean, when I tell you this race means more to me than the playoffs, I mean it, and if we come here and put on a winning performance, the points take care of themselves. So, I wish we could have won. However, having said that, we didn’t have the margin that Larson or Bell or some of those other guys had to let it all hang out here, which is what you have to do with 200 (laps) to go to win this race. I mean, these guys, I so wish everybody understood how hard it is to do what you’re watching out there. At this level, you cannot give 99% — it’s not enough. So to race from a deficit and in the last 200, kind of have to not lose what you’ve earned, rather than have this big buffer to be able to risk it, that’s the difference.”
The buffers went away for Hamlin’s less fortunate teammates, who were the only drivers to reach this year’s playoffs on the basis of points.
Truex carried realistic hopes of advancing through the first two-thirds of the race, putting his No. 19 Toyota up to second place behind Larson and accumulating 16 stage points to bolster his chances. His speeding bust on Lap 333 during the final caution period of the race knocked him to 26th for the final restart and onto the other side of the playoff bubble.
“No option other than to drive the piss out of it,” crew chief James Small told Truex on the No. 19 radio. Truex, however, managed just 24th place — his eighth consecutive finish of 20th or worse — and said later that his penalty was for .09 mph over the limit.
“Just really frustrated, upset,” Truex said. “Hate it for my guys. You know, they worked so hard and we had a shot at it tonight. It wasn’t going to be easy. I know there was no guarantee. I think they said we had to run second or third to make it through, so it was going to be tough. I don’t know if we were quite good enough, but it would have been nice to find out at least, and just hate it that I screwed it up for everybody.”
Asked how he would walk away from Saturday night’s race with his hopes for a second Cup Series title dashed, Truex mixed the glum emotions with shades of optimism.
“I mean, been getting used to swallowing disappointment lately, so I don’t know,” Truex said. “It sucks, but we’ve got seven more races to try to go out on some high notes with this team and hopefully win a race. That’d be awesome, and that’s going to be our focus from here on out.”
Gibbs’ speeding penalty came earlier, shortly after he’d placed a competitive eighth in Stage 1. The 21-year-old driver shaved too much time off Bristol’s curved Section 6 of pit road, and the punishment for the shortcut sent him to the tail of the lead lap — 24th place.
“The speeding penalty is on me,” Gibbs said post-race. “Just we run under the (tachometer) lights so close, and I just got a little bit too much, I guess. My fault. Unfortunate. Proud of these guys and all the effort that they’ve given me and we’ll keep hammering down.”
Gibbs never quite recovered, and the deficit left him out of the stage-point conversation at Stage 2. He diligently worked his way back to a 15th-place finish, but got no higher on the leaderboard after his tires gave out during the long, final green-flag stretch.
The penalty was a glaring mark for the No. 54 team on elimination night at Bristol, but the sum of his first-round finishes — including a 17th at Atlanta and a 22nd last weekend at Watkins Glen — made the difference.
“Just disappointing, right?” said No. 54 crew chief Chris Gayle. “In the grand scheme, what was it, 11 points out? There are a lot of places over the last three races that we collectively as a group left 11 points on the table. We needed to bring better cars last week, and we didn’t do it, you know what I mean. We had a good car at Atlanta and maybe didn’t get the finish at the end we needed. We had a speeding penalty today, got him in the position where he needed to drive his butt off, and he did at the end, and we just got the longer run and didn’t get those caution and split to where you could do that and not run the tires off of it.
“It is what it is. Learn from it, right? The first round is very important, right, especially if you start off with a bad run. You’ve just got to maximize what you’ve got.”
