Denny Hamlin's Great Shot at NASCAR Title Spoiled by Late-Race Gamble
It was a very disappointed Denny Hamlin who stood on pit road of Homestead-Miami Speedway after the checkered flag fell on the Ford EcoBoost 400, giving interview after interview. It may have been the toughest interviews he had to give in a week full of media activity.
You could see it on his face. He nearly had the race and the championship won. It was in his grasp.
Then, with 17 laps to go, a gamble—that should have paid off.
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“We were walking away from them and the next closest guy with tires was in seventh, I believe,” said crew chief Darian Grubb in a post-race interview with his manufacturer. “So, we had it wrapped up there.”
Well, not quite.
In the car, Hamlin was worried that maybe his tires weren’t cycling properly. That meant, they may not have had enough time during the caution to cool off, be a little less slick and a bit more sticky than tires on the other cars, including race winner Kevin Harvick, who was on newer tires.
"It was hard, especially since I was on hot tires and older tires than those guys,” said Hamlin in a post-race interview on live television. “ (I was) Just trying to fight and get all I could and was getting bad restarts and spinning the tires trying to go. (I) Couldn't really time it right and restarts were something that was hindering us throughout the day with getting going.”
He had fallen back from the race lead to second. There was one more restart, but his tires were even older, slicker and hotter. After leading 50 laps, many of them during the final segment of the race, Denny Hamlin ended up finishing in seventh.
Race lost. Championship lost.
“We didn't have a short run car and then when we were on older tires at the end compared to those guys—we were just a sitting duck,” added Hamlin.
Sometimes those late race gambles do pay off and sometimes they don’t. Crew chief Grubb used a similar gamble in 2011 while on the pit box directing Tony Stewart. It worked then. Stewart went on to win the championship.
Was the difference between then and now Stewart, or was it the tires or was it something else? Hard to pinpoint, but Grubb felt confident enough to run that same play a second time and unfortunately this time, it didn’t pay off.
“The two quick cautions are what killed us,” Grubb continued in his post-race interview as he described how his well-thought-out plan began to collapse in front of him.
“Then (the) two quick cautions—then the guys at the in-between that pitted, between the guys with us and tires. I just killed us. But, I'm very proud of the team. Everybody hung in there. I made that call. And I knew some guys were going to be aggressive.”
He fell on the sword. It has to be good to know that you’ve got a crew chief that will fall on the sword.
But it doesn’t change the reality of the situation.
“We knew a race win was what it was going to take,” said Hamlin during the same post-race interview. “Just got killed with that strategy there at the end and all those cautions really hurt us a lot allowing those guys to close back up. It's just part of it. Sometimes [the breaks] fall your way and sometimes they don't. Unfortunately, the breaks didn't really go our way at the end of the race today."
Instead, the breaks went well on Sunday for the race winner and new champion, Kevin Harvick.
To make things even worse, a similar fate befell Hamlin in 2010, as he went into the final race of the season leading the points. A combination of the stress of the final week before the race and his rival Jimmie Johnson playing head games resulted in a disastrous final race and a lost championship to Johnson. It took Hamlin several seasons to forget that.
Hamlin has since matured. He’s started a family and spent time with a sports psychologist, making sure that the next time he came this close he wouldn’t be defeating himself.
That Hamlin is here is no mistake. The 2014 season began on a high note for him; he won everything at Daytona, except the 500. Then, a few missteps and by Fontana, things became genuinely bumpy and a medical issue forced him to miss the race.
It wasn’t easy to put the train back on the tracks, but a month after missing the race at Fontana, Hamlin took the checkered flag at Talladega, punching his ticket into the Chase.
The rest of the season was at best, unspectacular. Pole wins at Pocono and Phoenix marked an otherwise average season.
“We didn't have the tools to win a lot of races throughout the year, but we got better and we got better when it really counted,” Hamlin said in the same post-race interview.
When it really counted was in the Chase. His Joe Gibbs Racing team peaked at the right time, during those all-important final 10 races. Although his only top-five finish came late, at Phoenix, his team played the points game. It worked.
And it brought him into Homestead, a favorite to win the championship. He'd won the season finale twice before. He was so confident he brought family and friends to Florida and basketball great Michael Jordan was on his pit box.
This was to be his race, his year. It would erase all those bad times.
But, even when you’ve given your all, you sometimes have to accept that it wasn’t meant to be.
“Everyone gave 100 percent to give me the best car they could this weekend. It just wasn't enough to beat those guys,” Hamlin added during the same post-race interview.
“Things didn't work out our way and they very easily could have worked out our way, but they didn't.”
No they did not, Denny Hamlin. They did not.
All quotes are taken from official NASCAR, team and manufacturer media releases unless otherwise stated.
Bob Margolis is a member of the National Motorsports Press Association and has covered NASCAR, IndyCar, the NHRA and Sports Cars for more than two decades as a writer, television producer and on-air talent.
On Twitter: @BobMargolis
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