by Patrick Zier | Sep 10, 2025 |
You can criticize Denny Hamlin for the way he drives. You can criticize Denny Hamlin for what he says. But you can’t criticize Denny Hamlin for his work ethic.
And more and more, the 44-year-old Hamlin has depended on that to keep him at the top of his game, which is better than most and as good as any despite his age.
Hamlin will never be NASCAR’s Most Popular Diver. He seems to find new ways to irritate fans and competitors almost every week and he’s pretty good at it because he’s been doing it for a long time, almost as long as he’s been racing.
And he did it again Sunday after winning the Enjoy Illinois 300 at St. Louis’ World Wide Technology Raceway, which punched his ticket to the second round of the NASCAR playoffs.
Getting out of his car to a mixed reception from those in attendance, Hamlin went into attack mode almost immediately. “Y’all can boo,” he said to the crowd and those watching on USA TV. “You can either get on the bandwagon or get run over by it.”
How this got so intense isn’t exactly certain, but it probably began a few years ago when he had a problem with Chase Elliott, one of NASCAR’s most popular drivers.
And since then, Hamlin has kept it alive by being involved in disputes with anybody he perceives as getting in his way, on the track or in the stands. After one race this year, he waved a flag that said “11 against the world.” After another race, one of his first comments was “I beat your favorite driver.” And so it goes.
All of this is distracting from the fact that Hamlin is one of the best ever to sit behind the wheel; his body of work proves that. And while Joe Gibbs teammate Chase Briscoe may have shot to the top during the last few months, it remains to be seen whether or not he has Hamlin’s staying power.
Going into this week’s race at Bristol, Hamlin has now won 59 races, one shy of Kevin Harvick, who has 60 and ranks 10th all-time. Right ahead of Harvick is former Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch, who has 63 and, stuck in limbo at Richard Childress Racing, is finding it hard to add to that total.
Sixty-three wins is well within Hamlin’s reach considering how sharp he is despite his age, but getting to the next man up, Dale Earnhardt, is going to be tough. Earnhardt has 76 and even Hamlin can’t beat Father Time forever.
He’ll probably try though.
One of the most studious and astute drivers in the sport, Hamlin said there was a time when, if you were driving for an elite team, your equipment gave you an edge. That’s gone now, he says, so the only way to gain an advantage is to be better prepared than the competition, especially as you get older.
“With everything so similar, how else am I supposed to separate myself from everyone else?” Hamlin asked after Sunday’s Enjoy Illinois 300 according to NASCAR’s website.
“I’ve got some talent, but I feel the working part of it is how I separate myself,” Hamlin continued. “You’ve got to know what to look for, you’ve got to identify it and then you have to go to work to fix it.
“That’s what I feel like I’m good at; identifying the problem first – all my problems essentially. My job is to find out all my flaws,” Hamlin said. “Then it’s my job to fix them on the racetrack.”
If Hamlin has a “flaw” in his resume, it’s the fact that in his 20 year Cup career he’s never won a championship, although he’s been in the playoffs every single season except one, 2013, when he was injured, and he’s made the final four four tines, 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
“My results every year in the playoffs are better than they are in the regular season,” Hamlin commented. “My average finish, all of that stuff, it’s always better in the playoffs.
“It’s just that we haven’t won that stupid, freaking last race of the season that crowns the champion,” Hamlin remarked. And he can live with that if he has to. For Hamlin, winning championships isn’t the ultimate goal. To him, it’s winning races that counts.
“There’s certain races I do have countdowns for,” he said. “The only one I thought about this year was the Daytona 500, thinking I’m probably only going to do this twice more. And I haven’t won the freaking Brickyard (400), and I’m probably only going to have two more shots at that and that’s it,” Hamlin declared.
Maybe, maybe not. Hamlin has signed a contract extension with JGR that will carry him through the 2026 and 2027 seasons. After that, well…Hamlin has a lot of pride. He’ll never race just to keep racing. But he will race as long as he thinks he can win.
He knows he can win now, and can anyone say he won’t be able to win then?
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Bristol: 1-Denny Hamlin, 2-Kyle Larson, 3-Chase Briscoe. Winner of first race at Bristol: Larson. Top five in first race: 1-Larson, 2-Hamlin, 3-Ty Gibbs, 4-Briscoe, 5-Ryan Blaney.
Last week’s Old Guy Sport St. Louis picks: 1-Hamlin, 2-Briscoe, 3-Larson. St. Louis winner: Hamlin. OGS record after 23 races: 11-11; no pick in Pocono race.
OGS competition index top 10: 1-Hamlin 536 points, 2-Briscoe 443, 3-Larson 375, 4-William Byron 326, Christopher Bell 326, 6-Blaney 314, 7-Shane van Gisbergen 295, 8-Chase Elliott 179, 9-Bubba Wallace 173, 10-Alex Bowman 158.
OGS top 10 on short tracks (tracks most similar to Bristol): 1-Hamlin 211, 2-Larson 136, 3-Briscoe 112, 4-Bell 110, 5-Byron 80, 6-Bowman 74, 7-Blaney 72, 8-Austin Dillon 63, 9-Elliott 50, 10-Wallace 41.
by Patrick Zier | Sep 4, 2025 |
Chase Briscoe is killing it. Since early May, Briscoe, not Denny Hamlin, not Kyle Larson or anybody else you care to name, has been the best driver in NASCAR.
Over that period, Briscoe has dominated the Old Guy Sport competition index, which measures competitiveness on all tracks except superspeedways (Atlanta, Daytona, Talladega) because you can’t measure competitiveness on those tracks.
Avoiding the big wreck and being at the right place at the right time on the last lap determines who wins and how you finish at those places.
Meanwhile Briscoe, in his first year in an elite car, has pushed everybody else aside including his teammates at Joe Gibbs Racing. Nobody expected this, and Gibbs, in fact, was criticized for picking Briscoe out of the rubble of Stewart-Haas Racing when that organization finally collapsed last year and he needed somebody to replace Martin Truex.
But Gibbs has been vindicated. Briscoe started to muscle his way to the top after the race at Kansas, where he finished fourth. Expectations for him were high all along because he was driving for one of the two best teams in NASCAR, but until that race he was struggling driving a car that could do things he never dreamed of doing with Stewart-Haas.
“Kansas was like the light switch,” James Small, Briscoe’s crew chief, commented on NASCAR’s website after last week’s win at Darlington. That victory made Briscoe the first driver to advance to the round of 12 in the playoffs.
“I really think that’s when things started coming together and him understanding it,” Small said. “I think just within the team, with Chase himself and everything, I think it was the final stage at Kansas,” Small said.
According to the OGS competition index, ever since then Briscoe has been running away from everybody else. Counting Kansas, Briscoe has two wins, three seconds, one third, one fourth and one fifth over the 14 race period and has led laps under green in four other races, meaning he has been blanked in only two.
That totals up to a whooping 343 points on the OGS competition index, far more than anybody else except maybe Shane van Gisbergen, who has 295. But van Gisbergen got all of his points with four straight road course wins. He has yet to score a single point on an oval. Hamlin, with 254 points, almost one hundred fewer than Briscoe, is third and William Byron, with 187, is fourth.
That it took Briscoe a while to settle in is understandable. Briscoe has always known what he had to do to win in a race car, he just never had a car capable of doing it until he got to Gibbs. So it took him a while to realize things were different now.
Briscoe is a guy who has always had to prove himself, beginning when he was a youngster and his dad didn’t really want him to race. The climb has been long and hard and mostly in inferior equipment, which kept the pressure on as Briscoe tried to stand out from the crowd.
But it’s made him mentally tough. Nothing was given to him. “I don’t know, I’ve always just loved being in high pressure situations,” Briscoe said. “I feel like I just perform better for whatever reason.
“I feel like my whole career has been a high pressure situation. There was no backup plan. You might only get one race, you’ve got to go perform, show your worth,” he continued. “I’ve always felt like every week I’m still auditioning to prove I belong here.”
“We went through a whole process of who’s going to replace Martin (Truex),” Gibbs remarked. “The way we do things at our race team, it’s everybody sitting around, all of our management group, and we go through a lot of discussions; who would fit best, who matches up with our sponsor.
“And certainly we felt like Chase matched up well with Bass Pro Shops,” Gibbs said. “It’s a big process. It’s very important because that’s a quarter of our race team. We got a lot of people depending on that.
“It becomes critical, those decisions, because we all know you’re not going anywhere unless you’re got a really, really good crew chief and a really, really good pit crew and a really, really good driver,” Gibbs said.
And Briscoe, as he has proven over the last few months, is a really, really good driver.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at St. Louis: 1-Denny Hamlin, 2-Chase Briscoe, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at St. Louis: Austin Cindric. Top five at St. Louis last year: 1-Cindric, 2-Hamlin, 3-Brad Keselowski, 4-Tyler Reddick, 5-Joey Logano.
Last week’s Darlington picks: 1-Hamlin, 2-Larson, 3-Ryan Blaney. Darlington winner: Briscoe. OGS sport season record after 22 races: 10-11, no pick in Pocono race.
OGS competition index top 10 after 22 races: 1-Hamlin 472, 2-Briscoe 403, 3-Larson 366, 4-William Byron 326, Christopher Bell 326, 6-Shane van Gisbergen 295, 7-Blaney 293, 8-Bubba Wallace 161, 9-Alex Bowman 158, 10-Chase Elliott 148.
OGS competition index top 10 on intermediate tracks (tracks most similar to St. Louis): 1-Hamlin 261, 2-Briscoe 232, 3-Larson 229, 4-Byron 186, 5-Blaney 119, 6-Wallace 118, 7-Ross Chastain 102, 8-Logano 79, 9-Reddick 73, 10-Bell 71.
by Patrick Zier | Sep 4, 2025 |
TAMPA – There’s no denying it. Florida has the toughest schedule in the country, and South Florida just made it tougher. For Florida, this wasn’t supposed to be a big game. LSU is a big game. Miami is a big game. Texas is a big game. Georgia is a big game. All are ranked in the top 10 in the country.
And then you have Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Tennessee and Florida State. That last wasn’t supposed to be a big game, either, but after beating Alabama, the ‘Noles are ranked in the nation’s top 25, as are all the rest. USF, by the way, received votes after hammering Boise State.
So Florida knows it will have more on its hands than expected when it collides with USF Saturday in Gainesville.
One of the most interesting aspects of this game is the battle of the quarterbacks, Florida’s DJ Lagway and USF’s Byrum Brown. Both are coming off injuries that impacted their team’s season a year ago and both looked healthy and strong in their openers last week.
There is no question that from a physical and talent standpoint, Lagway is elite. Playing to his potential, he is probably as good as anybody in the country. But Brown is really not far behind. He can carry a team on his back. He’s a difference maker.
But USF has more going for it than just Brown. With Brown, the offense is potentially explosive and the defense appears to have taken a major jump forward.
“This is a team, not a one-quarterback show here,” Florida Coach Billy Napier commented according to Florida’s football website. “It’s going to be important to contain him (Brown). We’re going to have to rush as a team and work together to compress the pocket and keep him in the pocket,” he added.
For Napier, this is a potential “gotcha” game. He can’t lose this, not with the schedule that’s in front of him. There is tremendous pressure on Napier to produce an SEC contender after three years of mediocrity, become relevant again nationally, and a loss to USF would be potentially devastating.
Napier saved his job last year with a late season turn around that started with wins over 22nd ranked LSU and 18th ranked Ole Miss, a decisive victory over arch-rival Florida State and a bowl win over Tulane.
It continued when the Gators crushed Long Island U. in their opener this year, and Florida simply can’t afford to go off the rails against USF.
From a South Florida standpoint, this is another huge game, a chance for this team to continue to develop a winning attitude, to see if it can put the Boise win behind it and move on.
“It’s part of growing, it’s part of what we’re building, right?” USF Coach Alex Golesh said here this week. “It’s, and I said it a week ago, it’s part of handling success. Wining programs are able to do that because winning programs are used to winning,” Golesh said.
“I think in a winning program you truly forget about it (winning a big game) the next day and you move on. We’ve conveyed that to them (the players), we’ve pushed the heck out of doing that,” Golesh said.
“I think anytime you’ve got an opponent like we have if you’re looking behind in any way you’re out of your mind,” Golesh emphasized. “And truly, I think these guys are mature enough to handle that.
“All you’ve got to do is look up and see what’s in front of you,” Golesh continued. “If you’re going to take a breath and say this happened a week ago and I’m going to enjoy it you’re going to get your brains beat out. It helps that we’re playing a really good football team in terms of that and I think the guys are mature enough to handle it,” Golesh said.
In some ways, the Florida game will define USF’s season. You’re on the road in a hostile environment after a big win. Good teams move on. This is today. Forget yesterday, it doesn’t matter anymore.
The Bulls don’t have to beat Florida, but they must go in believing that they can. They have to believe in themselves, because if they collapse here, if they get knocked out, last week’s dominant win over Boise may look good, but it will mean nothing.
PAT’S PICKS
Florida over USF: The Gators are skating on thin ice here. If USF plays up to its potential, this could be a slugfest.
Miami over Bethune-Cookman: Why do teams even schedule games like this?
FSU over East Texas A&M: See Miami over B-C.
UCF over North Carolina A&T: This isn’t as bad as the other two, because UCF isn’t nearly as good as the other two, but it’s still a game that shouldn’t be played.
Last week, 2-3. For the season, 2-3,.400.
