You can’t escape the irony. Last year, Denny Hamlin lost his shot at a Cup championship in the final race of the season at Phoenix when crew chief Chris Gayle opted to pit for four tires instead of two. Kyle Larson, who only took two, ended up winning the race and the championship.
Then last Sunday at Martinsville, Hamlin, needing to cut into Larson’s point lead to set himself up for a final charge at Homestead Sunday, was victimized again. Gambling that there would be a caution during the first stage of the race, Gayle elected to leave Hamlin out while others pitted. The caution never came, and Hamlin was left running on worn tires as the other contenders zoomed by him.
Hamlin, who trailed Larson by 73 points when the race started, never recovered and left Martinsville 70 back at the end of the day. Game, set, match as they say in tennis. Doesn’t matter what happens at Homestead. Hamlin can’t make that up, and he knows it.
And so Hamlin, the best driver in the sport the past two years, has no Cup championships while Larson, who has been good but not as good as Hamlin, now will have two straight. Which is why the NASCAR championship shouldn’t be decided by a playoff, but rather by how well you race over an entire season.
This isn’t football. It isn’t baseball, or the NBA. Those are entirely different animals. If you have a bad play, strike out with the bases loaded or miss 10 shots in a row, you get a chance to recover. Not in NASCAR. Make the wrong judgment call, as Gayle did last year at Phoenix and again this year at Martinsville, get penalized for going too fast on pit road, damage your car because of somebody else’s mistake, you’re done.
That said, there is no question that Larson’s team has been consistently better than everybody else during the playoff run. While the NASCAR Chase standings reflect this to some extent, the Old Guy Sport competition index, which rewards leading laps under green and top five finishes, shows just how dominant Larson is.
Since the playoff races began at Darlington, Larson has scored a whopping 258 points. Christopher Bell is next with 167 while Chase Briscoe, fourth in the NASCAR standings, has 166. Hamlin, though, has gone in the tank with just 60.
And Larson has really taken control by dominating on the intermediate tracks, NASCAR’s bread and butter and Toyota’s personal playground heading into the playoffs. Toyota won eight of the 10 intermediate races prior to the Chase, with Hamlin taking four of them, and also took 27 of the 50 top fives up for grabs, or more than half. Larson, meanwhile, had no wins and only four top fives.
But that changed beginning with Darlington. Since then, Larson has crushed Hamlin and Toyota. He has 214 points, including two wins, on intermediate tracks while Hamlin has struggled with just 56 points in the five races.
Speaking on USA TV after the race, Hamlin said his chances of putting some pressure on Larson disappeared with Gayle’s first stage call at Martinsville. “It just basically came down to stage one with us running the no-stop strategy,” Hamlin explained. “We obviously lost all our track position there and once we lost our track position it’s just hard to drive back to the front. Nobody else did.
Making things worse for Hamlin was an incident where Joey Logano got into Bell which pushed Bell into Hamlin. “We got some decent damage there,” Hamlin said.
“Obviously, we didn’t capitalize today (last Sunday) with Larson not getting any stage points and stuff like that,” Hamlin continued. “I just, the first stage was the killer for us, that set us back,” Hamlin repeated. “For us, this weekend (Martinsville) was about all or nothing.
“We had everything to gain and nothing to lose and we just didn’t gain enough to make it (catching Larson at Homestead) realistic. I feel confident I’ll be able to go there and contend,” Hamlin declared. “I’d love to get another win before the end of the year. I thought it was going to come today (last Sunday) but, you know, we’ll get one more shot at it next week.” And one more shot at a championship in 2027.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Homestead: 1-Christopher Bell, 2-Denny Hamlin, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at Homestead: Larson. Top five at Homestead last year: 1-Larson, 2-Alex Bowman, 3-Bubba Wallace, 4-Chase Briscoe, 5-Hamlin. (The Homestead race was not part of the Chase last year and was run early in the season.)
Last week’s Old Guy Sport picks: 1-Ryan Blaney, 2-Joey Logano, 3-Bell. Last week’s Martinsville winner: William Byron. OGS season record after 29 races, 13-16. (OGS does not counnt superspeedway races in its standings)
OGS competition index top 10 after 29 races: 1-Hamlin 625 points, 2-Bell 558, 3-Larson 541, 4-Briscoe 478, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 388, 8-Logano 319. 9-Chase Elliott 262, 10-Shane van Gisbergen 236.
OGS competition index top 10 on intermediate tracks (tracks most similar to Homestead): 1-Hamlin 475 points, 2-Larson 343, 3-Bell 325, 4-Briscoe 311, 5-Reddick 301, 6-Elliott 120, 7-Byron 119, 8-Blaney 111, 9-Bowman 80, 10-Austin Cindric 79.
