Denny Hamlin came home P8 at Las Vegas on Sunday, but the Joe Gibbs Racing wheelman believes he could’ve done much better as he evaluates his performance.
During the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast, the NASCAR veteran evaluated his afternoon in Sin City, where he explained why he’s chalking up Las Vegas as a missed opportunity for the No. 11 team.
“S— the bed,” Hamlin responded, asked what happened late in the Pennzoil 400. “Yeah. We missed it, on the setup side, a little bit. I just feel like, I thought, ‘Man, I’m in a good spot here.’ We had worked with our balance. My balance was off to start the race. We got it pretty good towards the middle. But I felt like I was just a little bit too free, and that’s when we lost the lead to [Kyle] Larson. Fell back to P3. We kind of stayed within shouting distance. We never really let it get too far away. Made some adjustments. They weren’t really better. We went back on those adjustments, and I thought it was better.
“Leading to start the third stage, right after that green flag pit stop, I thought we had a very, very good car. We were running very good, competitive lap times. We were catching the group in front of us, pretty rapidly. Then the caution comes out late. You’ve got 20 something laps to go and you’ve got a shootout there. It just required a little bit different things out of my car than what I had.”
Evidently, Hamlin believes he had a car that should’ve at least netted him a top three on the afternoon, but for one reason or another he found it difficult to drive late in the race.
“So it was so frustrating from my standpoint, because I’m like, I know I’ve got a top three car, and I keep losing positions here late in this race, but I was hamstrung. It was not doing what it needed to do, in that short run scenario,” Hamlin added. “So that was frustrating on my end for sure, but at least we had a good stage day, and it somewhat made up for it. But you always like to get top fives when you know you’ve got a top five car, which I did.”
Alas, Denny Hamlin can at least use the missed opportunity as some motivation for this weekend’s race at Phoenix, where he’s been able to run well in the past during his NASCAR Cup Series career.
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