Denny Hamlin was actively crying during the cool down lap following his victory in the South Point Casino 400 on Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and there was a lot to unpack during a vibe check post-race press conference.
60 career Cup Series wins
Back to the Final Four
An ailing father
The 23XI lawsuit against NASCAR
The mortality of his own career
So yes, there was so incredibly much for Hamlin to process while cooling both himself and his car down after the race, to the point that he didn’t even want to jab his detractors on the other side of the catchfence.
Hamlin simply thanked them, tears still welling up under his eyes.
“This is the point where I kind of give the fans some shit, but not today. I appreciate all of you so much. Yeah, obviously want to say hi to my dad, family back at home. All the friends that came out here for Vegas, hoping we get 60. I didn’t think we were. Put the pedal down the last 10 laps, made it happen.”
There is so much happening in Denny Hamlin Land right now.
First and foremost, it’s no secret in the garage that Dennis Hamlin Sr. is not in the best of health, so any achievement his son can earn is a moment for the younger Hamlin to express gratitude for how they got here together.
“Yeah, he’s just not doing well, not feeling well,” Hamlin said of his dad during the press conference. “He’s the one that got me into racing — just took me to a racetrack when I was five. Then made all the sacrifices financially to keep me going. Sold everything they had. We almost lost our house a couple times. Just tried to keep it all going.
“So I’m glad he was able to see 60. That was super important to me.”
That number, 60, is one that Hamlin has talked about since February. He wants to retire in the top-10 of all-time Cup Series race winners, and that has become more important that the elusive championship, one that he will finally get to chase again for the first time since 2020 next month at Phoenix Raceway.
He says this is the most satisfying win in his career because all of those elements have collided at this exact moment. He says he’s softer at heart than most people realize but there was no holding these tears back tonight.
“When I won the Daytona 500, I had always hoped to win the Daytona 500 and there’s a letter that I wrote when I was eight-years-old that’s in my garage that my mom kept that says, ‘My wish is to win the Daytona 500. I hope that this comes true on February 18th, 1998.’
Hamlin couldn’t help but chuckle.
“I thought when I was 18 years old, I was going to be in Cup for some reason,” he continued. “There’s something about manifesting, because I’ve won it twice on February 18th, the Daytona 500 so some things are kind of meant to be.
“So while that took 30 years to happen, that was just one race. There were no other implications to it, right? The reason this one is more is because of all the things, right? I got the home things, we got the lawsuit things, we’ve got just the Final Four, the 60. There were just so many other factors that played into today, which is why I think that it’s my biggest win.”
Hamlin was reminiscent about the late JD Gibbs, who plucked him out of Late Model Stock Cars, and within a year made it to the Cup Series almost by complete blind luck. Coach Joe Gibbs certainly didn’t believe he was going to reach 60 wins, the most of any at his organization, with that kid.
“Really, if you remember that year, we actually were struggling with the car, the FedEx car,” Gibbs said. “He only ran half a year in Xfinity, which is amazing. So we put him in there kind of as an experiment. I think the third race he sat on a pole, he was gone.”
And now, in the word of Gibbs, his late son, who passed in 2019, lives on through Hamlin, the embodiment of how JD was going to run the team and the eye for talent he possessed.
“Denny put J.D. over the door with his name. Denny’s kid, his little boy now, is J.D. All of that, it gets emotional really.”
Hamlin says so much of his life and career is about father figures — his relationship with his dad and them JD, and now his surrogate father, Coach.
“J.D. was my road dad, my track dad,” Hamlin said. “When J.D. passed, it’s more of Joe now. I think that father figures are really, really important to make sure you do the right things. They’re the ones that kind of keep you in the lane of life. They are your bumpers. I know that I do outlandish things and say outlandish things at times, but I always know that eventually I have to answer to the higher power, and on earth here it’s Joe.
“I appreciate that he lets me be me, for one. He never asks me to change. He probably should at times. But I see him as family. The relationship and the bond is really, really close. I’m very, very grateful for what his family has done for me. They allowed me to start a race team. Everything that I got, I owe to the Gibbs family.
“I’ve got two dads. One’s at home and one’s here. I think I’m very, very grateful for that because not a lot of drivers have that kind of relationship with their team owner. These guys are the ones that found me and took a chance. So my loyalty to them runs very, very deep. His loyalty to me has made me feel that way.”
How could Hamlin not cry under this context?
And now, here we are again, Hamlin preparing to race for the championship in a way that he has before in 2010, 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
“I mean, truthfully I don’t get nervous anymore, but I will at some point because is this my last chance to do it,” Hamlin asked rhetorically.
He’s 44 and has just two more seasons after this one.
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Hamlin said. “I just know I’m going to do it, do the work, and I hope it works out. If it doesn’t, I’m going to be okay with it. I’ve had a season that far exceeded what I thought it would.
“Yeah, I mean, it’ll set in. I’ll get nervous certainly over the next few weeks about it. But I’m going to be nervous about the things that I control, not the other things.
“You guys have seen it. There’s been weird and crazy things that have kept me from winning a title or advancing to have a chance to. I’ve said many times, if you get enough chances, like eventually just the tides will turn. It’s like, did they start turning today? Maybe.”
But make no mistake, he is going to put in the work, just like he has put in the work at an elevated level for this entire decade. Ever since being paired with Chris Gabehart in 2019, Hamlin has been defined by a discipline and work ethic he didn’t have earlier.
Now paired with Chris Gayle, Hamlin continues to do a vast majority of the simulation work for Joe Gibbs Racing, anything possible to find a competitive edge in his mid-40s.
“Seven and a half hours this week,” Gayle said.
Hamlin even had to run back to his motor home in the hour between drivers meeting and driver intros because there was one more piece of homework he felt like he needed to consume before the race.
“I was so antsy during the driver meetings thinking, ‘I got to get out of here, I got to get out of here’ because I have to go back to the bus and look at something,” Hamlin said.
“I don’t know. It would have just… I don’t think I could have… It would have mentally bothered me the entire race had I not gone back and looked. Then I would have said, How did you let that slip? How were you not prepared for this? Had you known this, then you would have been in a better position to win.
“It’s just a weird way that my brain works.”
What was that thing that Hamlin said did play a small factor in the finish?
“I can’t say. I can’t say,” he said. “But I just have a mental checklist that I go through before I leave the bus for the drivers meeting. I have a mental checklist of checking all the things that I think’s going to be important today. One small thing just kind of slipped through the cracks. Maybe I was distracted. I don’t really know.”
But for now, Hamlin kind of gets a two-week break before the championship race. Gabehart, now the competition for Gibbs, told Hamlin before the race if he locked in this week, he can take a bit of a mental break to focus on all these other things.
And they are piling up.
But immediately, Hamlin does have a text message from his dad on his phone, and he just wants to get back home to talk to Dennis Sr. in person because fathers and father figures mean so much to where this could be champion is right now.
“I just want to thank him for sacrificing really his and my mom’s life to chase around my dreams,” Hamlin said. “My parents had no money. My parents had very normal jobs, but they found a way. That way is a path I would never recommend anybody taking. Every credit card that comes to the mail, ‘Okay, we’ll use it.’ Asking people to help. Second and third mortgaging the house. All these things. The arguments I had to listen to. I’m in my room, and my mom and dad are going at it. One is saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ The other one saying, ‘Please, just one more week.’
“It’s great it’s all paid off. Certainly they got the life now that they deserved before I decided to do this.”
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