- A right-rear tire let go on lap 221 at Phoenix and dropped Denny Hamlin from fourth to 28th, snapping a 31-race streak of lead-lap finishes.
- Hamlin sits 31 points behind the championship leader with three races left, and his crew chief says the group has lost opportunities in three different ways this postseason.
- A win at Martinsville is close to mandatory for Hamlin to keep his championship hopes alive heading into the finale at Homestead-Miami.
The tire that would not hold
Denny Hamlin had the best-handling car he had all day at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, and for 220 laps it looked like the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota was finally going to deliver the result his title defense needed. Then the right-rear tire let go in Turns 3 and 4, and the whole afternoon came apart in the space of a few seconds.
“I’m thinking that this is not ideal, but thinking we’re going to be early on this green-flag sequence and probably come out with the lead for a portion of the time,” Hamlin said of his mindset in the laps before the failure. “Blowing a rear tire when the best the car had been all day. We had battled back and were able to pass a bunch of really good cars. Just frustrated.”
The sequence that followed turned a bad break into a disaster. Cody Ware suffered a similar tire failure moments earlier and hit the Turn 1 wall, triggering the caution that caught Hamlin a lap down as he limped to pit road. NASCAR then penalized him for speeding on pit road, ruling him ineligible for the wave-around and sending him to the back of a field he had spent the first two stages carving through. A late caution on lap 283, caused by points leader Kyle Larson’s own tire failure, offered one last chance to make up the lost lap. Chase Briscoe, Chase Elliott and Ty Gibbs all stayed out, and Hamlin’s lap never came back. He finished 28th.
A streak snapped, a gap that is not supposed to be there
The finish ended a streak of 31 consecutive lead-lap finishes for Hamlin, a run that had quietly made him one of the most consistent cars in the Cup Series field all year. Consistency is supposed to be the whole point of his 2026 campaign. Instead, a day that started with Hamlin running fourth, banking 12 stage points through the first two stages, ended with him sliding from fourth to fourth-in-the-standings territory he can no longer take for granted.
Hamlin now sits fourth in the Chase standings, behind his own Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe, and 31 points behind championship leader Larson with three races remaining. The top seven drivers are separated by just 56 points heading into Talladega, which means the margin for another day like Phoenix does not exist.
“I wish I could change it, you just can’t,” a dejected Hamlin said after climbing from the car. He has been racing long enough, and lost enough championships in painful ways, that he did not pretend the moment surprised him. “Some things are meant to be, some things are not meant to be,” he said. “There have been so many cards that have been dealt in my career in these playoffs, Chase, that I’ve seen it all. Nothing surprises me. It’s not like I’m not shell-shocked because I’ve been here.”
What stings more than the single result is the pattern underneath it. Hamlin’s average finish in the Chase round has fallen to 12.4, down from 3.9 across the regular-season short tracks and intermediate ovals where his No. 11 car built its reputation. His laps led have dropped from 824 across the first 16 races of the season to 169 across the 17 races that followed. A car that spent the summer at the front of the field has spent the fall finding new ways to fall back from it.
“We just cannot finish races to the best of our capability,” Hamlin said. “Until we can start doing that in a really big hurry, you never know what can happen.”
What his crew chief is telling him
Crew chief Chris Gayle tried to make sense of the tire failure in a way that did not put blame on the setup. He said the team’s tire pressures had stayed above the minimum NASCAR requires and shouldn’t have been a concern on their own, and he pointed out that race winner Tyler Reddick ran similar pressures without issue. His read was that Hamlin’s car had simply run over debris somewhere on the mile oval, the kind of bad luck that cannot be engineered around no matter how well a team prepares.
“It’s unfortunate that we didn’t close the gap more because there was opportunity to do it,” Gayle said. “We were sitting in the spot to do that before the flat tire. It is what it is. There’s three more. All you can do is the best you can every week.” He closed with the same two words Hamlin’s team has repeated through every setback this postseason: “It’s not over.”
That phrase is doing a lot of work right now. A 31-point deficit with three races left is not the kind of hole that ends a championship on its own, and Hamlin has climbed out of worse positions before. But Frontstretch’s postseason tracking has flagged the more uncomfortable number: Hamlin is tied for last among the remaining contenders in wins through the Chase, and last in points scored across the round. Five of his six championship competitors have already found victory lane in the playoffs. He has not.
Twenty-one years of near misses
Hamlin’s career has become shorthand in the garage for a certain kind of heartbreak. He has reached the championship-deciding round of the playoffs more times than almost anyone in the field without ever leaving with the trophy, and he has watched teammates and rivals younger than him collect the title he still does not have. None of that history erased itself when his tire let go at Phoenix. If anything, it made the moment heavier. Fans who have watched him come agonizingly close for two decades recognized the shape of this story before the broadcast even cut to his in-car camera.
What makes this year different is the quality of the opposition standing between Hamlin and the title he wants most. Larson is the reigning champion and has already proven he can win under pressure. Bell and Briscoe are his own teammates, which means every point Hamlin needs to find has to come at the expense of a car built in the same shop as his. Christopher Bell in particular has looked like the form driver of the Chase, and Joe Gibbs Racing now has the unusual problem of needing three of its own cars to beat each other cleanly while still beating everyone else.
Hamlin has talked for years about wanting to win a championship for his own racing organization, 23XI Racing, as much as for himself, and that ownership stake adds a layer to every result that a purely hired driver would not feel the same way. A late-season collapse does not just cost him a trophy. It costs the business he built a season of momentum heading into contract and sponsorship conversations that depend on results like this one going the other way.
Why Martinsville is close to a must-win
The math is simple, though the racing never is. Talladega, a superspeedway where a single wreck can end a championship in an instant, comes first. Martinsville, the short track where Hamlin has built much of his Hall of Fame-caliber resume with multiple career victories, comes next. Homestead-Miami closes the season. If Hamlin arrives at Homestead still chasing points rather than racing for a trophy, his best chance at a first Cup title in a 21-year career defined by near-misses slips away again.
“Just one win, it’s doable,” Hamlin said, refusing to treat the deficit as fatal. “One win, we’re right there, and we need to do that.” It is a simple sentence carrying an entire season’s worth of pressure. Hamlin has 64 career Cup victories and has won at both Talladega and Martinsville before. He has never needed one of them more than he does over these next two weekends.
For a driver who has spent two decades being the bridesmaid of his own sport’s biggest races, the flat tire at Phoenix will either become a footnote in the story of a title he finally won, or one more entry on the long list of moments he can recite from memory when people ask him how close he has come. Right now, even his own team does not know which version of the story this becomes. What Hamlin does know is that he is out of room for another one.
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