- Denny Hamlin passed teammate Chase Briscoe with four laps left and held off Kyle Larson to win the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
- The win is his 60th career Cup Series victory and locks him into the Championship 4 at Phoenix for the first time since 2021.
- Hamlin holds more Cup Series wins than any driver in history who has never claimed a championship, and he dedicated win number 60 to his father and his family.
A Pass With Four Laps Left Changes Everything
Ten laps out, Denny Hamlin thought the South Point 400 had gotten away from him. His Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, Chase Briscoe, had taken the lead off pit road on a two-tire stop, and Hamlin sat behind him with nothing obvious left to try. Then his crew chief, Chris Gabehart, called for one more adjustment, and Hamlin went looking for a gap that had not existed a lap earlier. He found it entering turn three, drove around Briscoe with four laps remaining, and crossed the line 1.533 seconds ahead of a hard-charging Kyle Larson to win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
“This one means a lot,” Hamlin said after climbing from his No. 11 Toyota. “I just put the pedal down those last ten laps and made it happen. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would’ve said we didn’t have it. But I’m proud of the team for the adjustments they made. Chris nailed that last stop, and I just went for it. I had nothing to lose.”
The victory was his sixth of 2026, the best of any driver in the Cup Series field this year, and it put him into the Championship 4 at Phoenix Raceway on November 2 for the first time in five years. For a driver who turns 46 in November, who has raced a full Cup schedule every year since 2006, that detail carries weight beyond the trophy. Hamlin has built one of the strongest resumes in NASCAR history around a single missing line: a championship.
Twenty Years of Almost
Hamlin’s career reads like a highlight reel with the ending cut off. Three Daytona 500 wins. Trips to the playoffs in 20 of his 21 full seasons, with only 2013 as the exception. An eight-win 2010 season that ended as a championship runner-up to Jimmie Johnson. A seven-win 2020 campaign that ended with a fourth-place finish in the Championship 4. Win after win, year after year, and no title to show for any of it.
That pattern is why Hamlin’s name sits where it does in the record book. In 2023, his 51st career victory at Bristol moved him past Junior Johnson for the most wins in Cup Series history by a driver who never won a championship. Johnson built his total across an era when drivers rarely ran full schedules. Hamlin built his across two decades of racing nearly every lap of every season, which makes the gap between his win total and his title count harder to explain away. He is, by most measures in the sport, the best driver of his generation to come up short every time it mattered most in November.
He has talked about the toll that takes in blunter terms than most drivers allow themselves. In a NASCAR interview during the 2024 season, Hamlin described his pursuit of a title in a single pointed phrase, admitting the hunt for a championship has become something close to a curse he cannot shake. Every fall, the record resets, and every fall, Hamlin finds himself explaining why this year might be different.
The Record Nobody Wants
There is a version of this story where the numbers become a punchline, where a driver who wins this often but never finishes first in the standings gets filed away as a tragic footnote. Hamlin has mostly avoided that fate by refusing to disappear. He keeps signing with Joe Gibbs Racing, keeps building his own ownership stake in 23XI Racing alongside Michael Jordan, and keeps showing up at the front of fields that include drivers half his age.
William Byron and Martin Truex Jr. join Hamlin in the Round of 8 field chasing the remaining Championship 4 spots, with two more elimination races left before Phoenix sets its final lineup. Larson, who finished second at Las Vegas, remains in the mix as well. For Hamlin, simply making the final four is not the goal he will settle for. He has been there before, in 2019 and 2020, and left Phoenix each time as the best driver who did not win.
What Phoenix Means Now
The format NASCAR uses to crown its champion gives Hamlin exactly what his critics say he has never needed: another clean shot. Whoever finishes ahead of the other three Championship 4 drivers at Phoenix on November 2 wins the title outright, regardless of points accumulated across the rest of the season. That format has worked against Hamlin twice already. He arrives at this version of the format with a car that just won at Las Vegas by making a pass most of the field could not have made, and with a points lead over nobody he has to protect. He only has to win one race.
Gabehart, who has worked alongside Hamlin as crew chief through the bulk of this championship drought, called the final pit stop at Las Vegas the best of the season. Hamlin called it the difference between going home and getting a fourth chance at Phoenix. Both views point at the same fact: the margins in modern NASCAR are too thin for talent alone to settle anything, and Hamlin’s team has given him a car capable of settling them anyway, lap after lap, all year.
A Family Name on Win Number 60
Hamlin closed his post-race comments with the line that mattered most to him personally. “Number 60, that’s for my dad, my family, everyone back home,” he said, referring to his father, Dennis Hamlin Sr., who worked construction jobs and ran short tracks around Chesterfield County, Virginia, to fund his son’s early racing. That history still shapes how Hamlin talks about milestones. Sixty wins is a number reserved for a short list of NASCAR’s greatest drivers. A championship would be a different kind of number altogether, the one Hamlin has chased since he arrived in the Cup Series in 2005 and has never quite caught.
Phoenix will not care about any of that history when the green flag drops on November 2. It never has. But for a driver who has spent five years watching other names get engraved on the Cup Series trophy, a fourth trip to the final four carries its own kind of pressure, the kind that comes from knowing exactly how it feels to fall just short, and exactly how little time is left to change the ending.
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