- Denny Hamlin has no optimism about the Cup title going into Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, per Motorsport.com, with Kyle Larson holding a 99.4 percent chance.
- Hamlin described last year’s title loss as a sudden death and this year’s Chase for the Championship as a slow bleed.
- He thinks 2027 will be his last best shot at a first Cup championship.
A Chase He Controlled Until It Drained Away One Week at a Time
Denny Hamlin has now lived through two kinds of title heartbreak, and he can state the difference in a sentence.
“I felt like last year was like a sudden death and this one was just a slow bleed, truthfully,” Hamlin said. “I mean, that’s really was how it was. I mean, I was in shock for 10 minutes after the checkered flag waved because I hadn’t seen (Larson) all day and now he’s suddenly ahead of me.”
“And then this year, through each playoff race, I’m on the way home just thinking, ‘Gosh, it’s alright though. We’ll have to just make up for it next week.’ And then we’ve just been trickling along and staying somewhat mathematically possible by being solid, but this one was definitely a cut to the wrist and we just watched it bleed.”
He said it two days before the season finale, with the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota still alive in the standings on paper only. Hamlin is 45, the oldest full-time driver in the Cup field, and he has chased a championship for more than 20 years without one.
The Odds Nobody Is Counting On
As of Nov. 6, Larson had a 99.4 percent chance of winning the Cup championship on Sunday, which left Hamlin and Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell with a combined .6 percent. A comeback from either would be the most improbable in the history of a stock car season finale.
Larson’s task is small. He needs to finish 28th if he scores no stage points, and each stage point he earns in the first half of the race lowers that clinch spot by one. Eight stage points ends the title fight before halfway: a third place in Stage 1 does it, and so does fourth in one stage and eighth in the other.
Hamlin did not dress up his outlook for Sunday.
“I mean, I don’t have any optimism,” Hamlin said. “I don’t. I’m here to try to have fun and try to win the race if possible, but I don’t … I mean, there’s obviously a chance you can win the lottery as well, but do you really count on that?”
A Top Seed With Four Wins and Nothing to Show for It
The frustration comes from where Hamlin started. He entered the Chase as the top seeded contender with four regular season wins, and he controlled the championship from the summer through the Bristol Night Race. A four win season that Hamlin has called a success now reads as the setup to another near miss.
Last year supplies the comparison. In the 2025 finale at Phoenix, Hamlin started from pole and led a race-high 208 laps. A yellow flew on Lap 309 of a scheduled 312, the race went to overtime, and Hamlin finished sixth. Larson came home third and took his second Cup title. Hamlin was two laps from the championship before that caution took it away.
This year the damage came in smaller pieces. Hamlin suffered damage at Darlington trying to put McDowell a lap down, spun from fourth place in Stage 1 at Las Vegas, and had a disaster of a race at Phoenix. Bell crashed on entry to pit road at Talladega and lost power steering at Las Vegas. Meanwhile Larson took control with three playoff wins and the second most stage points over the last nine races.
Hamlin put part of the blame on his own team and part on something he cannot explain.
“We have an execution problem, but I’m not going to totally remove myself from that problem,” Hamlin conceded.
He also believes two decades without a title do not add up on speed alone.
“Part of my career, most of my career, I’ve had fast cars, capable of winning championships,” Hamlin said. “But I mean, if anyone really did a deep dive and to see what happened in the playoffs or The Chase for the 11 year after year, it’s an anomaly of things that just doesn’t make sense, that just don’t happen.”
“So that’s just unfortunate, and some of it’s just execution of just we’re not performing as well and we’re not executing as well, so it’s so frustrating because you know that you’re definitely capable, but you have to still play the game. No one’s going to go out there and score for you.”
Martinsville Was the Microcosm
The weekend that pushed the title out of reach came at Martinsville on Nov. 1, a track Hamlin had gone to needing a win. He started from pole position and led early. Then his team’s decision not to pit in Stage 1 backfired, he fell outside the top ten, and he scored no points in Stage 1 or Stage 2. He spun mid-race and lost more track position to a caution that came at the wrong moment in a pit stop cycle.
Hamlin clawed back to sixth. Larson finished ninth after setbacks of his own, so Hamlin gained only three points and sat 70 points behind the lead. A driver can earn at most 76 points in a single race.
“Didn’t capitalize on the speed that we had,” Hamlin said after the race. “That was an absolute killer for us. Our strategy did not work out, staying out … had no tires left, and then got to start Stage 2 at the tail, because there was a caution that just was poorly timed for us. We just fought the track position. It took all day just to get it back. And then obviously the damage didn’t help at all either.”
“So it’s just a tough day, but it was kind of a microcosm of what we’ve had in the last several weeks.”
He knew then what the gap meant for the finale.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s unrealistic, for sure,” said Hamlin. “It needed to be in the 40s, something like that, to be somewhere viable. But we’ll go there and do the dog and pony show, and weep and act like we can do it. But .. we just didn’t capitalize. It’s not a Chase where we capitalized, and certainly did not execute to our best ability.”
Bell Sees the Same Season From the Next Garage
Bell shares Hamlin’s team and much of his frustration. He sees a Chase in which Larson’s No. 5 Hendrick Chevrolet found speed late while Toyota drivers had the numbers on their side.
“Ultimately, I think whenever we got into The Chase, the 5 car had a pickup in performance, but I still think by the numbers, there have been guys in Toyota cars specifically that have been faster than them, but just we all shot ourselves in a foot one way or the other,” Bell said.
Both drivers still praised NASCAR for replacing The Playoffs with the Chase for the Championship. Drivers controlled their own destinies. For Larson that meant winning and scoring stage points. For the two Joe Gibbs Racing drivers it meant mistakes and misfortune.
“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the new format for sure,” Bell said. “And I guess one thing that I’ll take away from it just an optimism that it doesn’t matter where you finish the regular season – it comes down to 10 weeks of winning races.”
Bell recalled being asked at playoff media day how far back the eventual champion could start. Nobody picked Larson, the seventh seed with a 55-point deficit and 10 races to go.
“So yeah, it’s just all about winning races,” Bell said. “That bonus for winning is really important, especially whenever it’s only 10 races. So yeah, it truly is not how you start, but how those 10 races go.”
One More Season to Find the Moments
Hamlin sees the Chase as a string of small moments, and he says nobody can tell which one mattered until it is over.
“This Chase can be defined by a few really small short moments and you just don’t really know what they are until it happens or it’s in postmortem,” Hamlin said. “But yeah, it’s a long grueling season, but there’s just little moments that just was like the turning point that you’re either going to end up winning the championship or not.”
“That for me is my biggest takeaway.”
The next question is how many more chances he gets. Hamlin signed a two-year extension with Joe Gibbs Racing that runs through 2027, and he has insisted it will be his last season. He has talked about how hard that retirement call could be if the winning continues. Looking ahead, he pointed to next year.
“I would think next year would be my last best shot, but I mean, we obviously had a great regular season and The Chase tracks lined up great,” Hamlin said. “But obviously, we just did not perform at a championship level the last nine races (and) this is what you get.”
So Hamlin goes to Homestead on Sunday with a lottery ticket he does not expect to cash, a clear diagnosis of what went wrong, and one season left to fix it. He will turn 46 on Nov. 18.
