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Martinsville, Va .- “It felt,” said Denny Hamlin about an hour after his light blue-white Toyota took the checkered flag at Martinsville Speedway, “like the old, old days.”
Old can mean so much around Hamlin, who at the age of 44 was the oldest winner on the oldest track of Nascar since a 47-year-old Rusty Wallace won for the last time in his cup career in 2004. In this case, old was a good thing. It was a return to win.
Joe Gibbs Racing Driver holds teammate Christopher Bell for his leading sixth victory on the track.
While Sunday was Hamlin’s sixth cup victory on this historic half-mile lane, it was his first here since March 2015-a team of 3.654 days.
“Ten years ago I have never made a Nascar start in my life today,” said 30-year-old Christopher Bell, who finished second to Hamlin, his Joe Gibbs racing team.
Ten years ago, Chase Elliott made his cup debut in the race that Hamlin won. He ended the fourth Sunday.
Hamlin returned to the driver who challenged Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson on this track on Sunday – and sometimes beat when they were the dominant drivers.
It was an emotional victory for Denny Hamlin, who ended a 10-year-old winless drought on his home state.
Hamlin led 274 of the 400 rounds on Sunday. Only two other times he led more rounds at Martinsville.
Hamlin has been good at this track-he has had eight top five finishes here since 2019-but he wasn’t the best.
“It was just aggravating to be the next best on this track for the next five years, and never had” it “,” Hamlin said after his 55th career cup, which bound Wallace for 11th place on the list of all time.
‘The’ It ‘is like the ability to control a race, run as fast as you need to lead the race and pull away if you want. Today we had ‘it’. ‘
Just as predicted by Chris Gabehart, who was the Hamlin crew head until he became the competition director at Joe Gibbs Racing after last season.
Gabehart leans in the window of Hamlin’s car and tells the driver just a few moments before the cars pulled on the track on Sunday that he would win today.
“I got it today,” Gabehart said of this particular feeling. “That’s you.”
The Joe Gibbs Racing Star is tied up with Rusty Wallace with 55 wins in the career.
Hamlin said that when Gabehart would say that in the 2019-20 seasons that “I almost knew he had a bullet of a race car he built, and we would probably win the race.”
But Hamlin has been careful about Gabehart’s feelings over the past few years because they have not always led to victories. While Hamlin felt good about his car after Saturday’s exercise, he knew that more work was needed.
“We didn’t have the best car,” Hamlin said. “We just didn’t. But I just had a kind of feeling that the direction we were going is the right way. “
It returned to Victory Lane, a place where he had not been with Dover since April 2024. He scored 31 races without a win before Sunday.
Hamlin comes to an era when drivers stop winning. Martin Truex Jr., who stopped competing in the cup after last season, last won in 2023 at the age of 43. Johnson, a seven-time champion, last won a cup race in 2017 at the age of 41. Gordon, a four-time champion, achieved his final cup victory-which in November 2015 at Martinsville was 43 years old.
Did Hamlin ever worry that his turns were over?
“I’m probably the king of irrational trust,” he said. “I mean, generally I know I can be the best, so I didn’t feel like I held the car back at any time. I am certainly not immune to understanding the time of the Father.
‘Everything I need to be good at being a race car driver is still very sharp. I feel like this hasn’t happened yet. It will, but not yet. ‘
