In his quest for the NASCAR Cup Series championship, Denny Hamlin may make his last stand — for 2024 at least — in his home state of Virginia, when he takes to the track at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday afternoon (2 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App).
And if we‘re being completely honest, his odds of winning a championship this year are not good. According to my NASCAR Cup Series playoff forecast, which simulates the rest of the playoffs 10,000 times to track each driver‘s chances of advancing through and/or winning the title, Hamlin has just a 13% probability of making his fifth career Championship 4 appearance.
Hamlin goes into the penultimate race of the season trailing William Byron by 18 points in the standings, with longtime rival Kyle Larson wedged 11 points in front of him as well. While he can still potentially make it in without a victory on Sunday, the odds are stacked against it — so his best path involves adding another of those fancy grandfather clocks to his collection (which already includes five of them, tops among active drivers):
Things didn‘t need to be quite so dire for Hamlin, though. If not for an unfortunate mistake earlier in the season, he would be much closer to extending his title hopes — and far less reliant on a win this weekend to make that happen.
I‘m talking, of course, about the L2-level penalty given to the No. 11 team for running afoul of NASCAR‘s engine inspection requirements following Hamlin‘s win on March 17 at Bristol. The Toyota Racing Development team mistakenly disassembled and rebuilt that race-winning engine before presenting it to NASCAR for inspection, violating multiple sections of the NASCAR Rule Book in the process.
Both Joe Gibbs Racing and Hamlin were docked 75 points in the regular-season standings and 10 playoff points when the violation was announced in mid-August, following Toyota self-reporting the infraction.
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While all of the implications weren‘t fully known at the time, Hamlin knew the penalty could end up looming large when he spoke of the situation on his weekly podcast, Actions Detrimental.
“You can look at it and say, ‘Well it’s just a 10-point penalty,‘ but it isn’t,” Hamlin said in August. “Look where I’m at now: I’m eighth in points. I was battling for the regular-season championship, which would have paid 15 points, and now at most I’m probably going to get three. Just a huge swing for us … and we know that these cutlines come down to the number, (it) always does.”
Those words seem particularly prophetic now. Let‘s break down what would have changed in the regular-season standings if nothing else changed in terms of on-track results, but Hamlin‘s team never received the engine penalty:
Hamlin would have finished 30 points shy of Tyler Reddick for the Regular Season Championship, but he would have ranked fourth in the final standings instead of seventh, which would have yielded a bonus of seven playoff points instead of the four he actually received. When you include the initial penalty of 10 playoff points, that reduced Hamlin’s overall playoff tally by 13 points (while also giving one point apiece to rivals Christopher Bell, William Byron and Ryan Blaney).
Carry that forward to the present, and we can see how much closer to the Championship 4 Hamlin would be in the playoff standings without the ripple effects from the penalty. In a hypothetical world, Hamlin would leapfrog Larson to rank fifth in the standings heading into Martinsville (rather than sixth), a mere four points below the cutline instead of 18 below:
That, in turn, would more than double his advancement odds in my forecast model, raising them from 13% to 29% — and lifting his championship chances from 4% to 9% in the process.
No, Hamlin wouldn‘t be above the elimination line, nor favored to move on, even in a world without the penalty. He can‘t blame it totally for a playoff run that has seen him finish outside the top 20 just as often as he‘s finished among the top five. But just the same, he would be under a lot less pressure now if the penalty never happened. His odds of advancing on points without a win at Martinsville would be 24% — instead of just 6% — including a coin-flip‘s chance (47%) to make it by finishing between Nos. 2-5 — instead of just 14%, as we noted above.
Simply put, Denny‘s path to that first-ever championship was made a lot harder when that engine mistake happened — and he knew it at the time. But it‘s still far from over for the No. 11 car, at a track where Hamlin has seen so much success (and is the co-favorite to win again, alongside Larson).
So maybe we‘ll look back on the penalty as just another chapter in the story of Hamlin‘s first title. The data shows, though, it likely will prove to be one obstacle too many in the career of a driver who can‘t seem to catch that crucial break to help push him over the top.