At age 45, time, wear and tear say that Denny Hamlin should be declining, a veteran on the back half of his career winding down and fading out of the NASCAR zeitgeist.
Yet somehow, some way, Hamlin keeps beating the odds as often as he’s beating his competition.
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Hamlin’s latest romp at Michigan International Speedway on Sunday was arguably his most impressive: qualified on pole despite an aerodynamic disadvantage, started from the rear and stormed to the front with a three-wide pass for the lead on a late-race restart to win by a whopping 11.11 seconds, the largest margin of victory on an oval since 2018. Even crazier is that he achieved a near-identical feat just one week prior at Nashville Superspeedway, where he jumped the start from pole position, went to the rear of the field and charged back for a three-wide pass for the lead on a late-race restart.
Team owner Joe Gibbs has fielded NASCAR Cup Series cars for Hamlin since Hamlin’s first of 736 starts back in 2005. Gibbs has led National Football League teams to Super Bowl championships. He has won five Cup Series championships as a team owner. He’s in both the NASCAR Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. What Hamlin is accomplishing at this stage of his career ranks among the most impressive athletic feats he’s ever seen.
“I think all of us here know how tough NASCAR is. We know this is the best people in the world racing stock cars,” Gibbs said Sunday. “And we’ve seen Denny now — I think at this point of his career, I think this might be the most exceptional thing he’s done. Because you think about most athletes, they get to a point where they have everything they need, OK? And they just lose the drive and passion. And what we’re witnessing with Denny is really just the opposite of that.
“He’s full-blown in the simulator, works extremely hard. In our meetings, he means so much to the other young drivers just hearing him describe what happens during the race, the way he looks at things. And so for us, it’s invaluable really. And for us to have this relationship this long, I just really appreciate him. He’s been so loyal to us, and he’s really helped build what we have.”
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Built-in speed goes a long way in allowing Hamlin to maximize his days so often that he’s now tied with Kyle Busch for ninth all-time on the Cup Series wins list with 63 victories. But so too does Hamlin’s work ethic, which is unrelenting despite his assured status as one of NASCAR’s greats. That includes putting in the homework, even in the hours before the race.
“I’ve been blessed to have really fast cars, for one,” Hamlin said. “But just learning — and I really studied (Sunday) morning, I really studied the 45. He started in the back last year, and I wanted to watch his first 20 laps, 30 laps to see how he navigated traffic. So I knew I was going to have my hands full, but I just — I don’t know, I constantly study some different things to try to get better, and we chip away at it. I never really panic at any point of the race anymore.
“Starting sixth here with 40 to go inside the last fuel run, it’s like, yeah, I feel pretty confident we’re still going to win. It’s just we’re at that point where we show up to the race track, and it’s like the confidence is just higher than it’s ever been.”
To have that self-assurance 21 years into his full-time Cup career may seem otherworldly to most. To Hamlin, this is just another day in 2026. The edge he holds is knowledge, a point he emphasized in a pre-race conversation with 23-year-old teammate Ty Gibbs, driver of the No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.
“He (Gibbs) was like, how many starts do you have? Probably 40, 30-something,” said Hamlin, who has indeed made 36 starts at Michigan. “He’s like, man, I’m at the point now where I feel like I know what I need. I know what I’m looking for. And I said, yeah, imagine having four times as many starts as you have.
“That’s the advantage I have every single week is that he feels comfortable where he’s at, but just add another 15 years of experience, and you know the transitions of the track and like what happens when it gets cloudy, what happens when it gets sunny, what happens when the wind is this direction, that direction, all those things you just learn over time. It’s why we have the upper hand right now.”
There are comparisons to be made to other sporting greats who’ve found this long-tenured excellence late in their careers — some in NASCAR like Jeff Gordon; others in other sports like the NFL’s Tom Brady or the NBA’s LeBron James. But those greats have championships to tag onto all of their wins. Hamlin is still seeking that ever-elusive first championship in NASCAR, especially after a devastating loss at Phoenix Raceway last November.
But like those aforementioned legends, Hamlin is still putting himself in contention for titles in the homestretch of his career, a tenure he intends to conclude at the end of the 2027 campaign.
His steps toward accomplishing those championship hopes were particularly rekindled Sunday at Michigan. Tyler Reddick, who drives the No. 45 Toyota that Hamlin co-owns with 23XI Racing, entered with a 97-point advantage over Hamlin for the No. 1 spot in the regular-season points standings. Reddick hadn’t finished worse than 15th all year, but a Lap 83 crash ousted his car from competition, dropping him to a season-worst 35th-place finish.
That one misstep, coupled with Hamlin’s late-race dominance, has sliced Reddick’s advantage to just 51 points entering Pocono Raceway — where Hamlin is the track’s all-time winningest driver with seven victories and is seeking to win three straight races for the first time in his career.
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After his Nashville victory, Hamlin said there was “not really” a realistic path to the No. 1 seed in The Chase because of Reddick’s five victories and ability to avoid bad finishes.
“We’d have to win three or four more races,” he said that evening. “He’s going to have to have some DNFs and stuff. Not really. My goal is to try to stay P2, and that will be close enough with 10 to go.”
That tune changed — if only slightly — after cutting the deficit to Reddick to a far more manageable margin with 11 races remaining before the postseason begins.
“I knew the only way we ever could catch him is he was going to have to have bad luck. I said it weeks ago,” Hamlin said. “He had bad luck today. We were in the same wreck. We were turned around backwards. Luckily, no one hit us in Turn 1. Our car wasn’t very good, and we just overcame it.
“I think it’s still going to have to — he’s going to stretch it out at San Diego, Sonoma. I still think he’s in a really good place, but if we keep doing this, it will keep them interesting and honest for sure.”
The driver with the most points at the conclusion of the regular season in August will earn the No. 1 seed and a 25-point buffer over second to begin The Chase, which starts at Darlington Raceway in September. The closer Hamlin makes it in the regular season, the better his chances for hoisting the Bill France Cup in November when the 10-race postseason marathon concludes.
Until then, it’s all about winning for Hamlin. It always has been. And now, only the sport’s giants stand in front of him on NASCAR’s all-time wins list: Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, David Pearson and Richard Petty.
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Sunday at Michigan, he wanted to remind everyone he’s not done yet.
“I wanted to go as hard as I could. I just wanted to make a statement on the last run,” Hamlin said. “And I wanted to keep myself in rhythm. This is a track where rhythm matters. … The minute you start backing off and not running 100%, your car will start biasing, doing something that it shouldn’t be because, again, like I talked about, it’s not meant to be run at 3/4 speed, it’s meant to be run at 100.
“So I wanted to have a no mercy run and just see what happens.”