HOMESTEAD, Fla. — So you’re saying there’s a chance?
Neither Christopher Bell nor Denny Hamlin feel optimistic heading into the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Bell is second in points, 67 markers behind Kyle Larson, the series leader and the apparent champion-in-waiting with a healthy advantage over his competition. Hamlin, Bell’s teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing, is third in points, 70 back of Larson. Both Bell and Hamlin are seeking their first championships.
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The odds are not in their favor. Larson would clinch the championship by scoring as few as eight stage points, even if either Bell or Hamlin score a perfect 76-point day. But they stand a chance. Sort of.
“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. No matter what — I mean, there’s obviously a chance you can win the lottery as well. But do you really count on that?”
Missteps throughout The Chase presented by Mobil 1 have cost both points that would have tightened the gap to Larson entering the 2026 finale. Bell’s most apparent mistake came at Talladega Superspeedway, where he entered just five points behind Larson but crashed entering pit road during Stage 1, squandering a golden opportunity to manage the point gap to Larson heading into the final two races of the season. That hasn’t proven to cost him a shot at this championship yet, but Bell lost a whopping 69 points to Larson that afternoon.
In short, execution has been the Achilles’ heel of Bell and the No. 20 team throughout The Chase.
“It was certainly not ideal,” Bell said of his postseason. “I mean, we had the car performance, had the speed, and yeah, just execution … lack of it is the reason why we’re not in a better spot than we are.”
Hamlin walked into The Chase as the apparent man to beat, the No. 1 seed with a 25-point advantage over the next-nearest competitor. But throughout this 10-race postseason, the No. 11 team has yet to mirror the dominance it once showed this season, winless since June when it strung three consecutive victories together. Instead, errors and unfortunate circumstances put Hamlin behind week after week throughout the postseason, culminating in a performance that may leave Hamlin short of the championship yet again.
“I think as long as the season is, 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 post-mortem,” Hamlin said. “But yeah, it’s a long, grueling season, but there’s just little moments that just was the turning point that you’re either gonna end up winning the championship or not.”
Time is running out, and a scheduled 267 laps are all that stand between the drivers and establishing the 2026 Cup Series champion. There is a shared disappointment between Bell and Hamlin, who have watched Larson and the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet gap the field across the last two weeks. Toyota has not won a championship since 2019, when Kyle Busch clinched the title at Homestead-Miami.
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The expectation at Joe Gibbs Racing — which fields Toyota Camry XSEs for Bell, Hamlin, Chase Briscoe and Ty Gibbs — was to end the championship drought. Instead, it continues into 2027.
“I was very confident that it was going to be a Toyota driver that won the championship,” Bell said. “And 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 we all shot ourselves in the foot one way or the other.”
Hamlin has been with JGR for all of its tenure with Toyota. With Busch’s two championships and Martin Truex Jr.’s title in 2017, the manufacturer has three Cup Series driver championships since joining Cup in 2007.
“I think it needs to be looked at personally, internally with Toyota and JGR and Legacy and 23XI,” Hamlin said. “I think we have to figure out that the win ratio to championship ratio has just not been as good as it needs to be, so I think that needs to be a deep dive and honestly figure out what needs to be changed.
“I don’t think we should just rinse and repeat and let’s just do this all again next year. I think we really should think about what it’s going to take to win the big prize at the end, because our cars are too fast for there to be just … three championships in 20 years. We’ve got to fix that.”
There is an opportunity to fix that on Sunday under the lights at Homestead-Miami Speedway. If disaster strikes the No. 5 team, Kyle Larson can still lose this title to either Bell or Hamlin.
Whether or not the drivers are optimistic, there is still a chance.