Five laps from the scheduled end of last weekend’s playoff race at Watkins Glen, Denny Hamlin was 32nd on the track with a car that had been bruised and battered in two separate accidents. He sat 15 points below the cutline.
When the checkered flag waved, Hamlin had moved up to 23rd on the track. That moved him to within six points of the final transfer spot heading into Saturday night’s elimination race at Bristol Motor Speedway — a track where Hamlin has won the past two Cup races.
After informing Hamlin how close he was to the cutline, crew chief Chris Gabehart told his driver on the radio after last weekend’s race: “Let me make one thing clear … that is going to our house where we’re six (points) behind. That is going to our house.”
Four drivers will see their title hopes end at Bristol (7:30 p.m. ET Saturday on USA Network.). With two former champions among the four drivers outside the transfer spot, it is Hamlin who is the biggest storyline.
It was only a year ago that he taunted fans after winning this race, saying: “I beat your favorite driver … all of them.” He won again in March in a race that saw excessive tire wear.
Advancing to the next round would continue Hamlin’s quest for his first Cup title. Being eliminated would delay that effort another year for a driver, who at age 43 has limited chances remaining.
Should he fail to advance, it would be only the second time since 2014 he has failed to advance beyond the first round. He failed to do so in 2018.
Hamlin has made the playoffs every year since 2014. He has reached the championship race four times and advanced to the third round four other times.
His focus is singular this weekend.
“I love the fact that we get to go there on the offense,” Hamlin said on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast this week. “I’m going to be on offense the entire time.”
Hamlin said those final laps at Watkins Glen were critical in changing his approach to this weekend.
“We went from thinking we were going to have to win to, ‘Oh, we just got to be ourselves and do what we normally do at Bristol,’” Hamlin said on his podcast. … Minus six (to the cutline) ain’t nothing.”
Nothing is guaranteed but Hamlin has had quite a track record at Bristol.
He is one of five drivers who have finished in the top 10 in all three Bristol races on the concrete with the Next Gen car. The other four are Christopher Bell, Chase Elliott, Chris Buescher and Kyle Larson.
Hamlin has run all but four laps in the last 15 races on the concrete at Bristol. He has started in the top 10 in the last nine races there, helping him avoid potential issues.
As Hamlin said after exiting his car last weekend at Watkins Glen: “It’s not over yet. Not over yet. Not over until the end of Bristol.”
2. Due date for twins nears for Chase Briscoe
Five nights ahead of the race that will determine if Chase Briscoe advances to the second round of the playoffs, he was busy at home putting together a stroller for two infants.
“The instructions were not very good,” he said. “Fortunately, they had a QR code with a video which helped a lot, but the stroller deal was hard. I’m not going to lie. And this thing, I can’t express enough how wide this thing is. I think we should have went with the double-decker style because this thing, I really don’t know how it will fit through a doorway.”
Briscoe’s wife, Marissa, is pregnant with twins. They could arrive any day. If they have not arrived by Oct. 8, she will be induced to give birth, he said. The twins will join their older brother Brooks, who turns 3 in October.
Briscoe had a plan for all of this but that changed after he earned a playoff spot when he won the Southern 500 in the regular season finale earlier this month.
“We went from before I was in the playoffs, if (the twins) came on a Saturday or a Sunday, then I was going to be free to go and be there for the birth,” Briscoe said. “Once the playoffs started it was kind of a situation where if they call on Saturday morning, we’ll let you go and we’ll have somebody else practice or qualify the car, but you’re going to run the race no matter what.
“Now, with this weekend and our situation it’s kind of one of those things where even if it happens on Friday before practice or qualifying, I can’t start in the back and make the playoffs. I’m going to have to practice and qualify the car, so hopefully the twins will come in the middle of the week, but it’s going to happen soon.”
Briscoe and Ty Gibbs are tied for the last two transfer spots going into Saturday night’s race. Denny Hamlin is six points behind both.
Next year, all three will be teammates. Briscoe will join Joe Gibbs Racing next season, taking over the No. 19 with Martin Truex Jr. no longer racing full-time in the series.
Truex is 14 points behind Briscoe and Gibbs in the playoff standings. Briscoe said it would be “ironic” if the final transfer spot to the second round was between he and Truex.
Briscoe has had limited contact with members of the No. 19 team. He’s gone to lunch with the crew once and receives text messages after races from crew chief James Small, who will be Briscoe’s crew chief next year.
“I definitely have communication with those guys, but it’s just very basic communication,” Briscoe said. “I want to see them do good, too. Those are going to be my guys next year and I want them to be confident going into next year, but at the end of the day I’m really only worried about the 14 guys right now.”
3. Officiating could be key at Bristol
Christopher Bell says a key to Saturday night’s race at Bristol will be how officials call the race, noting how he believed that officials changed how they called yellows during the spring race there.
“Even if a guy blows a tire and brushes the wall, I think it’s important to stay green,” said Bell, who leads the playoff standings. “It just completely changes your strategy and your mindset inside the car (if there is a yellow).
“At the beginning of that Bristol race (in March), the only thing that mattered was getting to the next yellow flag. At all costs you were saving your tires. … to make sure you weren’t the guy that blew a tire and caused the yellow. Then, all of a sudden, in the third stage, when they quit throwing the yellow flag, then it opened up the strategy.”
The March race had nine cautions but only two in the final half of the 500-lap race. In the first 250 laps, there were two multi-car incidents that brought out the caution, two cautions for debris after vehicles hit the wall, two cautions for spins by Kyle Busch, including one at the end of the first stage and a caution at the end of the second stage.
In the final stage, the only two cautions were for a spin by Josh Berry and a two-car incident. There were no cautions in the last 121 laps. That was the longest stretch without a caution. There were at least four cars — including Bell’s car — that had flat tires in the final 70 laps but all made it to pit road and didn’t lead to a caution.
“If someone would have went hard (in the last 120 laps), I think the possibility to maybe … pit twice and pass everybody, it might have worked out but nobody knew that going into it. Everyone was saving their tires and everyone had to make a pit stop (under green) which was fine, but I think knowing the officiating, the way it is going to go, you can strategize the race a lot differently and it’ll be a completely different mentality.”
4. Good vibes on Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway
Big Machine Racing owner Scott Borchetta said this week that he remains confident that a deal will get done between the city of Nashville and Speedway Motorsports to bring NASCAR to the historic Fairgrounds Speedway.
Borchetta is a member of the track’s Hall of Fame. Before he founded Big Machine Records, he won three NASCAR SuperTrucks titles there.
Along with owning a team in the Xfinity Series, Borchetta also is the CEO of the Music City Grand Prix, the IndyCar race that had run in the streets of Nashville but moved to Nashville Superspeedway because of construction with the new NFL stadium near downtown.
“As far as the business of getting things done at the fairgrounds, I think we’re inching toward it,” he said this week. “We were hoping to be racing in ’25 or ’26. Our best-case scenario now, if we could get it done before the end of the year, maybe ’26 but probably ’27. … I think everybody knows what the right thing to do is and the right thing is to have NASCAR back at the Nashville fairgrounds.”
The 0.596-mile track hosted at least one Cup race a year from 1958-84. The Xfinity Series raced there in 1984, ’88, 89 and from 1995-2000.
Speedway Motorsports has sought since 2017 to return NASCAR to the track.
5. Numbers to know
1 — playoff driver (Austin Cindric) has scored top-10 finishes in both playoff races this season. Cindric was 10th at both Atlanta and Watkins Glen.
4 — Wins in a row for Ford and all by different drivers. Harrison Burton won at Daytona, Chase Briscoe won the Southern 500, Joey Logano won the playoff opener at Atlanta, and Chris Buescher won last weekend at Watkins Glen.
5 — Race top 10 streak for Kyle Larson at Bristol, the longest active streak.
7 — Drivers who won last year in Cup who have yet to win this year. They are Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Ross Chastain, AJ Allmendinger, Michael McDowell, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Shane van Gisbergen.
8 — Drivers who have broken a winless streak of 42 races or more this season. Kyle Busch has a 49-race winless streak going to Bristol.