Denny Hamlin: Crew chief Chris Gabehart 'rejuvenated' my career

Denny Hamlin believes the impact his crew chief Chris Gabehart has had on his NASCAR Cup Series career can’t be understated enough.

During the latest episode of Harvick’s Happy Hour, Hamlin sat down for an interview with Kevin Harvick, where the former NASCAR Cup Series champion first waxed poetic about Hamlin and Gabehart’s connection, as he’s seen it from a new light since joining the broadcast booth.

“We went through the whole race and we listened to all the comments,” Harvick prefaced. “You go back a week before, and you go to Phoenix and you’re battling for the lead, and Chris comes on the radio is like, ‘Well, no big deal. Settle in, refocus.’ I heard him come on the radio at Bristol, ‘All right, we need to do this, this and this.’ How big of a part, especially last week, was the crew chief, in just that information coming from him, relaying it to you? Because I hear this dynamic between the two of you guys, and I haven’t really listened to a lot of people until this year, but the dynamic between you guys is so good, that I don’t even know how to explain it to people.

“Because he’ll ask you a question in the middle of an intense situation, and he’s a little bit jacked up and you’re like, ‘Okay, sounds good.’ There’s there’s no emotion out of you. How important is that in a situation like last week, and even a situation like you had the week before, for your confidence at Phoenix, to be able to say, ‘Alright, we do need to blow that back off,’ to have that crew chief support you, and give you all that information like he has been the last two weeks.”

Evidently, Hamlin believes he owes a lot of his recent success to his crew chief, heaping immense praise on Gabehart and what he’s done for the No. 11 team.

“I don’t think there’s any secret that Chris has rejuvenated my career,” Hamlin stated. “I think he is just a guy that has really pushed me to get better, at all types of aspects of my my craft. He’s also a good supporter of mine. But I think of him like the head coach. I’m the quarterback. He’s the head coach. And if he tells me to — this is one thing that he loves saying is, ‘What I love about Denny is that if I tell him to go and run a lap in reverse in practice, he won’t ask why, he’ll just go do it. Because he knows I have a reason, I need him to do that.’ And so that is my job right, is to run whatever play he tells me.

“Last week, when I threw a pick six, trying to go for a race win at COTA, he says, ‘Well, now we’ve got to just reset and get the best day we can out of it.’ So you know, you’ve got to have a good support system with it. And it’s something about our personalities that really meshes really, really well. And we just really respect each other. Knowing that we each have each other’s best interests at heart.”

So why do Hamlin and Gabehart go together like peanut butter and jelly? According to Hamlin, it’s Gabehart’s willingness to give it to his driver straight, and Hamlin’s ability to take the ball and run with it.

“So I mean, it really happened after a challenging 2018,” Hamlin reminisced. “I went to my first season ever without winning a race, and that was very tough. And honestly I was starting to doubt myself, whether I was going to be able to continue to perform at a high level in the Cup Series. And then he just came in, and he was a rookie crew chief and he says, you know, ‘I just want to know,’ you know, ‘Are you going to be the veteran that says I’ve always done it like this, this is how I —,’ he’s like, ‘That’s that’s when things don’t get done very well,’ right? ‘If you’re stuck in your ways, and I have my ways that I want to do things, that could cause clashes.’

“But I said, ‘Listen, I don’t have any answers right now. I just came off a losing season, and I’m willing to listen to any constructive criticism you might have of of my craft.’ And he says, ‘Alright, well I think you need to get better here, there, there, there.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go to work.’ And that’s — ever since then we’ve had success.”

Denny Hamlin and Chris Gabehart have won just about everything you can together in the NASCAR Cup Series. We’ll see if the duo can bring a title to Joe Gibbs Racing in the future, as they’ve come close in the past.