Denny Hamlin 'disappointed' in 11 team's performance in playoffs

Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 team have been inconsistent over the last couple of months, especially during the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, following a blazing start to the 2024 campaign.

While the veteran didn’t have a bad afternoon in Las Vegas this past weekend, as he finished P8 in Sin City, Joey Logano’s victory coupled with Hamlin’s P8 finish left him 27 points below the cut-line following the race. That’s a lot of ground to make up over the next two weeks for Hamlin if he wants to make the Championship 4.

“Yeah, just not a clean day,” Hamlin said, regarding his P8 run in Las Vegas. “That certainly kind of sums it up. You’ll have that. We’ll just do the best we can to get the best finish.

“I thought Chris [Gabehart] did a great job trying to get some sort of finish. Once we lost the track position early, he was doing everything he could to try to get it back through some alternate strategy. It goes long there, we fall back to the back. Just part of it.”

During the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin elaborated on his performance at Las Vegas, as well as the playoffs as a whole, revealing his disappointment in the way his No. 11 Toyota team has performed over the last couple of weeks.

“I’m just kind of disappointed in our playoffs,” Hamlin stated. “Certainly, it hasn’t been clean, by any means, especially at the race tracks where we know that we’ve got a chance to contend. It’s just been a rough go at it for us. Kansas and Vegas, two races — you know, you only get so many of these normal style, cookie-cutter race tracks that we’ve got in our playoff schedule, and we’ve had one of them, which was Bristol, and our pit crew was great there. We had a flawless day. We ran upfront, stayed up there throughout the stages and got a great finish, but besides that, it’s just been a really tough go at it.

“We’ve had crashes, we’ve had all kind of things throughout these playoffs. I told you on the way home, ‘Frankly, I’m amazed we’re still in it. I’m amazed we’re still part of the playoffs.’ So, it just has not gone well.”

At the least, Denny Hamlin will have a chance due to the way the schedule shakes out. Homestead and Martinsville have both been kind to him over the course of his NASCAR Cup Series career, and he’ll have to have a little bit of luck over the next two weeks if he’s going to race for the championship at Phoenix.