Denny Hamlin 'wants to win Indy bad'

The Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway makes its return for the first time since 2020 this Sunday, and Denny Hamlin has already made it known it’s a race he desperately wants to win.

In 15 prior Cup Series starts on the IMS oval, Hamlin has tallied eight top 10s and finished inside the top-three on three occasions. He’s been close, but never gotten it done at IMS. Will he change that this Sunday?

“I want to win it bad,” Hamlin said on Monday’s “Actions Detrimental” podcast. “I also know that I need to control what I can control, do my job on the racetrack, off the racetrack. This is gonna be a race that can be frustrating. You can have a very, very fast car and if you put that fast car in 10th place, it’s gonna be tough. It’ll be tough to come back from that. It comes from executing right when you unload to the checkered flag. I just got to make sure I do my job to the best of my ability and if we do, we’re gonna have a great shot. But I wanna win bad.”

Denny Hamlin stops the bleeding with solid run at Pocono

The Brickyard 400 is back after three years of NASCAR racing on the infield road course. The 160-lap, 400-mile race is similar to Pocono in its size, meaning strategy and fuel mileage will be key.

Hamlin had a fast car at Pocono, a racetrack he’s dominated his entire career. A seven-time winner at the Tricky Triangle, Hamlin made a run at Ryan Blaney in the closing laps of the race but could never quite get under two seconds away from his bumper. Blaney took the checkered flag while Hamlin finished P2, his best finish since his runner-up effort at Gateway last month.

Despite the solid run it wasn’t a win and thus, Hamlin was critical of his performance, specifically on the final restart when Alex Bowman cleared him for second.

“I knew that was the critical part of the end of the race was trying to come out of that restart second, and I just didn’t do a good job of trying to clear Alex there and he did a great job of clearing me,” Hamlin told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “So, it just, I knew I was just kind of sitting there at that points waiting on the tires to wear out so I can make a move. You get so aero tight at this race track that you need, I need those long runs for the field to kind of start spreading out to make moves and it was just too late.”