NASCAR insiders explain Denny Hamlin's championship outlook entering Round of 12
Denny Hamlin had an eventful Round of 16, but the NASCAR Cup Series veteran is on to the Round of 12 after Bristol over the weekend, surviving a stretch of tough luck.
Still, the question of whether Hamlin can still win his first Cup Series title remains. The No. 11 team has gone from a dominant group to one skating by onto the next round, and Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi debated their potential on the latest episode of The Teardown.
“All right, here’s an interesting one. Denny Hamlin finished 10th in points this round. There was nothing to inspire much confidence, but they survived, and so now they get a fresh slate,” Gluck prefaced. “The Atlanta strategy, whatever, even though we both agreed with it, actually. Most people did not agree with it though. He got blasted for that. I think actually it might have gotten him through, in a way. He made it by 15 points. So, if he, you know, tries to race for stage points in Stage One, coming from the back in Atlanta, and gets wrecked and doesn’t get the however many points he got that day, maybe he doesn’t make it.
“This looked like it could have been one of the biggest collapses ever for a top contending team. Now that they’ve survived, do you feel better about them? Can they win the championship?”
Evidently, Bianchi’s confidence in Hamlin hasn’t been shaken, and he believes Hamlin needs to be mentioned among the top contenders in the sport moving onto the Round of 12.
“They can absolutely win the championship, absolutely. I mean, they could win, they could win at Talladega or Kansas and it would not be a surprise,” Bianchi answered. “Then, you go into Round Three, they could win at any of those three tracks. They could win at Vegas, Homestead or Martinsville, and they sure as hell can win at Phoenix. They can absolutely win the championship.
“Are they snakebit a little bit? Absolutely. Have they not had the finishes that correspond with their speed? Yes. Are they to the level they were at — the same level they were at earlier in the year? No, they’re not. But this still, this team, is still so good, and while consistency is great, and you can point your way to the next round, this team is also good enough to win a race, and if that’s what they need to do, I feel like they’re going to do it.”
Continuing, Gluck is in agreement with his podcast partner, seeing the forest through the trees and wondering if a Hamlin championship in 2024 would be the perfect story for his first, after missing out on so many dominating seasons in the past.
“I’m with you, right? Like, they can turn it on,” Gluck added. “I wonder if somehow we’re looking back on this in November, and you’re almost like, ‘Man of all years that he finally did it, this was the weird year,’ where, like, it seemed like he was just going to keep having bad luck, and it seemed like all things were going to go wrong, and he somehow made it and won.
“So yeah, I mean, you know, they’re not gonna have a ton of points. They don’t have much breathing room, but he could absolutely go to Kansas and immediately launch himself in the next round.”
While Denny Hamlin has gone from championship contender to the veteran driver trying to surprise some people over the course of the 2024 season, count out the Joe Gibbs Racing wheelman at your own risk. Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi certainly aren’t.