Martin Truex Jr.’s had major unseen role in Denny – Sports News
Three-time winner on the Monster Mile, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin’s newest NASCAR Cup Series victory on the Dover concrete got here after a thrilling rain-delayed double additional time affair on Sunday. However, the historic Delaware oval hasn’t at all times been one of the driving force of the No. 11 Toyota’s best tracks, with the 44-year-old crediting some of his success to former teammate, Martin Truex Jr.
Speaking with 2014 Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick on Monday about his win at the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400, Hamlin was fast to confess that he had “struggled” at Dover for round 13 years.
“At the very beginning, I felt as though, ‘Okay, well, Jimmy [Johnson is] doing it this way, but he has a car that can do it that way, and my car can’t do that,” Hamlin went on to say on the ‘Happy Hour’ podcast.
“And then I was kind of blessed to have Martin Truex as a teammate and in the same car as I was able to do the same things Jimmy was able to do. And at that point I’m like, ‘Okay, so, it’s not the car, it’s the driver and their approach.’
“And, as you know, while this looks very straightforward, when you look at this track from the overhead and it looks very symmetrical and it’s just a normal oval, you do not drive this thing like you drive any other oval.
“It’s just the way the load of the car is, how you make speed here is different than it is at any other track that is remotely similar in size or length or banking. So it just had to wrap my head around how they make speed and a change by style based off of that. And once I started doing that, I had a lot of success.”
Hamlin and Truex Jr. had been teammates at JGR between 2019 and 2024, when the latter retired from full-time driving. A observe the place Truex Jr. visited victory lane on 4 events, Hamlin lastly adopted swimsuit in 2020 during his fifteenth Cup Series season.
Reflecting on this newest victory, and particularly the late rain stoppage and subsequent restart, Hamlin admitted he thought he possibly stood a 50/50 likelihood of holding onto the lead. “I knew at that point we were going to stay out on older tires,” he defined.
“I knew that new tires, where are they going to restart? Are they going to start beside me, behind me, a couple rows behind me? How many restarts is there going to be? All those variables you just never know.
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“And I think it’s such a 50-50 proposition, and it very well could have ended up a different way, had a few circumstances been different.”
Now with two consecutive wins in Dover, Hamlin will look to hold this constructive momentum over to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday for the Brickyard 400. To date, Hamlin has but to win on the two.5-mile oval, ending a best of third in 2008, 2014, and 2018.
A win in Indianapolis wouldn’t solely lengthen his lead in the playoff image but in addition mark his second back-to-back wins of the season, following Martinsville and Darlington.
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