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Sprint Cup
CUP: Hamlin, JGR Elevating Game
Denny Hamlin is having a career season at Joe Gibbs Racing...
Denny Hamlin does a burnout after a dominant win last Sunday at Michigan. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
It’s not unusual for a team to get on a hot streak during the course of a season, but it’s not often that a team can take its game to an entirely different level, and keep it there.
But that appears to be the case with NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team.
Getting hot happens. Staying hot? That’s the tough part.
And yet Hamlin, 29, heads into Sunday’s race at Infineon Raceway coming off his second consecutive win, and a career-best fifth victory after only 15 races. For a driver that had knee surgery earlier in the season, and a team that has been streaky in the past, it’s been quite a turnaround.
“I’ve watched them grow week in, week out,” JGR President J.D. Gibbs said after Hamlin’s victory Sunday at Michigan International Speedway. “[They] don’t panic if things don’t go well; they’re able to rally and have a great weekend.
“This is another encouraging, I think, notch for those guys.”
Although he has won five times this season, Hamlin sits third in the point standings, trailing second-place Kyle Busch (his JGR teammate) by 25 points and points leader Kevin Harvick by 47.
The team finished no better than 17th in its first five starts this season, but has rallied to win three of the last five and five of the last 10.
Hamlin and crew chief Mike Ford insist that the best is yet to come for the team that has championship aspirations.
“I think there are some aspects of our race team that can get better,” Hamlin says. “I think our pit crew has definitely stepped up. I feel like my communication with Mike has stepped up. What I’m telling Mike and then applying to the race car has gotten better.
“But … where is the limit on it? I feel like each week that we show up, we just set our bar a little bit higher than it was the week before. You go to Pocono, everyone expects us to win. They jot us down [and] engrave the trophy. There’s a lot of effort that gets put into that.”
Heading into this season, three of Hamlin’s career eight wins had come at the oddly shaped 2.5-mile track. Consistently fast on the series’ flatter tracks, Hamlin and the team have quickly become a force on tracks of just about any size and shape.
But “not without a lot of work,” he says.
“It’s not as easy as it looks. The way we’re performing now goes back six months, a year from now,” Hamlin says. “We’ve worked very, very hard to get to this spot. To show up [at Michigan] the way we did on Friday and know we just kept battling. Literally, I looked at the notes on how many things we changed right here before race day, and I was a skeptic. When you got faith in a guy like Mike to make the right decisions, it’s easy to do my job.”
Ford has been with Hamlin and the No. 11 team since it debuted late in the 2005 season. He helped guide Hamlin to a third-place finish in points in 2006, the team’s first full season in Cup, and they’ve qualified for the Chase For The Sprint Cup every year.
It was the way the team ended it’s 2009 campaign – with two wins and four top-five finishes in the final five races – that Ford says told him the group was ready to step up to the next level and be a legitimate threat to win the championship.
“I knew that was a catalyst to really turn up the team, to get a little bit more out of everyone,” Ford says.
“We come into this season and we do [turn it up]. Denny goes down with his knee injury. He comes back, obviously not 100 percent. The team steps up. We narrow the gap to try to pick him up knowing he’s not going to be there, and we start winning races, even with a driver that’s not 100 percent.
“Now that he’s coming back healthier each week, we’re winning more and more.
“It’s easier when the morale is high to get a little bit more out of your guys. That’s where we’re at.”
Ford says the team won’t “be complacent … fail to realize that guys are trying to play catchup to us.
“We’re trying to catch up to ourselves. Our benchmark is ourselves and we’re just trying to work on that.”
Since 2004, only Greg Biffle had managed to win five of the first 15 races, doing so in 2005. Busch won five of the first 16 races in 2008.
Neither driver was able to parlay those strong starts into championships however. In part because maintaining that advantage is difficult. And in recent seasons, it’s been the difference between four-time champion Jimmie Johnson and the rest of the field.
“The key portion of that team has been together for a while,” Ford says of Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 48 team. “They understand each other. They’re very competitive. They work well together.”
Ford says he sees similarities in his own group, which gives him one more reason to feel good about the direction his team is headed.
“Being able to challenge someone is difficult if you don’t have a competitive person, but we’ve got competitive people all the way around,” he says. “Their objective is to win. When we see fruit and we understand why we see fruit, it makes it a little bit easier.
“I think getting to this point is very difficult, but maintaining it’s going to be difficult as well. As long as we understand what we’re doing on a weekly basis, I think that’s going to make it a little easier.”
SceneDaily.com • Infineon Raceway is high on Jimmie Johnson’s to-do list as one of five tracks he hasn’t won at
But that appears to be the case with NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team.
Getting hot happens. Staying hot? That’s the tough part.
And yet Hamlin, 29, heads into Sunday’s race at Infineon Raceway coming off his second consecutive win, and a career-best fifth victory after only 15 races. For a driver that had knee surgery earlier in the season, and a team that has been streaky in the past, it’s been quite a turnaround.
“I’ve watched them grow week in, week out,” JGR President J.D. Gibbs said after Hamlin’s victory Sunday at Michigan International Speedway. “[They] don’t panic if things don’t go well; they’re able to rally and have a great weekend.
“This is another encouraging, I think, notch for those guys.”
Although he has won five times this season, Hamlin sits third in the point standings, trailing second-place Kyle Busch (his JGR teammate) by 25 points and points leader Kevin Harvick by 47.
The team finished no better than 17th in its first five starts this season, but has rallied to win three of the last five and five of the last 10.
Hamlin and crew chief Mike Ford insist that the best is yet to come for the team that has championship aspirations.
“I think there are some aspects of our race team that can get better,” Hamlin says. “I think our pit crew has definitely stepped up. I feel like my communication with Mike has stepped up. What I’m telling Mike and then applying to the race car has gotten better.
“But … where is the limit on it? I feel like each week that we show up, we just set our bar a little bit higher than it was the week before. You go to Pocono, everyone expects us to win. They jot us down [and] engrave the trophy. There’s a lot of effort that gets put into that.”
Heading into this season, three of Hamlin’s career eight wins had come at the oddly shaped 2.5-mile track. Consistently fast on the series’ flatter tracks, Hamlin and the team have quickly become a force on tracks of just about any size and shape.
But “not without a lot of work,” he says.
“It’s not as easy as it looks. The way we’re performing now goes back six months, a year from now,” Hamlin says. “We’ve worked very, very hard to get to this spot. To show up [at Michigan] the way we did on Friday and know we just kept battling. Literally, I looked at the notes on how many things we changed right here before race day, and I was a skeptic. When you got faith in a guy like Mike to make the right decisions, it’s easy to do my job.”
Ford has been with Hamlin and the No. 11 team since it debuted late in the 2005 season. He helped guide Hamlin to a third-place finish in points in 2006, the team’s first full season in Cup, and they’ve qualified for the Chase For The Sprint Cup every year.
It was the way the team ended it’s 2009 campaign – with two wins and four top-five finishes in the final five races – that Ford says told him the group was ready to step up to the next level and be a legitimate threat to win the championship.
“I knew that was a catalyst to really turn up the team, to get a little bit more out of everyone,” Ford says.
“We come into this season and we do [turn it up]. Denny goes down with his knee injury. He comes back, obviously not 100 percent. The team steps up. We narrow the gap to try to pick him up knowing he’s not going to be there, and we start winning races, even with a driver that’s not 100 percent.
“Now that he’s coming back healthier each week, we’re winning more and more.
“It’s easier when the morale is high to get a little bit more out of your guys. That’s where we’re at.”
Ford says the team won’t “be complacent … fail to realize that guys are trying to play catchup to us.
“We’re trying to catch up to ourselves. Our benchmark is ourselves and we’re just trying to work on that.”
Since 2004, only Greg Biffle had managed to win five of the first 15 races, doing so in 2005. Busch won five of the first 16 races in 2008.
Neither driver was able to parlay those strong starts into championships however. In part because maintaining that advantage is difficult. And in recent seasons, it’s been the difference between four-time champion Jimmie Johnson and the rest of the field.
“The key portion of that team has been together for a while,” Ford says of Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 48 team. “They understand each other. They’re very competitive. They work well together.”
Ford says he sees similarities in his own group, which gives him one more reason to feel good about the direction his team is headed.
“Being able to challenge someone is difficult if you don’t have a competitive person, but we’ve got competitive people all the way around,” he says. “Their objective is to win. When we see fruit and we understand why we see fruit, it makes it a little bit easier.
“I think getting to this point is very difficult, but maintaining it’s going to be difficult as well. As long as we understand what we’re doing on a weekly basis, I think that’s going to make it a little easier.”
SceneDaily.com • Infineon Raceway is high on Jimmie Johnson’s to-do list as one of five tracks he hasn’t won at
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