Being the most successful manufacturer takes years of patience and hard work, but maintaining that position can be a bit too difficult in NASCAR, as Chevrolet has shown this year. Winning the Cup title with Kyle Larson last year, the team hasn’t won any races so far, as Toyota continues to dominate. Although Chevy made some changes to its overall body this season, Denny Hamlin, one of the Toyota drivers who outperformed Chevy competition and won a race this year, feels the changes are minor. Moreover, he seems to be just as curious about their performance as Chevy is.
Denny Hamlin is curious about Chevy’s performance gamble
“This is less of a downforce and drag change than what you have over the course of a race,” Hamlin claimed, speaking on his Actions Detrimental podcast. Now, while Chevrolet did introduce some tweaks to its ZL1 body for this season, it remains unclear whether those were the ones that affected its overall performance.
As per Denny Hamlin, the change was too minor to cause such a huge gap in performance, considering they won the championship last year with multiple race wins throughout different teams. Moreover, he finds it more curious that the manufacturer is still on a learning curve with the changes.
“Interestingly, they’re acknowledging that they’re trying to figure it out, but yet I didn’t see anything numbers-wise that would alert me that this was going to be a learning curve type of moment,” he said.
Toyota has absolutely dominated this season so far. They managed to win five of the six races, four coming from Tyler Reddick and the #45 23XI Racing team and one from Hamlin’s #11 Joe Gibbs Racing team. And the one other race win was Ryan Blaney’s Ford at the Phoenix Raceway.
Interestingly enough, Rick Hendrick did mention that they had ‘given’ away some performance to Ford and Toyota and were trying to catch up. But this was before Chevy announced the new body. So, they were expecting to outperform the two other OEMs. But that hasn’t happened so far.
Meanwhile, for Denny Hamlin, it seems that the universe is giving him the perfect opportunity to finally fulfil his biggest NASCAR achievement.
Is this Hamlin’s final and strongest chance?
For years now, Hamlin has been targeting to win the Cup Series championship but has failed to do so. Despite being one of the strongest performers last season, he missed out on winning the title against Kyle Larson. But more blame was put on the elimination-style playoff format for this, rather than individual performance. Sure, both drivers had been neck and neck throughout the 36 races, but Hamlin seemed to have the edge at Phoenix.
However, things could be rather different this time around. With the Chevy losing performance and Toyota continuing its dominance, Denny Hamlin has a very strong chance of conquering the Cup Series title. Considering the Chase format has been reinstated, all he has to do is remain consistent. He has already won a race, and his other performances have put him in fourth place in the standings. A few more race wins and consistent top 10 finishes can seal him to get into the Chase.
The main advantage that Hamlin has here is Chevy’s losing performance. The OEM hasn’t been able to register as many leading laps as the Toyota has done, and while Reddick does lead the table, Hamlin’s experience will kick in here.
So overall, considering the head start that he has and the Chase championship format, Denny Hamlin finally has the best shot at winning the title in a long time. Moreover, considering he claimed that he would retire after 67 race wins, this might as well be his final shot at the title, too.
