Why Didn’t Denny Hamlin’s Teammates Come To The Rescue? J.D. Gibbs Explains

Denny Hamlin was hung out to dry, having lost the draft and watching his run-at-the-rear strategy backfire as the field came around to lap him during Sunday’s race at Talladega.

Was Hamlin about to lose his championship hopes by out-thinking himself? Hamlin eventually came back to finish ninth, but there were some nervous moments for Joe Gibbs Racing while he ran a lap behind the leaders.

“It was discouraging,” JGR team president J.D. Gibbs said. “He’s riding back there and you’re wondering, ‘Is he going to get his lap back?’”

At the time, there was much debate: Why wouldn’t one of his teammates – either from JGR or Toyota –drop back, pick him up and help him draft back to the front?

Kyle Busch offered to do so on the team radio but was discouraged by crew chief Dave Rogers. Gibbs later said the team discussed it, but felt it wasn’t a good solution.

Gibbs said Hamlin’s disappearance from the draft happened so quickly that “in a way, you’re kind of thinking ‘Well, we’ll get the draft back.’”

“And then when we kind of realized, ‘You aren’t getting it,’ it was almost too late to send those guys back, because then they could go a lap down, too,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs added that JGR reached out to some other teams (such as Michael Waltrip) in an attempt to say, “Hey, help us out a little bit.”

“It didn’t really come to fruition,” he said. “Our problem was when you send someone back to get him after a certain point, you’re both a lap down.”

Hamlin said he was “a little disappointed” to be a lap down, in 34th place, but knew he had a good car and could drive to the front after getting his lap back.

“I hate that I had to race like that,” he said. “Unfortunately with our points format, it’s how you have to race. It was an up and down day.”

Hamlin eventually did get his lap back and rallied, even leading the race with less than 30 laps to go.

He was ahead of Johnson by five spots going into the final corner, he said, but his pusher was Mark Martin – Johnson’s teammate.

“As soon as we passed the 48, he stopped pushing,” Hamlin said. “...When the 5 stopped pushing me, it just killed us. We weren’t going to go forward from that point.”

Hamlin sat on the step of his team’s hauler after the race for a few minutes to collect himself before speaking with the media. Later, he acknowledged that the result between the three top drivers is “what I asked for.”

“I asked for nobody to really get killed (in performance) here this weekend and to let us settle it on the racetrack where our cars and our teams can make a difference and us drivers can make a difference,” he said. “That’s what we got. We’ve got a tight one.”

Said Gibbs: “Hey, we’re still alive with three to go. We’ve still got a shot. He’s got three tracks he runs pretty well at, so hopefully we’ll have three good runs, stay out of trouble and have a shot at the end.”