Fryer's Five: Hamlin proving critics wrong
Denny Hamlin went into the offseason as the popular pick to unseat Jimmie Johnson this year, but that role was put into question before he even climbed into a car in 2010. When he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in a January pickup basketball game, people immediately starting dismissing his title chances.
He heard the talk and knew he now had doubters. So at 1:13 a.m. on Jan. 25, he answered his critics via Twitter.
"i'm going to bed on this note.. no matter what people may think this injury will not stop me from being a contender this year,'' the posting read.
Hamlin had come out swinging, and a few of us in the NASCAR press corps joked that it was his "Willis Reed moment." We even told him as much when we saw him a week later in Daytona.
His response? Something not too far from a blank stare, and an unabashed admission that he wasn't familiar with Willis Reed. We did our best to explain to Hamlin how the New York Knicks captain so famously limped onto the court in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals – full disclosure: None of us were exactly sure of all the details – and played through a torn thigh muscle to help the Knicks beat the Lakers.
That conversation was forgotten until Saturday night at Darlington Raceway, where Hamlin grabbed his third win of this season. In an interesting twist, it was also the 40th anniversary of the Willis Reed game.
Watching this season unfold for Hamlin, we see now that the late-night January Tweet was not his Willis Reed moment. That actually came three months later at Phoenix, when 10 days removed from reconstructive surgery on his knee, Hamlin gutted out an entire race.
The recovery from that surgery has been so much harder than Hamlin had dreamed it would be, and that first race back was brutal. It was hot, the length of the race had been extended and he was in significant pain. When the combination of a mediocre car and a bad pit stop dropped him two laps down, it would have been so easy for Hamlin to turn the wheel over to relief driver Casey Mears and call it a night.
Although the television cameras were fixated on an anxious Mears sitting atop Hamlin's pit box, his Joe Gibbs Racing team says now they knew Hamlin would never get out of the car.
"I know he sucked it up, stayed in the car all day," crew chief Mike Ford said. "I know the worst thing for him would be to watch someone else drive his car. I knew that would be more detrimental than him staying in the car and just dealing with the pain."
Was it the right call?
"Good decision or bad decision, in my head, it was the only decision," said Hamlin, who to this day believes he needed to stay in the car to prove to his team that he's a fighter and they're all in this championship race together.
Whether or not Hamlin does indeed dethrone Johnson this season, that night six races ago in Phoenix will forever be his own Willis Reed moment.
Here's a look at five issues from Darlington:
1. Is Hamlin a legitimate title contender?
His slow start this year, followed by the late-March decision to go ahead with surgery that had initially been planned for after the season, led many people to dismiss his legitimacy as a threat to Johnson's four-year reign.
My concerns weren't related to either issue, though. Instead, it was his mental toughness that had me wondering just how serious a contender he would be this year.
The back-to-back blows of the injury and slow start had knocked Hamlin back a step, and the swagger he'd carried throughout last season's Chase for the Sprint Cup championship had been diminished. He seemed embarrassed by the way he'd stumbled out of the gate, and pulling himself out of that early-season funk was going to be a challenge I wasn't sure he could handle.
Silly me.
Hamlin's bull-in-a-china shop-like drive to his Martinsville win proved his determination, and the victory at Texas two weeks after his surgery showed the resolve of his No. 11 crew. Then came this weekend at Darlington, where Hamlin won both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races to become the first driver since Mark Martin in 1993 to sweep the weekend.
That's three wins in six races, good enough to move him from 18th to sixth in the standings.
There are, of course, questions swirling as to whether Hamlin can maintain this pace. Last year, a four-win season, was the first time in his career he'd won more than two races. Three of those victories, by the way, came in the final 11 races.
Now he already has three wins, making some wonder if he's peaking too early.
But he and Ford are adamant that they are winning right now in old stuff, and their focus has always been on unveiling their best equipment around Indianapolis in July with an eye on rolling into the Chase.
"We're working on the back half of the season right now," Ford said. "Honestly, I'm surprised how strong we are right now. Not to spill the beans, but we're working on Chase stuff right now. We're racing things that we were racing at the end of last year so we can concentrate on the later months of this year.
"I'm personally surprised that we're running as strong as we are."
So is everyone else. And if Ford is telling the truth, and their best stuff has yet to be seen, then Hamlin is going to be a contender all the way down to the wire.
2. What in the world is going on with Jimmie Johnson?
Everybody was only joking about Johnson's so-called slump through Talladega and Richmond, right? I mean, it's a little preposterous to think the four-time defending champion is having any legitimate issues.
Then came the disaster that was Darlington. Now we can seriously ask: What the heck is going on with Double J?
Johnson wrecked out of Darlington for a 36th-place finish and his third DNF of the season. He had just seven total DNF's during his four-year championship run.
Johnson had myriad problems during the race. At one point, crew chief Chad Knaus told him over the radio, "If you hit something again … [expletive] wreck it so we can quit." Johnson was eventually done in when AJ Allmendinger lost his brakes and smashed into the side of the 48.
"Just wrong place, wrong time, I guess," Johnson said. "We had a tough night and a bunch of small issues, but we were still fighting through all that and there on the lead lap. Hopefully we were going to have a top-10 finish but oh, we got slammed."
Johnson, who won three of the first five races this season, now has a six-race losing streak and has led nine total laps over the last three races.
Don't get too excited, though, about the potential loss of his golden horseshoe. Clearly, Knaus and the No. 48 team are working on different things right now, which is a luxury under the Chase format. They have to be good over the final 10 races, and everything leading in for a team of that quality is simply a tune-up.
Next up is Dover, where Johnson is a five-time winner and swept both Cup races last season.
Don't expect to see this slump last much longer.
3. Don't make the mistake of overlooking Kevin Harvick:
A lot of people predicted Harvick would be ousted as the Cup points leader after Darlington, where he took a 10-point cushion over Johnson into a track that's, well, not among his best.
He was grouchy after two long practice sessions and a 35th-place qualifying effort, using 42 words to answer three questions in his weekly media availability.
"It sucks, to be honest with you," he said of his qualifying lap. "I almost lost it there. It's pretty typical."
But Harvick managed a sixth-place finish for his best effort at Darlington since 2003. It helped him put some distance on Johnson in the standings as his lead bulged to 110 points. Harvick now has eight top-10 finishes for the season, including four straight.
His strong results coincided with a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity for both Harvick and Richard Childress Racing. They lost Harvick's sponsor just days before he won at Talladega, snapping a 115-race winless streak. Now he's apparently in the final stages of completing a contract extension to stay at RCR.
Childress said at Darlington that he believes he'll have a deal completed to retain the driver by the end of this month.
It seemed not too long ago that Harvick had made up his mind to leave RCR, where he'd grown frustrated with the peaks and valleys and had tired of waiting for widespread company improvement. Now that he's running so well, it doesn't make much difference what opportunities might be out there for him.
Drivers of Harvick's caliber negotiate their deals now, locking up their future rides way before the season hits its long summer stretch. With the way Harvick is running and the dedication Childress has shown in turning around his organization, it would be awfully difficult for the driver to walk away.
Sponsorship issues could still cloud the situation. But Childress seemed awfully confident that he's close with his star driver, which likely means he's got a strong play that's going to keep Harvick in the No. 29 for several more years.
4. This Ford situation might be serious:
I made note last week that Ford drivers have yet to win a race in any of NASCAR's three series this season, but Greg Biffle is good at Darlington and one would have thought the Blue Oval at least had a chance in one of the two races this past weekend.
Not so much.
Ford drivers failed to even lead a single lap in Saturday night's race, the first time in 30 years that has happened. Matt Kenseth was the highest-finishing Ford at 13th, and was followed by teammates David Ragan and Carl Edwards.
"That was like a victory," Edwards said of his 15th-place finish.
Although Roush Fenway Racing has three drivers inside the top 12 with Kenseth, Biffle and Edwards, they aren't exactly running up front and contending for victories.
"We just weren't very fast and we didn't handle very well as a group," Kenseth said. "Even when we got it balanced, we just don't have speed, and I don't really know why. It was just a struggle. I'm actually super happy to come home 13th. That was probably way better than we should have finished.
"The last month has been really hard for whatever reason. We show up at the track and we're slower than we were a couple months before that. It's just been a battle lately.''
If something doesn't change quickly, it's going to be a very long season for NASCAR's only winless automaker.
5. The best of the rest:
• Jeff Burton's pit crew talked Saturday of their win in last year's Pit Crew Challenge, then made a late-race gaffe that might have cost him a win. An apparent miscommunication caused Burton to run over his air hose on the final pit stop, leading to a penalty that prevented him from challenging Hamlin.
"We have to make a decision on whether we need to be a championship team or whether we want to just pretend to be one," Burton said after finishing eighth.
• Jamie McMurray had a stellar weekend with a second-place finish in the Cup race and a third-place finish in Nationwide. That's two runner-up finishes in the last three Cup races for McMurray, who jumped three spots to 16th in what's shaping up to be his best season since 2005 – his last season with Chip Ganassi.
"It's been amazing coming back and seeing just the results, how much a difference everything has been for me,'' said McMurray, who also started from the pole Saturday.
• Dale Earnhardt Jr. is back in the top 12 after a roller-coaster weekend. He wrecked his primary car on the second lap of practice, hit the wall with his backup in the second practice and finished 18th. Earnhardt's spot inside the top 12 came from Clint Bowyer, who had a tough weekend and dropped three spots in the standings to 15th.
• The "new" Kyle Busch didn't last very long: He was surly after wrecking his car in qualifying, proving teammate Hamlin's theory that Busch is really only in a good mood when he wins.
• The one-year anniversary of Jeremy Mayfield's suspension for a failed drug test passed quietly last weekend. A saga that consumed the NASCAR community for most of last summer has quietly drifted away, with only occasional courtroom updates to remind us of the drama surrounding the first driver suspension under NASCAR's toughened drug policy.
