When Denny Hamlin drove into victory lane at Darlington Raceway after winning Sunday’s (April 6) Goodyear 400, he moved past NASCAR Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace into sole possession of 11th on the all-time NASCAR Cup Series wins list with 56 victories to his name.
That’s a huge accomplishment for the 44-year-old driver, dropping his name among NASCAR’s elite.
But the truth is, Hamlin’s legacy was cemented a long time ago.
Hamlin set a personal goal of 60 Cup wins, which is not only in reach, it’s dangling at his fingertips for this year. It’s a stretch, as he’d need four more wins, and Hamlin hasn’t won more than three races in a season since 2020. But he’ll get there sooner or later.
Sixty wins would tie Hamlin with a driver he raced against for most of his career, Kevin Harvick, for 10th all-time.
Beyond that … it gets tougher fast.
Hamlin will need seven more wins to match longtime teammate and competitor Kyle Busch for ninth at 63. That’s almost certainly something that would happen in 2026 at the earliest, and 2027 seems more realistic.
But there are a couple of big ifs in the way.
One, how long Hamlin will race full time? At age 44, he’s nearing decision time on how long he wants to pull double duty as driver and car owner every weekend. He has two young daughters with a third child on the way. 23XI Racing, the team he co-owns with NBA great Michael Jordan, has three full-time Cup entries now, which is a lot for an owner without obligations to his own team.
The second piece of the equation is one Hamlin has no control over: Busch. Busch has struggled in the last two years, but his contract with Richard Childress Racing is up after this year, and in a competitive car, Busch’s winning days may not be behind him. He’s four years younger than Hamlin too.
Realistically, Hamlin can pass Busch on the list if Busch doesn’t hit a winning streak in the next couple of years. That will likely be as far as Hamlin will climb, as Dale Earnhardt’s 76-win mark is next, and as good as Hamlin has been in recent years, that’s still 20 wins from now.
For now, future wins are all speculation. Hamlin has secured 56 of them, and he’s done it in an extremely competitive era of the sport. The drivers he’s chasing are drivers he raced with for most of their wins.
Until right now, Hamlin has always fallen the tiniest bit short. The three drivers ahead of him on the wins list that his career has overlapped the most are Busch, Harvick and Jimmie Johnson. Right now, all of them have more wins. Hamlin isn’t going to challenge Johnson’s 83 victories, but he’s already breathing down Busch’s and Harvick’s necks, and only Busch is still racing full time.
Breathing down Hamlin’s neck? The elephant in the room: the title.
Hamlin doesn’t have a Cup championship. He’s the winningest driver without one; the only other driver with 50 wins and no title is Junior Johnson, who never raced for one.
Hamlin has come close. Since the current format debuted in 2014, he’s made the championship race five times. He was leading the points entering the final race in 2010 before falling to Johnson, who was on a five-year reign of terror in the title department at the time.
If Hamlin retires without winning a championship, he will still be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. That’s long since been a foregone conclusion.
If he doesn’t win one, the reason many will point to is his inability to close the deal in one final race. Five times he’s started that race as an equal in the title hunt; once he entered with the advantage … and he’s still empty handed. Because it was still fairly early in his career, 2010 might be excused as ”not quite ready yet.” It’s easy to point to Johnson as nearly invincible at that time and a master of getting in other drivers’ heads.
That makes the 2010 question come down to whether Johnson got into Hamlin’s psyche … or if Hamlin did it himself. Hamlin won more races (eight to six) than Johnson did that year. He was the closest to an equal as Johnson had. And he ran with him until the 11th hour.
But the meltdown, when it came, was lasting. Statistically, 2011 was Hamlin’s worst season for a full, healthy year (2013 was worse, but Hamlin was out for four races and recovering from a back injury).
Hamlin did, of course, recover, but those five championship appearances with no result in the playoff era will always be on the tip of naysayers’ tongues. Unless he wins one, many fans will assign a mental asterisk to Hamlin’s career.
But does it matter?
The easy answer is that it matters to fans. Outside his own fans, Hamlin has struggled with fan perception. He can be cocky and has come across to some fans as having a chip on his shoulder. They’ll debate the reason: he was always second fiddle to Busch at Joe Gibbs Racing; he’s awfully arrogant for a driver without a title to back it up; he wanted to be a leader in the garage and fell just short. Fans will bring up those reasons and a dozen more when they boo a Hamlin victory.
The reality, though, is that Hamlin, head-to-head, raced some of the best drivers to ever strap into a car and on all other measures has been as good as they are.
Put Hamlin up against Busch, a driver hailed as the most talented of his generation, and in the 682 races they have both run in the Cup Series, Hamlin finished ahead of Busch in 342 of them. For the majority of those races, they were in equal equipment.
Harvick does have an edge straight up, beating Hamlin 358 times in 650 races.
But most telling? In 554 races against Johnson, Hamlin finished ahead of the seven-time champion 295 times, beating Johnson more than Johnson beat him.
Some might argue that that’s just more proof that Hamlin can’t get it done when it really matters. What it really proves is that Hamlin has had the ability to run with anyone, any time and be just as competitive as they are.
It matters to Hamlin (perhaps if he was able to shed that ideal, one would come more easily to him), and it matters to some fans. It can be argued that if Hamlin had 20 wins and no title that the lack of a championship would matter more in terms of his Hall of Fame chances.
But Hamlin has long since passed a win total where a title alone would define his career. In the conversation of the best drivers of the last 20 years, Hamlin has more than assured his place.
If Hamlin retired tomorrow, he’d be remembered as the best driver to never win a championship. The truth is, he’s already proven he’s better than that.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.