3-Headed Monster: Is Denny Hamlin or Mark Martin Greatest Driver Without Title, or Someone Else?

We’ve seen this movie with Denny Hamlin before.

The long-time staple for Joe Gibbs Racing has won three races thus far in 2025 and he’s hunting for more.

However, the ultimate prize of a NASCAR Cup Series championship has always eluded him, much like it has a few other drivers who became mainstays at the top level of the sport.

Namely, Mark Martin comes to mind. However, there’s another name that often gets forgotten in the modern era – Junior Johnson.

This week, three writers stake their claim to who they believe to be the best driver of all time without the penultimate trophy stood up in the case for a special edition of our weekly column.

Mark Martin Covers as the GOAT without a Cup*

As the title implies, Mark Martin is the greatest NASCAR driver to not have won a title – though that is with a glaring asterisk.

Martin competed in a number of transitional eras in NASCAR.

He came to the sport in 1981 racing against Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison – all winning regularly. From there, he’d have to battle Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson – all at their career peaks.

A failed full season as an owner-driver in 1982 sent him back to the Midwest short tracks to rebuild and rebrand himself. He returned to the Cup Series in 1988 with a new team and announced at the 1987 Awards Banquet that he would a compete in a full-season schedule, to the surprise of the skeleton crew who originally planned on running just 18 races.

After one season, driver and team created a championship-caliber organization based almost two hours outside of Charlotte with an outsider owner from Michigan and a driver from Arkansas. 

The asterisk I included in the title centers around 1990.

Much has been said and written about the events that allowed Dale Earnhardt to win his fourth championship: a penalty that was questionable at best, the No. 3 team allowed to pit their car on the apron at Charlotte when the wheels fell off of it or left side tires on the right, to win at Phoenix Raceway – none of which was assessed a point fine.

But hey, who’s counting?

You can identify one or two races a season that cost Martin a championship in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2005. I’m sure everyone can cherry-pick points for their favorite driver, but the perpetual falling anvil that targeted Martin and the No. 6 team for almost 20 years is beyond the pale.

Engines that, early on, were both unreliable and underpowered also seemed to perpetually run out of fuel while leading. It took a threat of a lawsuit to get out of his contract in 1993 to get the bodies on his car to his liking, which immediately resulted in four consecutive wins, and nearly a fifth.

In 1997, Martin was eliminated on the last lap of the July Daytona race while running in the top 10, getting t-boned in the door at full-speed by Bobby Hamilton. No other championship contender was involved.

With the Brickyard 400 easily in hand and gas to spare, Jack Roush was worried about running out.

A pit stop handed the win to Ricky Rudd and Martin lost 30 points alone there.

Martin looked to be dominating the Atlanta Motor Speedway finale, but a burned piston with little more than 10 laps to go relegated him to a 29-point differential.

2002 saw him leading the points with only eight races remaining. Martin’s request to team Roush was just no engine failures – horsepower was irrelevant. The result?

Kansas: Engine failure – 25^th.

Talladega Superspeedway was up next. So why wouldn’t the steering lock up on the pace lap, driving him and Jimmie Johnson down into the infield? Martin was black-flagged to inspect the issue and went a lap down out of the draft.

In the era of “the big one,” where Elliott Sadler would routinely tumble through the air, there were zero cautions on this day. Martin finished 30^th, while eventual champion Tony Stewart was second. Stewart won by 34 points –- 25 of which were due to another questionable fine for an altered spring at Rockingham Speedway.  

The next few years saw a consistent replay of blown engines and tires with two laps to go, questionable yellows while leading and a Daytona 500 taken by an inexplicable officiating call that was contrary to changes for safety made four years prior.

Then, at the age of 50, he returned from a partial schedule to reel off five wins and go toe-to-toe with Johnson at his Jimmie Johnson-ist for another championship runner-up in 2009.

Hamlin is a tremendous talent, but he also came into the sport with an established super team that’s never really had a down period, be it atop Chevrolet or the flagship factory Toyota program for over 15 years now. Junior Johnson as a driver is from an era that I don’t even think is relevant for comparison.

Not denigrating Robert Glenn Johnson, Jr. by any means, it was just an era too far removed from Hamlin and Martin to fairly compare with seasons that saw little more than half of the races entered for the most part.

For my money, Martin will always be the greatest driver to have never (officially) won a Cup Series Championship – Vito Pugliese

Denny Hamlin Gets the Nod

Denny Hamlin is the best driver without a Cup title.

He has three wins already this year, matching what he earned the previous two seasons. He has also earned seven top fives and eight top 10s so far in 2025.

At 44 years old, Hamlin’s still going strong, tallying 57 victories in just over 700 starts. That ranks 11th on the all-time win list in the Cup Series, trailing only Kyle Busch among active full-time drivers.

His accolades may not include a Cup championship, but he still has won several crown jewel races. Hamlin’s a three-time Daytona 500 champ, taking the Harley J. Earl trophy in 2016, 2019 and 2020. He’s also won two Southern 500s at Darlington Raceway in 2017 and 2021.

At age 29, he scored eight victories en route to a runner-up finish in the standings in 2010. Then in 2019 and 2020, Hamlin had six and seven wins, respectively. With two wins in both 2021 and 2022 and three in each of the past three years, it doesn’t feel like he’s going to slow down. He also has 241 top fives and 366 top 10s in his Cup career.

Oh yeah, and he’s doing this while co-owning 23XI Racing. That’s definitely not an easy feat, managing a team while he’s trying to run with Joe Gibbs Racing. Hamlin and Michael Jordan’s team came into the fold in 2021 with Bubba Wallace behind the wheel of the No. 23. Since then, it’s expanded to three cars – Tyler Reddick in the No. 45 and Riley Herbst in the No. 35. That’s a lot for Hamlin to juggle, yet he still finds time to win races.

On the Xfinity side, though, Hamlin doesn’t have as many starts as in Cup. He does have 18 victories there, with the last one coming in 2023. Perhaps even more remarkable are his top five and top-10 results in Xfinity. He’s garnered 65 top fives and 101 top 10s in 164 starts. That’s about 60% of the races he’s run where he’s finished in the top third of the field.

As far as his pace in the Cup Series, Hamlin is currently in the top three of drivers with the fastest laps, behind just William Byron and Kyle Larson. He’s also third in driver rating for the season. He’s proven to everyone that he’s one of the best and a future Hall of Famer, so what more does he need?

Obviously, people will say that a championship would seal the deal for the Virginia native. But in this day and age of the playoffs, one bad race could ruin Hamlin’s chance at making the Championship 4. That’s already happened the last few years for the No. 11. It’s just not something that I feel should define a driver’s career, though it does help. Of course, those who’ve won multiple championships are obviously some of the top drivers, as it takes a little bit of skill, luck and teamwork altogether.

But for Hamlin, he should be happy with where he’s at right now in his career, as he’s able to continue to contend each race. Who knows how many more races he can win. – Joy Tomlinson

Junior Johnson is NASCAR, and That’s As Great As It Gets

When you think about NASCAR as a sport, what do you picture? Is it a math equation? Rattling off 50 sponsor names in the winner’s circle? Or is it a lot of cars going real left, real fast?

The odds are, it was the latter, and nobody embodies the attitude of what NASCAR was always meant to be more than the late, great Junior Johnson. Vito is right in saying that it’s not exactly fair to compare the era that Johnson drove in to what Martin or Hamlin experienced, but I’d say it’s more unfair to the latter two than anyone else.

Johnson couldn’t race in today’s climate, that much isn’t debatable. Hell, he spent a year in prison after he began his career in 1955 as a result of being charged with operating a moonshine still. In fact, he was one of the bootleggers that the sport loves to tell the world it got its roots from. Then, he received a presidential pardon from Ronald Reagan, because it was apparently just that important for the country that he got back behind the wheel.

More on that later, though. Let’s talk stats, and exactly why Johnson’s stats are hard to compare to the other two on this list.

For starters (pun intended), nobody ever started all of the NASCAR Grand National series races back then. In Johnson’s first year, 1955, the two drivers who did make the most starts still missed more than 10 races. Johnson himself made just over 35 starts that season and won five races, which earned him a sixth place spot in the final standings.

Then, prison happened, but when Johnson got out, he won six more races in the 1958 season and then five more in 1959. These were great accomplishments, but perhaps Johnson’s biggest contribution to the sport, aside from his, erm, technical innovations as we’ll call them, came in 1960, when he used the power of drafting to propel himself to a race win. The tactic became a staple of automotive racing after the fact, and I’m sure Martin and Hamlin both thank him for it to this day.

Johnson went on to retire with 50 career wins, which was the most of any driver without a championship, until Hamlin took over that title in 2023.

Here’s the statistical kicker, though. Mathematically, if Johnson would have ran a full season, there’s just about no way he wouldn’t have won a championship at some point, especially if he’d never had his run in with the fine folks in blue in North Carolina.

Johnson retired with those 50 wins. But Johnson won those 50 races in just 313 attempts. Hamlin, on the other hand, has more than twice as many starts than the amount Johnson ever got to run.

Martin is the same story, having run 882 Cup Series races in his career.

Johnson went on to become one of the most influential people in NASCAR history as a team owner. In fact, if there’s a rule in the NASCAR rulebook that causes someone to put on a weird face, the chances are it’s there because of Junior Johnson. He embodied the saying “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin,'” and because of that, we have some of the sport’s best stories to tell today.

Johnson might have come from a different era, but there are a few things you just can’t teach, no matter how much simulator time or money you throw at a problem.

Junior Johnson could flat out drive, and it’s a shame he never got to hoist the big trophy above his head, but I doubt he’d have it any other way. After all, he’d have to go through tech again afterwards. – Tanner Marlar