SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
That sound you hear is the clock ticking toward the eventual end of Denny Hamlin‘s NASCAR Cup Series racing career.
On Friday, July 25, Joe Gibbs Racing, the team Hamlin has competed for his entire Cup career — which began in 2004 — announced a new contract extension for the driver.
About an hour later in a press conference at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Hamlin confirmed two things.
Instead of the typical three-year extension, it was for only two years.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Also, when asked, Hamlin said “who knows, but most likely” this would be his final contract extension.
Boom.
At 44 years old and with 58 Cup wins under his belt, the final chapter of Hamlin’s driving career has officially begun.
Luckily for him, through 706 career starts the perseverance of Hamlin’s racing abilities has fallen more in line with Kevin Harvick than Jimmie Johnson.
Last weekend, Hamlin scored his series-leading fourth win of the season at Dover Motor Speedway.
Harvick was able to keep racking up wins until he was 46, while Johnson’s Hall-of-Fame career took a nosedive after he won three races in 2017 at the age of 41 and failed to win in his final three full-time seasons.
In a time when burnout from NASCAR’s excessively long seasons could be attributed to the retirements of drivers and crew members alike, how has Hamlin been able to keep going after 20 years?
“I would say it’s kind of a two fold thing,” Hamlin said. “Some of it is my self motivating, right? Goals I’d like to reach in the Cup Series.”
The other is his “very strong relationship” with team owner Joe Gibbs and his family, who “went out on a limb” on the former Subway sandwich artist and Virginia short track racer more than 20 years ago.
“JD (Gibbs) obviously believed in me quite a bit,” Hamlin said. “You want to pay back that loyalty to the family that gave you that start. It’ll be well over 20 years that I’ll be with them. And couldn’t imagine racing for any other organization, much less family.
Now, Hamlin is the longest serving and winningest Cup driver in JGR history.
Then there’s another thing. Father Time hasn’t quite caught up to Hamlin. He does keep winning.
“The ability to win week in, week out, that certainly is a high motivating factor in wanting to do this,” Hamlin said. “Certainly, I think about on a weekly basis, would I want to do this if I didn’t have the ability or couldn’t win as much? Probably … the motivation wouldn’t be there. But certainly, as competitive as I am, I’m motivated by being able to win.”
It also doesn’t hurt that Hamlin doesn’t hurt as much as he has in recent years.
Hamlin hasn’t escaped the last two decades unscathed, notably breaking his back in wreck at Auto Club Speedway in 2013.
Then there have been the nagging aches and pains that have resulted in multiple surgeries to other body parts.
“Kind of got my body in a good place,” Hamlin said. “My back is not bothering me as much as it was a few years ago. I’ve kind of gotten in a good place there. And so a lot of it is, can you physically hold up? Can you mentally hold up?”
Plus, racing is still very much remains “super high on the priority life list.”
He plans to treat however much time he has racing like he did “my rookie season or the year after.
“I just I never wane from making sure that I’m doing my job, and to the best of my ability and work ethic will never change,” Hamlin said.
Earlier this year Gibbs himself bragged about Hamlin’s work ethic, specifically about how much time he spends in the simulator.
This fact surprised Hamlin’s newest teammate, Chase Briscoe, during his first few months at JGR.
“Just from the outside looking in, you expect that he has a ton of distractions, right?” Briscoe said. “With the 23XI [Racing] stuff. And obviously he’s got a lot going on at home with three kids, I could definitely relate to that.
“He’s literally there more than probably anybody, as far as sim work goes … when he would, I feel like, have every reason to kind of be able to get out of it, especially he’s been doing it for 20 years.”
Briscoe said that was a “misconception” he had about his former Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Harvick.
There is one specific area Briscoe is taking Hamlin’s lead on. He noted that it’s been “very, very eye opening, just how into the analytics and into the data (Hamlin) is. And that’s something that I’ve never really used in the past and I’m trying to start doing more this year just because I’ve seen that it makes a difference for him.”
Though he has almost 60 Cup wins, 2023 Cup champion Ryan Blaney said he believes Hamlin to be underrated as a talent and called him “one of the greats in the sport.”
“I feel like sometimes the outside world overlooks that, just how good Denny is, Blaney said. “He’s one of the guys I watch pretty much every weekend in practice, comparing myself to speed wise, just because I know he’s going to be there at some point in the race.”
As for why Hamlin went for a two-year extension instead of three, the JGR driver said that at this point “it’s all I feel comfortable” with.
“Who knows what can happen three years from now,” Hamlin observed. “So I just want to make sure that I get (Joe Gibbs Racing) proper time and make sure I commit to them for not one year, (but) multiple years. Let them try to build continue to build the program. No particular reason other than.
“If I was 26, I would take 10 years, but I just I want to make sure that I’m still at my peak form in my final year. That could be tailing off for three years, so I don’t want that.”
But Hamlin isn’t deluding himself. He recognizes his racing abilities could drop off a cliff much sooner than the second year of the extension.
“I want the ability to know I can win my last race,” Hamlin said. “That’s going to be the deciding factor. I’m not going to wait until I start to head downward and then retire. I don’t want to go through a whole year.
“I understand if it just happens naturally in the second half of the final year, then it just happens, but I don’t want to have to go through another season … if I’m starting to tail off the end of next year, I’ll just retire. I could retire whenever I want to retire, so I think that I’m just going to see how things go.”
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.