Last Sunday’s (Sept. 7) win for Denny Hamlin marked not only the 59th victory of his illustrious 21-year, 713-race career and a milestone 200th win for Toyota, but it also saw the birth of a new finish line interview tagline (a Ham-line?): “Get on the bandwagon, or get run over by it.”
Now, whether or not the new line lands quite like his iconic “I beat your favorite driver” line, or infuriates Denny’s dad just as much, remains to be seen. But one question that is worth asking in the afterglow of a Cup Series-best fifth checkered flag of the year is how many wins might Hamlin tally before he hangs up his driving gloves?
As things stand, Hamlin has signed a two-year extension to his current Joe Gibbs Racing contract for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, and he has indicated as recently as the post-race press conference after his victory at Gateway that he will be retiring at the conclusion of the two-year deal.
By my math, albeit never a strong suit, that means he has 80 more Cup Series starts: eight remaining in 2025 and then 36 races each in 2026 and 2027, unless NASCAR alters the schedule for 2027.
So what, then, is a realistic win target for Hamlin as he concludes a surefire first-ballot Hall of Fame career?
On statistics alone, he has won an impressive 8.2% of his Cup starts. So extrapolating that percentage out across the 80 races he’ll run gets us 6.6%, so we’ll call that seven for the sake of argument, giving us 67 wins.
That’s good for ninth on the all-time list, provided Kyle Busch (63 wins) doesn’t win another five races in the next two seasons. And unless he goes on an extraordinary tear, Dale Earnhardt’s 76 wins seems totally unreachable. So ninth is as high as he can realistically go.
But as we consider the schedule, it’s fair to say we likely need to discount the road or street courses, which have never been Hamlin’s forte – something he’s been more than candid about on his Actions Detrimental podcast.
So that’s one road course this year — the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL — plus five next year, and we’ll assume five more in 2027 for the sake of argument. So that brings us down to 69 races. Next add in the unpredictability of superspeedways, and that takes the total of races down to 63.
Now that’s not to say he can’t add a fourth Daytona 500 or notch another win at Talladega Superspeedway or Atlanta Motor Speedway, but those races are the very definition of wild cards.
So realistically, the question is how many races could he win in his remaining starts? That’s without factoring in the possibility of regression in his age 45- or 46-year old seasons and it’s a theme Hamlin was keen to touch on last weekend.
“There’s just got to be a means to an end,” said Hamlin. “I’m just not going to leave the sport on my deathbed … just leaking oil, just running in the back of the pack … I have way too much pride for that. I’m way too cocky for that.”
Let’s assume for the purposes of this analysis that Hamlin can keep his skills finely honed and JGR keeps pumping out fast Toyotas (compared to the field) over the remainder of his Cup career, what then is a realistic tally? Let’s look at some possibilities:
1) No more race victories. There is a world, of course, where Hamlin doesn’t win another race. Plenty of big-name drivers finished their careers with long winless streaks. Darrell Waltrip went eight winless seasons before retiring, as did Richard Petty. Rusty Wallace was winless in his last 64 races, while Jimmie Johnson didn’t pick up a W in the last three full seasons of his glittering career. Kevin Harvick was 0-48 in his final Cup Series races. There is precedent. Do I think this happens? No, not for a minute. But you never know. These Cup races are super hard to win.
2) One or two more victories. Another not-totally-out-of-the-realm of possibilities would be Hamlin winning the title at Phoenix Raceway in November and going out on top – the ultimate mic drop moment. I could even see a world where he goes back-to-back and wins another at Martinsville Speedway in the penultimate race of the year and announces his retirement bathed in the joy of a long-awaited title. Unlikely, but as I say, it’s possible.
3) 65 wins. 65 wins feels like a reasonable goal for Hamlin. Looking at his season win totals since his only winless season of 2018, Hamlin has won six, seven, two, two, three, three and five (and counting) respectively. Another three wins in each of the next two seasons feels viable. That would take him to 65.
4) 65-69 wins. 65+ wins is where I think we’re starting to get into stretch territory. He would have to maximize every opportunity. Could he? Absolutely. Could he win another five or more next year? For sure. But the 65-69 win range feels like the sort of numbers where pretty much everything goes right.
5) 70 wins-plus. Now we’re getting into really rarified air. If 65-69 wins is everything going right, getting to 70+ would mean he wins pretty much every race where he has the best car on the day and maybe two to three when he is not. He’d probably need a superspeedway victory or two as well, especially with only one race at Richmond Raceway (five wins) and Pocono Raceway (seven wins), not to mention no Cup race at Dover Motor Speedway (won the last two) next year either.
So where do I think he’ll land? My guess is 65-69 wins. But first, he needs to hit 60. And what better place than Bristol Motor Speedway, where he has finished first, first, fourth and second in the last four visits? Either way, love him or hate him, it will be fun to watch him try.
Danny Peters has written for Frontstretch since 2006. An English transplant living in San Francisco, by way of New York City, he’s had an award-winning marketing career with some of the biggest companies sponsoring sports. Working with racers all over the country, his freelance writing has even reached outside the world of racing to include movie screenplays.