For most of the afternoon on Sunday (March 29), Denny Hamlin looked like the driver to beat at Martinsville Speedway. He won both stages and led 292 of 400 laps.
But he was not out front when it mattered most. Rather, it was Chase Elliott who took control late and took the checkered flag to win the Cook Out 400. It was the first win of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season for Elliott, Hendrick Motorsports and Chevrolet.
Hamlin let the win slip away on Sunday, and it is far from the first time that a dominant driver has been unable to seal the deal at the Paperclip.
In fact, out of the 45 Martinsville Cup Series races in the Chase/Playoff Era (2004-present), the driver who led the most laps failed to reach victory lane in 27 of them. Here is the full list, ranked by the percentage of laps led by the top lap leader:
Among the 27 races listed, eight of them saw a driver lead more than half the laps but not the last lap. Sunday’s race stands out as the highest by percentage, but there are a few others on the chart that stand out.
In the spring of 2012, Jeff Gordon posted the most laps led at Martinsville without a win, pacing the field for 329 circuits. On lap 497, Gordon had just taken back the lead from Hendrick teammate Jimmie Johnson when the caution came out for David Reutimann, who was stalled on the frontstretch in the No. 10. This sent the race into overtime.
To say that the overtime restart did not go Gordon’s way would be an understatement. Clint Bowyer dived to the inside of Gordon and then got into him entering turn 1, sending both drivers as well as Johnson spinning. This opened the door for Ryan Newman to take the lead and ultimately the win, while Gordon wound up settling for 14th and tangled with Bowyer again at Phoenix Raceway later that season.
More often than not, the dominant drivers who fail to win still fare pretty well in the end, with 16 top fives, 21 top 10s and just one finish outside the top 30 in the 27 races in the chart.
That one finish towards the bottom is perhaps the most well-known race on the list: the 2015 fall race.
Joey Logano, fresh off a clean sweep of the three races in that year’s Round of 12, seemed poised to run his win streak to four, leading nine times for 207 laps in the No. 22 Team Penske Ford. However, Logano’s race—and 2015 championship run—all came undone in the closing laps.
On a late race restart with 66 laps remaining, Brad Keselowski and Matt Kenseth made contact behind Logano, heavily damaging both cars and ending both drivers’ shots at the win. This continued an ongoing feud between Kenseth and Team Penske (mostly Logano) going back to the first race of the Round of 12 at Kansas Speedway, where Logano spun Kenseth late on his way to victory lane.
Needless to say, Kenseth had seen enough. Entering turn 1 on lap 454, Kenseth put Logano into the wall, knocking the No. 22 out of the race and all the way down to a 37th-place finish. From there, Logano got eliminated in the Round of 8, Kenseth watched the next two Cup races from his couch, and Kyle Busch went on to claim the first of his two Cup Series championships.
Overall, 14 different drivers have led the most laps in a Martinsville race and failed to finish the job in the Chase/Playoff era. No name appears on that chart more than Hamlin, who has the dubious distinction of leading the most laps and not winning five times at Martinsville in his career.
Hamlin has experienced a great deal of success at the Paperclip, sitting as the winningest active driver with six checkered flags, but it could and probably should be even more. If you reversed the result of each of those five dominant near-misses, Hamlin would have 11 Martinsville wins, which would vault him all the way up to a tie for second all-time with Darrell Waltrip.
Hamlin’s heartbreak after running up front is not limited to Martinsville. Out of his 728 career Cup starts, Hamlin has led over half the race 21 times, and yet he has only won 10 of those races.
Hamlin’s most dominant without celebration came in the 2008 spring race at his hometown track of Richmond Raceway. The Chesterfield, Va., native put the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota out front for 381 circuits before a flat right front tire sent him fading in the closing laps to 24th.
Hamlin’s worst finish after leading the majority of the race went down at Phoenix in 2017, pacing the field for 193 of 312 laps before a brush-up with Elliott put Hamlin into the wall and cut down a right-side tire. As a result, Hamlin could not finish the race and plummeted to 35th in the running order, missing out on the Championship 4.
However, the toughest heartbreak and the deepest wound on this list for Hamlin is probably the 2025 championship race at Phoenix. With the fastest car and a comfortable lead as the laps ticked down, Hamlin was on the verge of capturing that elusive Cup championship before William Byron cut a tire and hit the wall with three laps left to bring out a caution and force overtime. We all know the rest of the story from there as Hamlin was on the wrong side of the pit strategy and Kyle Larson won his second Cup championship.
There is no question that Hamlin has had a distinguished Cup career and is a first-ballot NASCAR Hall of Famer once he becomes eligible, but if a few more races with the dominant car had gone his way, he could be a Cup champion and right on Dale Earnhardt’s rear bumper in career wins.
Andrew Stoddard joined Frontstretch in May of 2022 and is currently an editor and a weekly writer of Stat Sheet. He is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Richmond, and VCU. He works as an athletic communications specialist at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.