Forget being the favorite to win the NASCAR Cup Series championship, Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 team have looked average at best throughout the first five races in the 2026 postseason.
Very clearly the best car during the regular season, the No. 11 team has been in complete disarray in the first half of the 2026 Chase. Zero wins, one top five and a lack of speed or execution have doomed them.
In Sunday’s (Oct. 4) South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Hamlin spun out in the first stage while in fourth, losing out on at least seven stage points and damaging the underbody while trying to make up lost ground after a lap 46 pit stop.
It’s another notch in the wrong direction with only so much time left, and Hamlin now trails Kyle Larson by 40 points with five races left. Are his title hopes over? Joy Tomlinson and Amy Henderson break that down on 2-Headed Monster.
Denny Hasn’t Been Good But There’s Time
So you say there’s a chance…
Yes, Hamlin can come back from that disappointing spin at Las Vegas last weekend and win the championship. That spin did not do him in.
I don’t know if you remember my stance back in July when I said Joey Logano would not be able to be in championship contention after his win at North Wilkesboro Speedway. He proceeded to win at Richmond Raceway a few weeks later and then at Bristol Motor Speedway in The Chase. Logano made me eat my words, because now he’s fourth in the standings.
Well, I’m not making that mistake again. I fully believe in Hamlin and the No. 11 team’s ability to make up just 40 points on Larson.
At Charlotte Motor Speedway earlier this year, he scored 60 points and finished third in the Coca-Cola 600. The No. 11 was also out front for 75 laps. He has a win in the 600-miler in 2022, and Hamlin has tallied 13 top fives and 22 top 10s there in his career.
If that’s not enough for you, let’s take a look at his history at Phoenix Raceway. Since the championship race in 2023, Hamlin hasn’t finished worse than 11th. Last fall, Hamlin led 208 laps and looked to be on the way to a title before losing the title on pit road during overtime.
In the spring race this year, he finished fifth and had 47 points, more than enough to make up some of the ground on Larson if the No. 5 team doesn’t have race-winning speed
Now, I know Talladega Superspeedway is more of an equalizer, as anything can happen there (and Hamlin hasn’t performed as well there lately), so we’ll look to the next race, the penultimate race of the year: Martinsville Speedway.
The Paperclip is one of Hamlin’s better tracks in the Next Gen era, as he’s led quite a few laps in most races since 2022. Earlier this season he led 292 laps and finished second to Chase Elliott, and he also was able to grab 56 points. Plus, he also took the win last spring in dominant fashion.
With Hamlin’s strength at Martinsville, Phoenix and Charlotte, as well as Larson’s year of boom or bust, Hamlin certainly has a chance to surpass the No. 5 in the standings by Homestead-Miami Speedway. However, if he’s unable to do that, it could just come down to the wire by then, and Hamlin just could eke out the win.
After all, he does have a victory there in 2020, and he has earned three top fives and four top 10s at Miami since that year.
Oh, and did I mention Hamlin has completed all but two laps this season and has yet to record a DNF?
Don’t count out a Joe Gibbs Racing team that’s earned four wins and four poles just yet, as Hamlin might surprise you and come back to earn his first Cup Series title. – Joy Tomlinson
Emotionally, This Feels Over
As on-track spins go, it didn’t look like much. With three laps to go in the first stage at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Hamlin spun on his own. He didn’t hit anything and didn’t even shed enough debris to warrant a caution as he was able to keep going. There was no visible damage to the No. 11, though there may have been some to the bottom of the splitter. It was something Hamlin and his team in theory had plenty of time to overcome.
Except they didn’t.
After the incident, Hamlin didn’t really recover. He didn’t score points in either of the first two stages and finished 16th after losing even more track positions thanks to fuel pressure issues. He hung on to second in driver points but fell to 40 behind Larson.
And just like that, Hamlin falls from title favorite to hanging by a thread.
Forty points isn’t impossible to overcome. One good race for Hamlin coupled with some bad luck for Larson could erase it all. The maximum number of points a driver can earn in a race is 76 (sweeping the stages, winning the race and posting the fastest lap). Thirty-sixth or worse is worth one. That 40-point gap could be gone like a bad dream in one afternoon.
But that spin was worse for Hamlin than it looked. It left him utterly defeated, and that’s been a pattern for Hamlin in the postseason, no matter the form.
Last year, he was unlucky; a late caution in the finale left him in an impossible situation and snatched the title away. He should have won that title. But it’s not the only one he should have taken by storm. He led the points entering the final race in 2010 during the original Chase format. All Hamlin needed to do was have a solid day and keep pace with Jimmie Johnson. But when all was said and done, Johnson won his fifth straight and it took Hamlin more than a year to fully rebound.
Under the playoff system, Hamlin made the Championship 4 five times. He never closed the deal. So, while last year was unlucky, it was far from Hamlin’s only chance.
After Las Vegas, Hamlin seemed resigned. There wasn’t much fight, there was none of the confidence bordering on cockiness Hamlin displays when things are going well. “Great that we didn’t give up more than that because we probably deserved to” isn’t exactly the statement of a driver coming up swinging.
The way the race went, to a degree, sums up why Larson has made himself a title favorite despite struggling at times during the season while Hamlin looks like the postseason Hamlin fans have grown used to: the one who can’t close the deal because he gets in his own head.Â
While Hamlin never really rebounded from the spin (and if the splitter was damaged, it would have limited how much Hamlin could gain back for sure), Larson, who lost a lap early because his car was so bad his team elected to make a lengthy adjustment under green, didn’t panic, didn’t overdrive trying to get stage points — and didn’t consider that he could settle. Larson came back to finish second with a checkers-or-wreckers bid to try and win, and it was wreckers, with Larson sliding across the line after bouncing off the frontstretch wall.Â
The fight never left Larson when the chips were down. But it certainly looked like it left Hamlin. And that right there could be the difference in winning a title and going home empty handed … again. –Amy Henderson
Joy joined Frontstretch in 2019 as a NASCAR DraftKings writer, expanding to news and iRacing coverage in 2020. She's currently an assistant editor and involved with photos, social media and news editing. A California native, Joy was raised watching motorsports and started watching NASCAR extensively in 2001. She earned her B.A. degree in Liberal Studies at California State University Bakersfield in 2010.
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.
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