Hamlin says team must boost cars’ speed
Strong Richmond showing means little in big picture, he adds
Denny Hamlin had the top-five finish and the opportunity to declare Joe Gibbs Racing ’s slog over.
He didn’t take it, because he doesn’t believe it, not even after two veteran teammates ran well but were undone by odd miscues. Not even after Hamlin finished third Sunday in the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond International Raceway. A short track, he said, proves nothing. And JGR still lacks speed.
“I think that some of the issues that you might have with speed is masked just a little bit on a short track, so by no means does this indicate that we’ve fixed anything,” said Hamlin, who produced his first top-five of the season. “I think we know that we have some shortfalls, and when I’m running out front, my balance is very, very good, where I need it to be, and we just don’t have a car that was quite fast enough.”
Hamlin, a product of nearby Chesterfield, was victorious at the 0.75-mile track last fall, capping a regular season in which JGR won 11 times in 26 races. JGR has not been nearly as daunting in defending Toyota’s manufacturer championship, which is possibly a combination of multiple factors, including mastering the nuances of a redesigned Camry. JGR drivers are winless a quarter of the way through the season, with Kyle Busch 10th in points, Hamlin 11th, Matt Kenseth 18th and rookie Daniel Suarez 22nd. At the same point last season, now-idle Carl Edwards led the series and had two wins, Busch was fourth (two wins), Hamlin was eighth (one win) and Kenseth 15th.
“We haven’t gotten better. We’re really right where we were,” Hamlin said of progress from earlier this season. “I mean, if we go to a mile-and-a-half (track) next week, we’re just as far off as what we were a week ago. Literally, it’s just a short track, and so drivers can make a little bit more difference in aerodynamics and skew, and all that stuff doesn’t matter quite as much, but it’s still an issue for us.
“You’ve still got to have raw speed. You cannot just have a better setup than those guys and go out and beat them. You have to have a faster car, and we just — you know, I’m optimistic. I hate to be pessimistic about today, but we’ve got to be real about it and realize, ‘Hey, it’s just a short track.’ We still have a lot of work to do to catch up.”
It began encouragingly enough at Richmond, with Kenseth winning the pole and grinding away a race-high 164 laps led — including the first 163 — and capturing the Stage 1 win before suffering a cut tire and finishing 23rd. Suarez was 12th. Busch was rounding into a late challenger but was penalized for a commitment line violation on a final stop and finished 16th.
Martin Truex Jr. of affiliate Furniture Row Racing continued to fare well in comparison to JGR, as he placed 10th Sunday to vault one spot to second in the driver standings. He wasn’t happy either, though, even after recovering from his own commitment line violation.
“We just weren’t that good today,” he said. “Just one of those days where you battle all day and hope to get a top-10, and we barely did that.”
JGR drivers had won three races in a row at RIR before Joey Logano got his first win of the season Sunday.
So what of Talladega Superspeedway, the next stop on NASCAR’s premier circuit? Hamlin has Toyota’s only win there since 2008 — in the spring of 2014 — but every JGR driver except Suarez has won at least one restrictor-plate race. So maybe there’s hope.