Denny Hamlin’s road to the Chase for the Sprint Cup is simple.
All he has to do is win Saturday night in the Wonderful Pistachios 400 at Richmond International Raceway.
Hamlin is 12th in the points standings, 42 points outside of the Chase. While chances are slim that he will vault into the top 10 in points, a second win in the regular season would automatically lock him into one of the two wild-card positions that NASCAR created for its 2011 playoffs.
“We‘ve got to just run well,” Hamlin said. “That’s all there is really to it. We‘ve just got to run the way we’re capable of running and we should be fine.”
Hamlin’s season has been full of wishful thinking. There are certainly tracks where Hamlin competes and the results are just expected to follow. His home-state tracks of Martinsville Speedway and Richmond certainly top the list.
While Hamlin did not do himself any favors by qualifying 28th (his average start prior to Friday was 8.4), his average finish of 7.5 — second only to teammate Kyle Busch’s 4.9 — is the reason he’s so comfortable having his Chase fate on the line at Richmond.
“We control our own destiny just like they control their own destiny,” Hamlin said. “We don’t have to have help from a few other guys. I think it’s probably easier on us than it is for the guys that have certain scenarios that have to happen for them to make it.
“Really, I’m racing this race as if it’s just a normal season race like I have the last few years — no different.”
Two scenarios exist for Hamlin to qualify for a top-10 spot in the Chase. If 10th-place Tony Stewart finishes 40th and Hamlin wins on Saturday night and leads the most laps, he would supplant the No. 14 Chevrolet. Or if Stewart finishes 43rd and Hamlin finishes second and leads a lap, he still could oust the No. 14 from the Chase. But with a half-dozen start-and-parks likely, it’s unlikely that Stewart, who qualified 22nd, will finish much worse than where he started.
Curiously, Hamlin’s No. 11 FedEx crew does not have a “set strategy” for the race.
“We just need to go out there and make sure we don’t take too many risks,” Hamlin said. “Don’t get off on some kind of fuel strategy, protect ourselves in the case that maybe those guys coming down and getting fuel and trying to run to the end — we’ve got to protect all of that to make sure we play offensively, but defensively also."
“We know how the cautions have been not falling like they used to. These races, a lot of them are fuel mileage nowadays. You’ve got to protect yourself in case it comes down to that.”
Hamlin, the defending victor of this race, acknowledges that winning Richmond “would be big” for the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team in terms of building confidence for the Chase — should the team qualify.
Compared to last season, when Hamlin won five races before his Richmond victory and earned the top seed, he is no longer under the spotlight. It’s been a long time since Hamlin has claimed boastfully “all we do is win.”
Losing in 2010 was a tough lesson for the 30-year-old from Chesterfield, Va. But given the previous success of the No. 11 crew, Hamlin could sneak into the Chase as a dark horse. If so, expect Hamlin to approach this year’s playoffs “with a totally different mindset.”
“We were expected to win it all last year,” Hamlin said. “Everyone expected us to. We expected to. With that hot summer that we had where we won all those races, we had the mindset of going out there and winning a championship.
“This year, if we get in, it’s going to be like we’re starting at the bottom, so we’ve got nowhere to go but forward. Where last year we started at the top and it’s hard to maintain that, trust me: It’s going to be a little different mindset. I’m going to look at it, personally, as everything from here on out if we do make it is a bonus, because luckily that one win could possibly give us a new lease on the season.”
UP IN SMOKE
Tony Stewart is hanging on to 10th-place in the Chase for the Sprint Cup by just 23 points.
Considering that he has to finish 18th or higher to qualify for the Chase, he’ll have to advance four positions from his qualifying effort of 22nd.
“I don’t remember what it’s like to qualify in the top four here,” said Stewart, who has started on the front row just once in the past 25 races at Richmond. “It’s definitely a lot harder. In the spring race here, we qualified in the back and got a lap down early and never could recover from it.
“But I think we’ve got a car that runs well. It seems like after about 10 laps, our car is as good as anybody else’s and maybe a tick better after 20 laps on. Hopefully, we’ll get a lot of long, green-flag runs (Saturday) night.”
Stewart has three Richmond wins — but none since 2002.
NUMBERS GAME
3 races in which Jamie McMurray has made the front row in 2011
4 career poles for David Reutimann
7 Chevrolets qualified in the top 10 for the Wonderful Pistachios 400
11 top-10 starts for Jimmie Johnson in 20 Richmond starts
SAY WHAT?
Clint Bowyer, who is 14th in the points standings, qualified fifth for Saturday’s race. While he knows it will take a win to earn a wild-card position, Bowyer found the different Chase scenarios amusing.
“Kasey (Kahne) and I were laughing,” Bowyer said. “Basically if everybody fell over dead, before the race; except for two cars and he was able to beat them, then he was in. And then if half of them fell over dead and I won, then I was in. Like I said, it’s silly and the pressure is off for me as far as I’m concerned. I’m here to win the race; and if something crazy happens, and crazy things happen in this world of racing, I’ll be glad to be a part of it.”
