Denny Hamlin, for the 62nd time, was a winner in the NASCAR Cup Series on Sunday night in the Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway. It was an incredible comeback win for Hamlin, who started on the pole but had to drop to the rear due to a black flag for jumping the initial start of the race.
Race Results: NASCAR Cup Series Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville
“I definitely jumped the start, no doubt about that,” Hamlin admitted after the race. “Yeah, just looking back on it, just didn’t wait quite long enough.”
But as the adage suggests, you can’t keep a good man down.
“Man, what an unbelievable day — starting first, going to last, and back to first,” Hamlin said after performing a bow to the crowd with the checkered flag in honor of Kyle Busch, a legendary driver, who Hamlin served as a teammate to for 15 seasons.
After attempting to slice his way back to the front for the majority of the race, Hamlin would regain the lead on Lap 189. Incredibly, after being mired in the pack for nearly two-thirds of the race, Hamlin was able to lead a race-high 57 laps, but none of his laps led were as important as the final one.
In an electric battle with Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe, two of his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, Hamlin would pull off a last-lap pass on Bell for the race win.
Going into the final restart of the race, it didn’t look like Hamlin had much of a shot at leap-frogging his two teammates, but then they got to racing, which allowed him to get in the mix for the win.
“Well, I think the 20 and the 19 were battling so hard on the first corner, just let me get to the inside of the 20 on the first corner there on the restart,” Hamlin explained. “From there, side by side with the 20. He drove in so deep on that last lap into 1, but it allowed me to barely clear off of 2.”
While it’s been an uncharacteristically unlucky start to the season for Bell, a 13-time NASCAR Cup Series race winner, the driver continues to seek his first win of the season after back-to-back runner-up finishes.
Still, runner-up finishes are better than some of the hard-luck results he had earlier in the season.
Bell experienced five sub-20th-place finishes prior to his second-place efforts the last two weeks. With the solid finishes, Bell has clawed his way from 11th in the championship standings to seventh.
Briscoe, who competed for a championship in his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing last year, has also had a rough start to the season. Briscoe has had five finishes of 29th-or-worse through the opening 14 races of the season, so a third-place finish stopped the bleeding for him in the hunt for a Chase berth. However, racers always want to win.
“Hate that we weren’t on the better end of it,” Briscoe said of the late-race battle with Hamlin and Bell. “We had a really, really good Bass Pro Shops Tracker Toyota, just felt like it was certainly capable of winning, ended up third. Great day for JGR, went one, two, three. Wish we were the ones in first.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., driving a NOS Energy Drink Kyle Busch tribute paint scheme, came to life on four fresh tires in the closing laps and scored a fourth-place finish, driving the No. 47 Hyak Motorsports Chevrolet.
Just behind Stenhouse was Shane van Gisbergen, a road racing ace who is starting to really show speed on ovals, who finished in the fifth position on Sunday night.
Tyler Reddick crashed hard across the finish line, but was still credited with a sixth-place finish, while Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Zane Smith, and Carson Hocevar rounded out the top-10 finishers in the race.
The race was marred by a rash of right front brake rotor explosions, the first of which was experienced by Connor Zilisch on Lap 72. 10 laps later, Ross Chastain, Zilisch’s Trackhouse Racing teammate, also experienced an exploded rotor, which ended his night.
A piece of the rotor from Chastain’s car went through the radiator of Ryan Preece’s No. 60 Ford, which ended his night early. With the 36th-place finish, Preece dropped outside of the Chase Grid by two points.
A.J. Allmendinger, who won Stage 1 of Sunday night’s race, would suffer a rotor failure on Lap 173, while Chris Buescher would also exit the race on Lap 287 after his rotor failed late in the event. It was Buescher’s issue, which set up the final restart, which allowed Hamlin a shot at the win.
