Toyota GAZOO Racing – Denny Hamlin
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes
LAS VEGAS (October 11, 2025) – Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin was made available to the media on Saturday after winning the pole for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
This is Toyota’s third top-three qualifying sweep this season (Indianapolis) and 25th time in Toyota’s history to sweep the top-three in Cup Series qualifying.
For Hamlin, it is his first pole at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fourth pole this season (Pocono, Darlington-2, Gateway), 47th of his career.
DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 ampm Toyota Camry XSE, Joe Gibbs Racing
How do you prepare for tomorrow?
“I mean, that’s proprietary information, but, you know, we prepare for how we think the race track will be on Sunday we use a lot of track history and things like that, and Saturdays, I think this is one of the more finicky racetracks where, you know, kind of no matter when your practice is, either early in the morning, like we’ve had here before, or even in the afternoon, it just is a different race track on Sunday. There’s just a lot of factors that you got a factor in. We planned for Sunday and knew we were going to have to put some patches on things to make it go on Saturday. I thought it was good in the short run. Obviously, we were decent in practice on the short run. Struggled quite a bit in the long run, but, you know, it’s nothing new and nothing that’s too alarming on my end.”
Do you look at this as a good opportunity to get stage points or are you immediately focused on the win?
“I plan for, you know, I said, goals for each stage or really each run, and then, you know, generally with stages, and that changes by what’s going on. I think that I try not to zoom out too much and if they start thinking about stage points and stuff like that, I do think about track position because I know one of the benefits of keeping it is you will get stage points. I’m not really focused too much on the result, just the execution of making sure I do my part, to make sure I don’t make any mistakes and take our team out of it.”
Are you surprised that you were able to find that much speed in qualifying?
“You know, not really. The team has done a really good job, especially on a mile-and-a-halves of getting me better on Saturdays. I don’t know if it a Chris Gabehart (former crew chief, current Joe Gibbs Racing competition director) versus Chris Gayle (crew chief) difference? I know Saturdays with Gabehart we had our struggles in and we always just kind of we knew Sunday we were going to be great, and Saturdays, like I talked about, we tried to put Band-Aids on it, but sometimes it wasn’t enough. Chris Gayle was always qualifying really, really well with Ty Gibbs, and I thought, you know, some of that new philosophy is something that maybe we could work off of because I thought that Saturdays were my weakness. Certainly, statistically something I needed to improve is especially qualifying, and so I think we’ve gotten that better this year and we haven’t really sacrificed any race pace for it. So, I think probably Chris Gayle gets the bulk of the credit.”
What do you expect tomorrow?
“I just expect it’ll be different. The car will drive dramatically different tomorrow than today.”
Are there any changes you can make overnight on what you expect the car to do?
“Well, we know we’re in a box when we get here, so we know that you know, the big stuff, the big components, you’ve got to have you got to set for Sunday on Friday or Thursday, whenever you leave. So, we know that our set up is not optimized for today’s conditions, track and whatnot, because we know that we only got small things that we can tune for tomorrow, for the race, in the garage. So, we get the bulk of the stuff that we need and then we there are small things we can change, we do adjust for Saturday versus Sunday.”
Will you know in the first 10 laps if you have a winning car?
“Man, I usually am pretty confident in saying that I’ll know that soon. At some point in the first stage, I’ll know. First 10 might be a little bit ambitious, but just because I think this track just changes so, so much.”
Were there any thoughts on the settlement conference news from this week?
“No, no thoughts and you know, appreciate Judge Bell asserting himself in there and, you know, volunteering himself as being the judicial officer that was asked for.”
Do you think you’ve backed up the speed from Kansas?
“It’s fair to say, I don’t know the ranking. I haven’t seen even the practice sheet. I don’t know where we even were. I don’t know where the competition is. I haven’t looked at any, again, my focus as soon as I get out of the car tell them what I need for qualifying in the short run, like, I haven’t even reviewed SMT. I’ve reviewed nothing. Like, I will do that as soon as I leave here. So, I can’t really tell you that yes, it correlates, but certainly it seems as though you can’t ignore that when our pedals all the way down, it seemed like the Toyotas were pretty strong there. So I hope it correlates, and again, we have the same tire. Who’s going to adapt the best tomorrow? That’s going to be really the one to beat.”
How cool is it to move up the 11th all-time in poles?
“Yeah, it’s great. I never really considered myself a qualifier. Here over the last few years, I feel like we’ve kind of revamped that a little bit, but it’s just my ability to continue to learn and learn from others that are significantly better than me at it. So, 47 is a lot. I know there for a while it was kind of hanging around to where it was like, the wins and the poles were about the same, but it’s like the wins actually started taking over more than the poles have. So, I’d like to keep them fairly even. I need a lot more poles to do it, though.”
Did you ever have any concerns separating your team ownership role versus driving?
“Well, I think it was a thought early on. You know, again, when I started the team, it was earlier than I expected that I was going to do it, but I guess fortunately for me, the stars aligned, like right when they did during COVID. And then yeah, up until just a few weeks ago, it’s been pretty smooth sailing now and you know, balancing the two. But you know, we knew that there would be challenges. There was, I think, a few years ago heading into the regular season finale, when the question was asked, you, you going to push your teammate, you got to push the cars that you own. The answer was a bit controversial there, but you, I thought it was an important to kind of, lay that out that way, no, you know, if I did do something that I wanted to make sure everyone knew it to expect, in case it did come up, and so I think that these are the fine line things that you do balance, but I mean, I’m certain that I’ve cost myself more victories by giving them free information that I have taken from them. So again, they’re long-term success is my future but, you know, I know every time that I open my mouth and show them things that I think would help them, that there’s a really good chance that they’re going to use that and beat me with it.”
Is there something about this track’s pit road that makes it difficult to not speed on pit road?
“I don’t recall. I know I had a bad pit stop in the first stage that we lost a ton of track position. I think I might have sped you’re right. I did end up in the back of the pack at some point pretty early. The only thing that makes it difficult, it’s truthfully, if you try to on the speed limit, it’s not a difficult pit road, but we’re always trying to find all the edges that we can. At the beginning of pit road, this pit road is curved, anywhere there’s a curve in a NASCAR pit lane, that’s in a place that you can cheat the system, and you try to do it to the best of your ability, and sometimes you get busted.”
With Talladega on deck are you expecting drivers to throw hail marys or is there going to be more of a focus on points?
“I think there’s going to be seven or eight of us that are worried about points and there’s going to be 30 that do not care. That’s always the beauty of Talladega in the fall is that there’s so many different agendas when it comes down to it. I haven’t even looked at the trends of wrecks and where they start and things like that that I will look at next week, but generally speaking, the fall Talladega is where you’re going to see a lot of manufacturer teammate stuff going on, even more than a normal superspeedway race, because you’ll have certainly everyone from Ford, Chevy and Toyota saying, you know, these are cars that we need – make sure we’re pushing these cars, right? So it’s just a weird balance and sometimes you see wacky races.”
Even with the warning, you think there is going to be manipulation?
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it’s manipulation of it, just, like, try to, you know try to help these guys as much as possible. It’s been going on for about 10 years now, and so I just don’t think there’s any way to stop that. I mean, everyone’s going to be game planning this week on when are we going to pit, we’re gonna do it together, and we’re gonna try to stop others from passing us. That’s racing.
Along those lines after Kansas, did you or any of the other Toyota drivers hear from Toyota asking why?
“I did not. No. I think they kind of understood and knew it was a touchy situation, I think they do a really good job of like kind of staying out of that stuff. We, you know, to be honest with you, I can’t remember the last time, and I talked about manufacturers and stuff next week. Hand on a Bible, I can’t tell you the last time that Toyota told us to do anything. They stayed out of that, they try to let us teams figure it out, and let the drivers figure it out. Their job is to provide fast engines and all the information that we need to go fast. So situations, especially like, you know, what we had, in Kansas, yeah, they’ll wipe their hands clean and that. They don’t want any part.”
I’m sure they wanted to win.
“I’m certain of that.”
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