[media-credit name=”Noel Lanier” align=”alignright” width=”246″]
[/media-credit]On a sun splashed Sunday afternoon in Loudon,NH, Denny Hamlin stood on the starting grid looking calm and relaxed. The Sunday previous at Chicagoland Speedway ended in disappointment for the Chesterfield,VA native as he run out of fuel on the last lap relegating him to a 16th place finish. After the race he went as far to guarantee a win at New Hampshire a track where he led a race high 150 laps in July only to come up short and finish 2nd to race winner Kasey Kahne.
Using the misfortune of last Sunday and a race that got away in July as motivation leading into Sunday’s second race of the chase Denny Hamlin looked to reassert himself as a contender for the 2012 championship at the end of the day he would follow through on his guarantee of week before in dominating fashion.
As the green flag flew on the Sylvania 300, Hamlin who had to start 32nd after a poor qualifying effort wasted no time making his way through the field finding himself in the Top 15 before the competition caution at lap 40.
53 laps later on lap 93 Denny would pass his teammate Kyle Busch and take the lead for the first time in the race and would go on to lead a race high 193 laps on the afternoon. As good as Hamlin’s car looked in traffic it was even more dominating in clean air as he would continuously run the fastest laps of the race and was at times two tenths of a second faster than the field.
Electing not to pit on the lap 130 caution, Hamlin was in the window of having to make a green flag pit stop when a well timed caution flew on lap 179 allowing him to pit with the rest of the lead lap cars to maintain crucial track position on one of the series toughest circuits on which to pass.
After another set of green flag pit stops Hamlin’s lead had grown to over 4 seconds over Clint Bowyer and Jimmie Johnson and it looked like Hamlin would continue to stretch the lead until a caution come out with 26 laps to go.
The top 7 cars opted to stay out and not pit before the final restart allowing Hamlin to maintain his position as the race leader. Getting an incredible jump on the restart Hamlin was able to stretch his lead to over 2 seconds on Jimmie Johnson with about 10 laps to go. Hamlin was never challenged coming to the checkers allowing him to cruise to his series leading 5th win of the season and a milestone 100th Sprint Cup Series win for Joe Gibbs Racing since the organization’s inception in 1992. “Our car was just extremely strong all weekend long,” said Hamlin in victory lane after the race. “Obviously we would have swept the weekend as far as number-one’s (practice, qualifying and race) if we didn’t have that blunder in qualifying.”
Car owner Joe Gibbs spoke about the significance of the organization’s 100th cup win after the race. “It was a huge day for us,” “Bobby Labonte (former JGR driver) came in victory circle and congratulated us, I appreciated Bobby. Dale Jarrett, Jimmy Makar, everybody when we first started..Tony (Stewart). It took a lot of people down the road.
After picking up the win at New Hampshire. Hamlin now sits third just 7 points back of leader Jimmie Johnson heading into next week at Dover, a track Hamlin has struggled at in the past scoring only 4 Top 10 finishes in 13 starts to go with an average finish of 20.5 in those starts. Next week could prove to be big as far as the championship hopes of the 11 team and Denny Hamlin are concerned.
