“It’s just who knows what can happen,” a concerned Denny Hamlin quipped before the playoffs kicked off in Atlanta. After all, the Round of 16 races are an eclectic mixture of a drafting track, a road course, and a short track. And the first race axed a bit of Hamlin’s championship hopes already. Over his 19-year-long Cup Series career, Hamlin never saw the glimmer of a Cup Series championship trophy. The hopes look bleak this time as well.

The Joe Gibbs Racing driver started weakly at Atlanta to begin with. He barely cracked the top-ten throughout until the final nail hit as a last-lap wreck took him out. Surprisingly, his bizarre race strategy supported this miserly showing.

Denny Hamlin shoots himself in the foot?

As Joey Logano cruised to an overtime victory at the Quaker State 400, a chaotic situation unfolded behind him. Entering turn 3, Ross Chastain got pushed by Chase Elliott, triggering a multi-car wreck collecting Denny Hamlin and others at Atlanta Motor Speedway. However, the JGR driver’s day was not going well to begin with. Hamlin has rarely fared well on superspeedway tracks and finished 23rd at the February Atlanta race. So he did not drum up a lot of hope to begin with and just tried to avoid crashes—a task in which he failed.

“I’m not sure. Just the cars turned sideways and that was it,” Denny Hamlin quipped post-race about the crash.

Then he also confessed his mediocre strategy for this Atlanta outing, saying, “It was mostly me, sitting back. Trying to avoid, you know, a 25th or worse place finish. That’s typically all the superspeedways where I have been. In Next-Gen, I got caught up in everyone else’s wreck possible. So I tried not to do that today and got caught in the last one.” 

Such an approach may yet again spell misfortune for Denny Hamlin’s championship pursuit. It eerily resembles Dale Earnhardt’s 20-year-long quest for a Daytona 500 victory, which he finally achieved in 1998 after finding every imaginable way to lose that prestigious race.

Similarly, Hamlin missed the coveted trophy due to reasons ranging from a roof hatch popping open to Ross Chastain’s ‘Hail Melon’ move. The JGR driver may be close to breaking his two-decade-long curse, but Atlanta’s showing poured some water on that goal. Yet the JGR driver had explained the logic behind his strategy before the race.

Hamlin did not raise his expectations

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Well, knowing your weaknesses is a skill indeed. Denny Hamlin knows the unpredictability that comes at superspeedway races. At tracks like Daytona or Atlanta, drivers rely on drafting to gain track position, for which they race extremely close to one another. So the slightest miscalculated nudge can trigger a massive, smoking wreck. These are wildcard races as well—drivers far below on points like Harrison Burton can take advantage of the drafting and clinch a victory. So before entering Atlanta, Hamlin had his priorities straight, when he said, “I try to do the best I can to avoid the wreck and that’s it.”

Before the Quaker State got underway, Denny Hamlin also explained the logic behind his approach. “There’s less, simply because I feel as though having this extra superspeedway in there in Atlanta, it just might put you in a hole that you cannot overcome,” Hamlin explained. “Because this is a race that you could easily go finish 32nd or 33rd and have one point and you find yourselves 20-some behind and even being solid at Watkins Glen or good at Bristol, it might not be enough.” 

He added, “And, now it’s down to a two-race season and that’s hard for us to overcome if we don’t get through the first one.”

Hopefully, Denny Hamlin knows what he is doing. Coming up next are tracks where Hamlin boasts multiple victories, including the tire management race in Bristol. So we are expecting some glittering results from the JGR driver.