It wasn’t looking good for Denny Hamlin at the Coke 600. Then he avoided the carnage

Denny Hamlin can finally add “Coca-Cola 600 winner” to his resume.

The No. 11 Toyota driver for Joe Gibbs Racing, despite being on the outside looking in for much of the last 10 laps on Sunday, found a way to avoid the race’s crazy carnage down the stretch to win the crown-jewel event at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The win delivers Hamlin his 48th career trip to Victory Lane, his second win of the season and his first Coke 600 trophy. And that Hamlin “first” intersects with a bit of history with the sport: Sunday’s 619.5 miles and 413 laps is the longest race in NASCAR Cup Series history.

“It wasn’t looking good for about 398 laps. And considering our day, I was going to be pretty content with a fourth-place finish,” Hamlin said. “Things worked out for us. They haven’t worked out very well for us in the first 12 races in a lot of different ways, but certainly this was one.”

With four laps to go, it looked as if it was Kyle Larson’s race to lose. The 2021 Coke 600 winner had battled back from a comedy of struggles from the first half of Sunday’s race and was fighting off Chase Briscoe in second place. Briscoe took his shot at passing Larson to no avail with four laps to go and then spun out, knocking him out of the winner’s circle chase, causing a caution and forcing overtime.

At the next turn after the ensuing green flag, Larson led again. But Hamlin “hung around” — and when a huge wreckage knocked out another layer of leading drivers, Hamlin and his pit crew were ready.

Teammates Hamlin and Kyle Busch then dueled out the final few laps in overtime, and Hamlin prevailed.

Busch finished second. Kevin Harvick finished third.

“There were quite a few times through the race that the car wasn’t right,” Hamlin’s interim crew chief Sam McAulay said in the wee hours of Monday morning. “He could make up some ground on a restart, and then we’d start to fall back a little bit on both sides of the balance. But I think the key was just him fighting to get those spots, to keep us up there in the top 10.”

He added: “(Denny) even mentioned it at one point, at halfway, ‘This is a survival race.’ ”

Calling Sunday’s race “different” than the 2021 Coke 600 would be an understatement. Maybe a disservice.

Last year’s event featured four yellow flags and a flawless run from Larson, who led a race-high 327 laps of 400 and sweeping all four stages en route to victory.

On Sunday, there were 18 caution flags. That’s four short of a Coke 600 record (2005). There were several single-car spin-outs and a handful of race-altering wrecks.

And perhaps no moment from Sunday served more of a foil than Larson’s embattled beginning — one that saw loose tires and wall scrapes and his car catching on fire: “I think this is the worst race of my life,” Larson told his crew chief midway through Stage 2, mainly commenting on how he performed as a driver. “And it’s not even halfway done yet.”

The Coca-Cola 600 is the longest race in the NASCAR Cup Series. It can be a battle of attrition, as Sunday’s race showed, but it also can be a unique challenge race crews embrace: Can you build a car that can last 600 laps? If so, can you stay in it?

“More so than almost any other race,” McAulay said, “you just feel like it has to be a full team effort to win this race.”

The victorious owner, Joe Gibbs, used a football term when describing Sunday’s race. “That was physical,” he said.

And it was. On Lap 191, The (First) Big One of the Coke 600 occurred after Ryan Blaney got on the apron and lost control of his car and spun sideways, knocking out several drivers. There was another big wreck in the second half of Stage 4 that sent Chris Buescher airborne.

And, of course, there was the final wreck. It happened after Austin Dillon took the lead late but got spun out and took out Larson, Ross Chastain, Joey Logano and others.

Hamlin avoided that final wreckage, scooting along the inside, and that ultimately set him up for the win.

“We managed the race,” Hamlin said. “We knew we didn’t have the fastest car, the best car by any means. But we just stayed in the race. Didn’t make any mistakes, and gave ourselves an opportunity when the opportunity arose for us.”

Coke 600 NASCAR race results

This story was originally published May 30, 2022 at 5:00 AM.

Alex Zietlow

The Herald

Alex Zietlow writes about sports and the ways in which they intersect with life in York, Chester and Lancaster counties for The Herald, where he has been an editor and reporter since August 2019. Zietlow has won nine S.C. Press Association awards in his career, including First Place finishes in Feature Writing, Sports Enterprise Writing and Education Beat Reporting. He also received two Top-10 awards in the 2021 APSE writing contest and was nominated for the 2022 U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Rising Star award for his coverage of the Winthrop men’s basketball team.