Denny Hamlin Tag

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor In his final start at Talladega Superspeedway, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. will start exactly where he intends on finishing Sunday’s race – in first. Talladega has served as Earnhardt’s most successful track, with six wins, but in all of the accolades he has gotten over the years at Talladega, he had never won a pole on the 2.66-mile track, but that all changed on Friday afternoon. With wild applause from the fans in the stands, Earnhardt was the fastest in the first round of qualifying andRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor Talladega may not be the Round of 12 elimination race any longer, but the mammoth 2.66 mile superspeedway is still a huge wild card and will go a long way toward determining which drivers will be in position to move on to the next round of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs. Racing at Talladega has always been crazy from the time the track opened back in 1969. From the driver boycott of the first race that led to unknown driver Richard Brickhouse scoringRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service CONCORD, N.C. – The only thing typical about Martin Truex Jr.’s performance at Charlotte Motor Speedway was the win. The No. 78 Furniture Row Racing team screwed up in qualifying on Friday—a rare occurrence in a remarkable season for the series leader. Truex failed to score points in the first stage of Sunday’s Bank of America 500, the first race in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoff’s Round of 12. That marked the first time since Daytona in July that Truex had finished outsideRead More

By Seth Eggert, NASCAR Writer CONCORD, N.C. – In a race where most of your competition is up front the entire day, a driver needs a strong finish, and one driver who got just that is Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin. Hamlin’s No. 11 FedEx Office Toyota Camry was a fixture inside the top-10 the entire race for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. Hamlin, the polesitter for the Bank of America 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway finished fourth after running just outside the top-five for much of the day.Read More

By Seth Eggert, NASCAR Writer CONCORD, N.C. –  Track position is often key at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The driver that will start with the best track position in the Bank of America 500 will be Denny Hamlin. Hamlin cruised to the pole with a lap of 28.184 seconds, 191.598 mph in the No. 11 FedEx Office Toyota Camry. His lap narrowly edged out his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Matt Kenseth, who ended up 0.016 seconds behind. Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, and Clint Bowyer rounded out the top five qualifiers. TheRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor With the first round of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs complete after last weekend’s race at Dover, NASCAR’s premier division heads home to Charlotte Motor Speedway this weekend to kick off the Round of 12 with Sunday’s running of the Bank of America 500. As the first race in the Round of 12, Charlotte will play a big role in setting up how the remainder of the round will play out at Talladega and Kansas in the next two weeks. The 1.5-mile quad-ovalRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor The first round of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs rolls on as the series heads back to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for their second visit of the season and Sunday’s running of the ISM Connect 300, which will also be the final time the Cup Series makes a visit to the track in the fall as they move to just one race weekend in 2018. First joining the Cup Series circuit in 1993, the 1.058-mile oval that has progressively banked turns from twoRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service JOLIET, Ill. – Remember all those playoff points that were supposed to carry regular-season champion Martin Truex Jr. through the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs? He didn’t need them—not after what turned out to be a dominating victory in Sunday’s Tales of the Turtles 400, the Playoff opener at Chicagoland Speedway. Truex’s fifth victory of the season, his second straight at Chicagoland and the 12th of his career was hardly a cakewalk, even though the driver of the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing ToyotaRead More

It’s that time of the year again. After the 16 driver field for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series playoffs was set last weekend at Richmond, the intensity of the season is about to ramp up over the final 10 weeks of the season as we’ll whittle the championship field down to four at Homestead to see which driver will walk away with the title at season’s end. As a refresher, there will be three rounds of eliminations before the Championship Four is set. The Round of 16 will includeRead More

NASCAR Wire Service RICHMOND, Va. – A caution on Lap 397 of a scheduled 400 in Saturday night’s Federated Auto Parts 400 turned what looked like a coronation for Martin Truex Jr. into an unexpected overtime victory for Kyle Larson, as the field of 16 drivers was set for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs. Truex, the regular season winner, had a comfortable lead over Larson when Derrike Cope brushed the outside wall with three laps left in regulation. Larson won the race off pit road after the lead-lap carsRead More