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HAMLIN AND NO. 11 TEAM PUTTING FINAL PUZZLE PIECES IN PLACE

Denny Hamlin has some experience with high expectations.

After bursting onto the scene in 2005 with a pair of victories at Pocono, Hamlin spent some time as The Next Big Thing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

So far, however, he’s never won a series title, despite having the benefit of a championship organization behind him and prodigious Toyota horsepower from Mark Cronquist’s engine room at Joe Gibbs Racing.

But according to many in the racing media, that’s all about to change. Read the papers, watch TV, or surf the Web and it appears Hamlin has been chosen as the next best bet to knock four-time defending champ Jimmie Johnson down a peg on the Sprint Cup podium.

Last year, after an up-and-down start to the season, he won four of the final 15 races and positioned himself as the heir apparent to Johnson, who seems to find a way to flip the switch in the final 10 races of the season and hold off all comers when it gets down to the nitty-gritty.

“I kind of hate for anybody to say, as good as the 48 car is now, that they’re going to project us to beat them,” says team owner Joe Gibbs of his No. 11 FedEx Toyota team. “Nobody has been able to do it. From Denny’s standpoint, the reason we’re excited is the last quarter of the year. I think he was up front consistently, which is where you have to be, and we had the two motor deals and a big wreck.”

It’s true. Hamlin was third in points after finishing second in the opening race of the Chase at New Hampshire. A 22nd-place finish at Dover followed, then a fifth-place run at Kansas. At Auto Club Speedway in California, Hamlin had just taken the lead when he came up the track to get back in line when he got clipped and spun hard into the end of the pit wall. Just like that, he was down to ninth.

A blown engine in Charlotte (42nd) and another at Talladega (38th) were sandwiched around an emotional victory at Martinsville in his home state of Virginia. That up and down stretch of results left him 11th in the points and out of the running.

But his next three finishes, in the final three races of the season, were second, third and first. Those finishes pushed him all the way up to fifth in the final standings, and take the No. 11 team into 2010 with momentum behind it.

“What we’re seeing is that we’re running good enough, the crew chief is there, and that’s hard,” Gibbs opines. “The pit crew is there, and we’re capable of running at that level. We didn’t get it done, we have to find a way to get it done when it counts, and you’re not going to be able to have the mechanical issues that we had.”

When you’re the chosen one, the guy everyone is touting as the one to knock off the driver who did something no one in the 60-plus years of NASCAR has been able to do, there’s a little pressure there.

For Hamlin, it’s not so much the expectations. He’s used to it, and he puts a fair amount of it on himself.

“[The pressure is] not any more than I put on myself anyway,” he says. “Last year, I said I didn’t want to be a contender any more, I wanted to be a champion. I wanted to be the guy. I was sick of having expectations and having no results to back it up. We did that this year [in 2009], we just didn’t have the reliability to win the championship. That’s the bottom line. We just didn’t have the parts and pieces right. This year, we know how to win a championship and I know how to win a championship. Now, it is just going to be executing it.”

That job falls squarely on the broad shoulders of crew chief Mike Ford. He has identified the trouble, taken steps to fix it and has a good idea that what he implemented will get the job done.

“You have to ask yourself what is most important,” Ford says. “Safety is most important, durability is next, performance, cost, personal preference. That’s basically the structure for making decisions in this sport.

“We look at safety first, and then we go straight to performance. We’re guilty of that because we’re competitors. We have to have a much higher awareness of No. 2 on the list, which is durability. What that means is, if we run parts to failure, OK, we know when they fail and we need to back it up a little bit. We need to have a little bit of a margin. Plus, we need to make sure that the guys who touch things are educated and have the things they need to work. It’s a little bit of both.

“We need to give ourselves an insurance policy, and with any insurance policy there’s a premium. That’s what we’ve got to pay.”

Beating Hendrick Motorsports is not easy. The team has nine driver championships, including the last four in a row, and they didn’t get to where they are by standing pat. The last non-Hendrick team to win the title just happened to be based out of the same shops as Hamlin and Ford are.

In other words, this isn’t a new war; it’s just the latest battle.

“I think the key to that is, it isn’t just Hendrick,” Ford says. “This past year, all three of their cars were up there, but consistently, the 24 hasn’t been there consistently, the 5 hasn’t been there consistently. When you talk about Hendrick, you’re more or less talking about the 48.

“You look at that group, and the key to it is they’ve been together for a while. They are able to work on the peripheral issues, not just the common issues that are in front of you every week, the global issues, the things that you fight when you go to all the 1.5-mile tracks, not just to Charlotte and Kansas. They’re able to tie things together, and you have a deeper way of thinking the longer that you’re together. We’re starting to experience that right now and with where we are and Denny being tied into our race team and being a key part of what we’re working on week to week, we’re going to continue to improve our 1.5-mile program.

“All I know is how we’re going to improve and how we’re working. You don’t know what everyone else is doing. But I think the rate that we’re working at that, I have a hard time believing that anyone else is learning more than we are.”

That’s the key to winning, both Hamlin and Ford agree. Knowledge is useless without the power to make it work for you, and that’s the tack they’ve taken for 2010.

“It’s two things: communication and patience,” Ford says. “He [Hamlin] has the patience, absolutely. The patience comes with knowledge. The more you can learn about the whys and the limiting factors, the more at ease you are with working through problems and that is what we gained last year.”

Developing the communication was the first step, and perhaps the least difficult. Patience, while it is a virtue, is often much harder to learn.

“At first, for Denny, it was very overwhelming to him,” says Ford. “He didn’t know what we were working on or why. As he’s matured, he’s been fed a little bit at a time and he understands it more and now it’s clicking. He understands it’s about communication and patience. We’re strictly problem solving, continually, and he’s become a very key part of that. How your demeanor is in those tense situations, it turns a lot on the outcome and he’s controlled that.”

Hamlin, for his part, has been compared often with Carl Edwards, who burst onto the scene in 2005 along with Hamlin. It’s a comparison that Hamlin doesn’t seem to like that much, because Edwards was the last Next Big Thing that was going to knock Johnson off his throne.

“I have been compared to Carl before…I think it was my rookie year,” Hamlin says. “They said, ‘Carl had a real good year his rookie year and then had a sophomore slump and didn’t make the Chase.’ The second year, I was not Carl Edwards. I said then that I’m not Carl Edwards and I’m not with Roush Racing.

“I’m Denny and I drive for Joe Gibbs Racing, and that’s an organization that does a good job minimizing the peaks and valleys in performance. We might not always be at the top but we’re never really in the basement. I don’t foresee any of the expectations being too far off.”

How soon will Hamlin, Ford and Gibbs know if they have what it takes to get that job done?

“We’ll know right away, a few races into the season,” Hamlin says. “The thing for us though is we’re going to work our way into the season. I don’t foresee us really lighting up the race track the first five months of the season, just because we have some things we’re working on and we want to come to the race track with our best stuff at the end of the season when the Chase starts.”

That’s the patience that Ford was talking about – seeing the bigger picture; taking care of the details; being ready for the endgame.

But before the points race starts in earnest with the Feb. 14 Daytona 500, Hamlin gets a chance to blow off the cobwebs and get back in a racing state of mind in the Feb. 6 Budweiser Shootout, the non-points, big-money curtain-raiser to the season. Patience aside, you can tell that he’s itching to go have some fun Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway.

“I’m ready for the season to start,” he smiles. “Last time I was in a car, it had champagne and confetti all over it and I got out and accepted a trophy.”

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