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HAMLIN HAULS AT VIRGINIA TRACKS

Denny Hamlin grew up just south of Richmond, Va. and cut his teeth on racing at tracks like South Boston and Martinsville.

In short, he’s a short-track kind of guy, and two of them happen to be in his home state.

As the Race to the Chase morphs into the actual Chase itself, he’s got a date at his hometown track before he goes about trying to knock Jimmie Johnson off his perch as the four-time defending series champion.

As to why he is so good at Richmond and Martinsville, Hamlin shrugged.

“I think it has to do more with them being short tracks, or shorter-style tracks,” Hamlin said Saturday at Atlanta. “That’s where I excelled early in my career.”

That’s where he was racing when Joe Gibbs plucked him out to drive the No. 11 FedEx Toyota in 2005. The late-model circuit in the South has many stops in Virginia and the Carolinas, and he hit them all.

After leading a ton of laps at Richmond, he’d never won there until last year (pictured taking the checkered flag), but he’s made a practice of winning at Martinsville…even on one leg. It’s just a case of having been around them all his life, he says.

“We don’t approach them any differently,” he said of Martinsville and Richmond. “I don’t try any harder at those race tracks. I just think it works out. I’ve seen a lot of laps run at Richmond just watching in the stands and I feel like I have a line around there that works really well for me.”

That line has seen him lead all but one of his starts there, lead the most laps three times and win the fall race at RIR last year, leading the most laps there as well.

In his career on short tracks, Hamlin has made 29 starts, won four races (one at Richmond, three at Martinsville) and finished in the top five 14 times. He has 19 top-10 finishes on short tracks.

At Martinsville, Hamlin used to run the big Taco Bell 300 late-model show there in October, and spent many a fall afternoon with his foot down on the throttle there.

“It’s just a track that I really get around well,” Hamlin shrugged. “I have a lot of laps there even before I made it to the Cup Series. I ran a lot of laps, and I think it’s just the experience level.”

With the annual Race to the Chase finale set for this weekend in Richmond, Hamlin is looking to make a statement heading into the 10-race season finale.

“What it’s all about for us right now is just getting those wins,” Hamlin said, referring to the bonus points earned by winning races. “We still feel like we need to get a win before the Chase starts.

“We don’t have to win in order to win the championship, but we feel like it’s important to us.”

Coming off a disappointing performance (for him) at Richmond in May, Hamlin is approaching this week’s race with a different outlook. Part of that is due to the fact that the last time the cars were there, they had wings on the back instead of spoilers.

“We ran so poorly there in May compared to what we usually do,” he said. “We’re excited to back there. We feel like we’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve got an open mind when we go back. I can’t rely on stuff from the past. It’s going to be the first week or first time that we go back there and we don’t have any notes to go back to.

“We’re going to come with a new setup and see if it works.”

Poor performance? Hamlin finished 11th in May, but that wasn’t good enough for him.

“When I say we ran bad, we ran in the top 10 all day,” Hamlin clarified. “We weren’t leading laps. I’d led laps every single time I’ve run there and every race in the past. We just weren’t as competitive and that was very frustrating.”

There are keys to running well at Richmond, Hamlin said.

“The biggest thing is staying off the brakes,” he said. “You have to have a car that’s extremely good to stay off the brakes. I told Mike (crew chief Mike Ford) the entire time there in May that I’m running the car like I know I shouldn’t be simply because the car wasn’t handling well and I had to rely on brakes to slow it down.

“Everything gets worse with brakes so for me, I just have to work on staying disciplined and make sure I have a good car.”

He’ll have some work to do at Richmond, too. He retired after 133 laps with a mechanical problem Sunday night at Atlanta and finished 43rd; dropping him five spots to 10th in the point standings. However, thanks to a 33rd-place finish from the point leader, Hamlin was able to clinch a Chase berth despite the misfortune.

“The good news is that we brought our best race car to the track and said that this is going to be a Chase race and this was going to be a test for us,” Hamlin said. “It was an A-plus on the track, the car handled great. I was just messing around out there and having a good time.

“It’s frustrating. I know if we had the reliability that we could win this championship and the odds would be pretty good to win the championship if I can just keep it together for 10 weeks.”

Those 10 weeks, for Hamlin, start Saturday night at Richmond.

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