NASCAR News | May 29, 2010

Johnson says about Hamlin: “He’s a threat”

By Viv Berstein
May 29, 2010


Huntersville, NC — In the sometimes bland NASCAR garage, at least one driver has dared to criticize the powerful, call out the untouchable, slap down the unbearable and catch the seemingly uncatchable.

Denny Hamlin might be NASCAR’s next great hope. If he plays it right, he could be its next champion, too.

“I said it last year,” Jimmie Johnson, the four-time defending Sprint Cup champion, said before the All-Star race last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “He’s a threat. He has the team and the organization and the crew chief and everything around him to do it.”

Johnson and Hamlin each have three victories, tied for the most in Cup competition this year. They each have had streaks of dominance, with Johnson winning three of the first five races and Hamlin taking three of the last six going into Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

And it seems they are on their way to what could be a memorable 10-race playoff this fall, with Johnson fourth in points behind the leader Kevin Harvick and Hamlin 19 points back in fifth.

“He’s ahead of me in points by just a couple, so you’ve got to say he’s got the upper hand,” Hamlin said recently in the offices of his team, Joe Gibbs Racing. “But in the grand scheme of things, I think the gap has narrowed now. Now we’ll see when it comes Chase time.”

Hamlin nearly gave up his dream of being a professional driver when he ran out of money in 2002 and resigned himself to working at his father’s trailer-hitch shop in Chesterfield, Va. Discovered in 2003 by Joe Gibbs Racing, Hamlin has ascended quickly. He reached NASCAR’s top series full time in 2006 and has been chasing Johnson ever since. Hamlin has made the season-ending playoff every year, only to come up short.

What’s different this year?

“We’re running up front because we’ve learned how to win races,” Hamlin said.

Confident? Yes. Cocky? Maybe that, too. Hamlin is an outspoken, occasionally brash and often entertaining change of pace for NASCAR. When he was unhappy with the young driver Brad Keselowski last year, Hamlin vowed to deliberately wreck him in a Nationwide Series race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Then Hamlin did it.

And when his pouting teammate Kyle Busch threw a temper tantrum last week, blaming Hamlin for costing Busch a shot at victory in the All-Star race, Hamlin coolly dismissed him.

“I don’t want to be part of it, any drama that he wants to create or anything is on him,” Hamlin said on Thursday. “All I’m going to say and I’m going to be done with it: each year I think Kyle’s going to grow out of it, and he just doesn’t. Until he puts it all together, that’s when he’ll become a champion. Right now he just doesn’t have himself all together.”

Hamlin has taken on Nascar and the four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon, too. He took to the Internet to slam NASCAR last fall when officials instituted a last-minute rule at Talladega Superspeedway that limited drivers’ ability to bump racecars in front of them.

“Not happy about rule change 1 hour before race time,” Hamlin wrote on his Twitter account. “Let us RACE.”

When he found out that Gordon had talked to Nascar about the rule change beforehand, Hamlin also chided him on Twitter.

“Jeff G told NASCAR we shouldn’t be bump drafting,” Hamlin wrote. “Who’s running this sport?”

If NASCAR officials were angry, they did not reprimand Hamlin. Instead, they agreed with him and rescinded the rule this year.

Perhaps NASCAR realizes Hamlin, 29, could be good for the sport. With his camera-friendly smile, playboy reputation and party-boy image, Hamlin injects a youthful personality into the NASCAR garage. A man about town, he owns a nightclub in Charlotte called Butter, is a buddy of Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain and exchanges text messages with Michael Jordan, owner of the Charlotte Bobcats.

Hamlin seems determined never to be bored — or boring.

“I think that NASCAR almost likes it that I’m somewhat seen in a lot of different areas,” he said, “because I think NASCAR drivers get the reputation of married homebodies that you never see. They just hide away until the race weekend. I will never be one of those guys who says, ‘Man, I wish I would have lived up my 20s.’ ”

But he is careful not to oversell that image. Although his opulent house was featured on MTV’s “Cribs” last year, Hamlin is leaning against doing a reality show on his life off the track.

Racing still drives Hamlin, as an emotional display in victory lane at Homestead last November made clear. It was a breakthrough for Hamlin, who was known more as a short-track racer.

Winning a Cup race on a one-and-a-half-mile oval showed he could be successful on just about any track.

“That was a huge piece of the puzzle to be able to win a championship,” said Mike Ford, Hamlin’s crew chief.

Hamlin thought he was poised to do so when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee playing basketball in January. It did not go over well at the Gibbs office.

“What I was thinking is, You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ford said.

Hamlin made up for it. He had reconstructive surgery after winning at Martinsville, Va., in March and did not miss a race. And he did not skip even a lap in his first race back, at Phoenix on April 10, although a replacement driver was on hand.

“He went up a few notches in my eyes during that,” said J. D. Gibbs, the team president.

Although still in pain, Hamlin followed that race with a victory at Texas the next week. He won a third time on May 8 at Darlington, S.C., in yet another sign that Joe Gibbs Racing had caught up to Johnson and his powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports team. Hamlin vowed last week that either he or Busch would capture the Coca-Cola 600 at a track where Johnson has won six times in his career.

Typical Hamlin. Anything but bland.

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