Denny Hamlin details 'shock' of finally seeing Kyle Larson in front of him in Phoenix championship race

It’s been a couple weeks since the NASCAR Cup Series finale, where Denny Hamlin suffered an immense heartbreak at the end of the race in Phoenix. Time heals all wounds, but this failure is going to take some time to cleanse for the No. 11 Toyota wheelman. 

He was seconds away from capturing his first ever title, but a blown tire by William Byron, a questionable decision on pit road and hectic green-white-checkered delivered the championship to Kyle Larson, who didn’t lead a lap all afternoon.

During the final Actions Detrimental of the season, Hamlin took some time to reflect on the ending of the race, and when he knew he wasn’t going to capture a long elusive trophy after dominating the race in the desert. 

“Even in the green-white-checkered, I thought I was fine, in the sense of, when I went off a turn — I remember them saying, all I remember hearing the spotter say is that you’re three-wide bottom and the No. 5 is stuck up top. I thought he was the third car on the outside of me,” Hamlin explained. “So when I went into turn three and I cleared whoever those cars were, I thought that was it. I thought I was past them at that point. 

“It’s not until we cross the white flag and the cars fanned out and we went to the dog-leg and the cars fanned out to where you could see them all, and I saw the No. 5. I’m not kidding, and I’m not overstating — that was the first time I saw him all day. Not one other lap was he in front of us. I saw him right there with three quarters of a mile to go. I knew at that point, ‘Oh my God, it’s over.’ Like, at that point, I knew that he had won.”

Once the white flag was out, Hamlin was disheartened, knowing Larson was too far gone: “We lost because we had crossed the white. There’s no going back at that point,” he added. “He was just too far ahead. There were just too many cars between me and him. And that was it.”

Hamlin’s come close to winning championships in the past, but there was no doubt this one was different. This was his best chance yet, and he did all he could. It was simply ripped away from him at the final moment. 

“So that was my — I’ve had other losses in championship races where I kind of, you give yourself a little time to prepare for it,” Hamlin elaborated. “Like, maybe you’re not fast enough that day. You’re like, ‘Oh man, we really need some things to kind of break our way.’ Or, you know, someone passes you a 50 to go. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to win it. They’re pulling away. It’s over.’ And it’s probably what the competition was thinking for the end of that race. 

“But that was the first one where I was like, I didn’t realize we had lost until three quarters of a lap to go. And so that was the utter shock that I had, that I had to just kind of sit there for a few minutes after the race to just figure out what in the world happened.”

Hamlin will be back and ready to compete again in 2026, but it’s easy to see why he’s disparaged after what went down in Arizona. It was a microcosm of everything wrong with the playoff format, and why NASCAR is ready for a change. It’s just a shame the revelation had to come at the veteran wheelman’s expense.