Denny Hamlin explains why he didn't expect to win at Las Vegas NASCAR playoff race

Denny Hamlin will be the first one to tell you that Las Vegas Motor Speedway is not a place where he has a great feel from what he needs out his race car to compete. It’s why he wasn’t extremely confident in his ability to win Sunday’s Round of 8 opener.

But come Saturday, it was clear Hamlin had himself a hot rod. He qualified on the pole, giving himself the opportunity to lead the field to green on Sunday. Hamlin took the checkered flag at Las Vegas, making the race-winning pass on Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe with three laps to go.

“I didn’t like our chances, but it wasn’t like Kansas where it’s like, I know exactly what I need to have out of my car, I know the feel I need, and I know whether we even have it in practice or not is irrelevant, I know we can get there on Sunday. Vegas is just one of those tracks where I think it’s my one-week big racetrack,” Hamlin said on Monday’s Actions Detrimental podcast. “All the two-mile stuff I feel really, really good about, all the mile-and-a-half, good, I got a great feel for them, I know what I need at every track.

“Vegas is just kind of one where I just don’t feel great at that track. I think a lot of it is the bumps in [Turns] 1 and 2 force you to have to do things with your setup that you don’t have to do on other mile-and-a-half because it’s bumpy and you can’t run your car quite as low to the ground. So, there’s some compromises to be had there and yeah, the last 10 laps I found out what that winning formula was. And now when I go back, hopefully that means I’m gonna be searching for whatever that was.”

Denny Hamlin found the winning formula at Las Vegas

From Hamlin’s point of view, it all happened so fast. His team had a long, final pit stop which was meant to knock him out of contention. But it was on that pit stop where crew chief Chris Gayle got his car just right.

What Hamlin had been searching for, Gayle found it. Hamlin is now a 60-time winner in the NASCAR Cup Series and will go for his first championship next month at Phoenix Raceway.

“I know this sounds really elementary, but I pushed the gas down harder,” Hamlin said. “Listen, we got the car better. The first stage we were not very good, I was hanging on, and we got a good stage finish because we got a good restart at the end of the first stage. We just kept working on it, and that’s what I really like about Chris Gayle is he’s not afraid to like put wrenches in the car if he’s got to.

“If the pit stop time suffers by half a second or a second, he doesn’t care. He wants to give me what I need out of the car and so, we made it better and better as the day went on. What I was telling you was true in that I just pushed it harder at the end of the race.”