Denny Hamlin questions Trackhouse speed: 'Teams will be investigating where speed came from overnight'

Denny Hamlin watched as Ross Chastain and Trackhouse Racing as a whole found some speed on Sunday night during the Coca-Cola 600. It all led to the Melon Man winning his first race of 2025, locking himself into the playoffs.

Chastain, after starting in the back of the field and having to go to a backup car following a wreck in practice put his car in Victory Lane after 600 miles. He wasn’t the only Trackhouse wheelman with some speed though — Shane van Gisbergen secured a P14 finish in a surprise run, as well.

It’s been a rough start to 2025 for Trackhouse as a whole speed-wise, and their performance at Charlotte has Hamlin wondering where the speed came from this past weekend. He believes that’s what the rest of the garage is thinking, as well.

“He’s consistently the top guy over there,” Hamlin said, regarding Chastain at Trackhouse in 2025, via the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast. “But we need to give credit to Trackhouse this weekend. We’ve been pretty hard on them in their lack of speed, lack of everything, to start the year, but they absolutely showed up here. The No. 1 was the fastest car in practice by a chunk, not a little bit. When he wrecked, you look at the left rear-tire, they were being a little aggressive on something, and that’s where the speed was coming from. But I think that they proved, by driving towards the front, over the course of [the entire race], and you heard Ross say just it took the entire race to get there, him starting dead-last. They had real speed.

“The No. 88 showed it. The No. 99, not so much. Is it by chance that the No. 1 —  I mean, I was looking at the rankings, and I think Chastain has been like the No. 17 fastest car on intermediates this year. I mean, this was out of the blue. This was absolutely out of the blue. But it wasn’t just him. It was Shane [van Gisbergen], as well. Shane has run P30 in most races, and he got a great finish of P14. Did him and Ross just happen to show up on the same weekend? I don’t believe so. I believe that they hit on something.

“All the teams certainly will be checking things out, investigating to figure out, you know, where the speed came from overnight. It just didn’t happen overnight, right? They could’ve been working on something that, you know, some sort of new setup or something like that, that they just now could get in the car.”

Regardless of what Denny Hamlin and the rest of the field thinks, Ross Chastain and Trackhouse Racing seemed to turn a corner this past weekend. We’ll see if they can keep it up as they head to Nashville this coming weekend, which has been an awesome track for the team in the past.