Insiders speculate on Denny Hamlin's NASCAR future, if he can still compete for first Cup Series championship

Bobby Allison was 45 years old when he won his first and only NASCAR Cup Series championship in 1983, still the oldest driver to win a championship. In 15 days, Denny Hamlin will turn 45 and after the finish to Sunday’s 2025 championship race at Phoenix Raceway, he is still looking for his first career championship.

Hamlin did everything right at Phoenix. He led 208 laps, a record for any driver in a championship race, and was cruising to his first title before William Byron blew a tire with three laps to go, bringing out one final caution. One questionable four-tire call later and Kyle Larson, not Hamlin, was the champion of the season, despite not leading a single lap at Phoenix.

Was that Hamlin’s last, best chance to win a championship? Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic is concerned that Father Time could defeat him.

“This isn’t a question about anything else other than age. It’s not about commitment, it’s not about dedication, want to, or any of those things,” Bianchi said on The Teardown podcast. “Plus, he drives for probably one of the two best teams equipped to win a championship going forward under whatever format. … He’s in a great situation based on all those things — work ethic, commitment, team, etc. But what he cannot defeat is Father Time, and we have seen that time and time and time again. He’s going to be 45, and that is an age where drivers’ performance can fall off a cliff in a hurry. … You don’t know what you’re going to do when you get to a certain level of your career, and it can go away.

“So, we don’t know. If Denny Hamlin has the same ability he has now as next year, absolutely he can come back and win this thing. He’s good at all types of tracks, which is what you need to win it. You’re probably going to need, to some degree in this new hypothetical format, whatever it’s going to be. Everything being equal, yes, but the question is can he defeat Father Time for one more year.”

Denny Hamlin provides visceral reaction to loss

Hamlin was understandably dejected after the race. His weekend ended in heartbreak, and there was nothing he could have done differently to change that. In the immediate aftermath of another championship race disappointment, Hamlin cast doubt on his NASCAR future.

“In this moment, I never want to race a car ever again,” Hamlin said. “My fun meter’s pegged.”

Jeff Gluck, Bianchi’s colleague, said he doesn’t believe Hamlin will walk away from the sport. That being said, Hamlin invested a lot of time this season into being as prepared as possible for Phoenix. He came up short — again — and that has to be “pretty tough to come back,” Gluck said.

“Obviously, he ends the season with the most wins and was this close to winning the championship tonight, so I don’t know if one more year makes him fall off a cliff or something like that. … A lot of the great drivers just stop winning suddenly and look, if I was Denny, after this, it’d be pretty hard to find, at least right now, the motivation to be like, ‘I gotta do this all over again.’ I don’t think he [retires], but it’s a lot of work,” Gluck said. “The amount of work that we heard he was putting in behind the scenes to get to this point this year, it is an extreme dedication. If you put in 90 percent of that, are you even as successful?

“There’s a very small club of people — Carl Edwards, Connor Zilisch, Denny Hamlin — who knows what it’s like to put everything in and be in position to win it, do everything right and not have it work out. It’s gotta be pretty tough to come back from that, but we’ll see.”