SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Two days after the most devastating moment of his racing career, Denny Hamlin said he is far from ready to get back into a race car.
Good thing he has about three months.
Hamlin was less than three laps away from winning the 2025 Cup Series title when William Byron crashed, resulting in a caution. Hamlin took four tires on the ensuing pit stop, restarted in ninth and couldn’t catch Kyle Larson, who restarted fifth and finished second to beat Hamlin and capture the championship.
Larson didn’t lead a lap all day but still finished best among the four drivers eligible for the title. Hamlin led 208 of the 319 laps.
After a dominant 2025 NASCAR season, Denny Hamlin fell short when it mattered most.
Having signed a contract extension through 2027, Hamlin indicated Tuesday prior to the NASCAR Awards show that he would race next season. However, at the moment, he doesn’t want to get in a race car.
“I have a contract to [race], but at this point, there’s just absolutely no way that I would even — I don’t even think about a race car right now,” Hamlin said. “I’m going to need some time on this one.
“The good news is the banquet is two weeks earlier, so the offseason is a little bit longer. But I’ll get over it. It’s just going to take a minute.”
It was the fifth time Hamlin had made the Champ 4 and not won the title. He also didn’t win in his best shot in 2010, when he led the points going into the final race of the 10-race championship format.
This hurt the worst.
“This cut is deep,” Hamlin said. “No way [comparable to others], not close. This one’s deep.”
Denny Hamlin and Jordan Fish embrace on the grid after the NASCAR Cup Series Championship at Phoenix Raceway.
Hamlin won six times in 2025 and now has 60 career victories, by far the most of any driver who has never won a title. Knowing how much work it takes to get to this spot is weighing on Hamlin.
“In the moment, I can’t imagine having to go through the process I went through to prepare for that race,” Hamlin said. “Doing it all over again, I don’t just see how there’s any way.”
Hamlin still seemed in a little bit of disbelief.
“You’ve seen me lose this in so many different ways, from the mechanical failures to just crazy things, but I don’t know. This one just adds to the list,” Hamlin said. “Nothing changed the way I felt about myself at the end of that race, and to use Carl Edwards’ quote, ‘I knew what it was like to be a champion.’
“I felt it. With five [laps] to go, I knew it was over. I don’t have the trophy, but I knew that was probably the first time that I was forced to perform a certain way under this format, and I did it. There’s nothing else I possibly could have done to change the outcome.”
Hamlin said the caution for Byron hitting the wall was the right call by NASCAR. He also said that taking four tires was probably the right call in the moment by his crew chief Chris Gayle.
“If you would have just blind told us that there was going to be nine, 10 cars on not four tires, we would have changed our strategy,” Hamlin said. “There’s just no way Chris Gayle was going to say, ‘OK, I’ll start ninth and I’ve got faith.’
How will Hamlin approach the offseason after leaving Phoenix empty-handed?
“There’s no way. …. We had no idea that many people were going to go in there and say, ‘All right, I’ll put myself in the middle of the Championship 4,’ and so I think maybe some of the thought process, too, is that there’s not going to be too many crazy strategies or different strategies here because probably no one wants to be part of the ending story. But it just worked out the way it did.”
It was when Hamlin saw where Larson was on the track after the two-lap overtime restart that he knew Larson would win.
“I don’t think I saw them until the white-flag lap,” Hamlin said. “I can’t remember a lap where he was ahead of me at any point of the race. I remember seeing him for the very first time right after we took the white [flag] in the dogleg … because they told me on the backstretch with two to go, the 5 [of Larson] is pinned on the outside.
“I thought he was one of the cars I was clearing in [Turns] 3 and 4 [with one to go]. So when I saw him [on the outside], I knew then that it was over. I had only about a half a lap to three-quarters of a lap to say, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna win.’ I think that’s where the shock came from.”
Hamlin and Larson are friends, and Hamlin went to Larson’s championship celebration Sunday night.
“Just pay my respects. I would hope that he would have done that for me,” Hamlin said. “I think he would have. He’s been a great friend of mine. I hate for him that the attention has shifted a little bit away from him and his championship because … there’s a difference in deserving and should-have-been, right?
“There’s not one person that should ever question his deserving of being a champion. That’s what I don’t like to see. … I was just trying to do the right thing as a friend and regardless of my feelings and emotions that evening, it was important for me to go show him support.”
How long did he stay?
“Not long,” Hamlin said.
And Hamlin was dreading the season-ending awards ceremony tonight.
“It won’t be as agonizing as having to sit through two hours of tonight,” Hamlin said. “You can say we’re the only sport that ‘blank’ lots of things, but having to make the losers sit there and celebrate the winners is just one of those extra things that we have to do in our sport that’s painful.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
