NASCAR Cup Darlington II
Does Denny Hamlin, NASCAR Chase favorite, get it done at 45?
He's the number one seeded driver with four wins to date
Matt Weaver
Edited: Sep 2, 2026, 6:55 PM
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Denny Hamlin at Chase Media Day
Photo by: David Jensen / Getty Images
A year after the Final Four format denied him that elusive NASCAR Cup Series championship, Denny Hamlin enters the first year of the second iteration of the Chase for the Championship as the favorite.
He is two months away from his 46th birthday and 14 months away from his intended retirement. Next year is not a guarantee and this very well could be his last chance to win the missing championship that he has tried to not let define him.
“It would mean a lot personally, but it also if I quit today, I'm still really happy with the stats we were able to put on the stat sheet and the wins that we've been able to get,” said Hamlin on Wednesday at media day for The Chase. “It certainly would be very gratifying, but what matters to me is my dad saw me when I was at my absolute best, and that was at Phoenix last year.”
That story has been well-documented. Dennis Hamlin was in the midst of a terminal illness and his son put everything he had into the pursuit of that championship race. He won the pole and was three laps away from winning the title when a caution came out and the crown was lost on a green-white-checkered.
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Hamlin the senior died in a house fire a month later and the playoff format wouldn’t see the next year either. Hamlin has four wins this year, earned the regular season championship, and enters this new format with a 25-point advantage over Ryan Blaney and 35 over Tyler Reddick.
There are 16 drivers overall with each seed having a five-point greater deficit. The driver with the most points after 10 races wins the championship.
There’s one obvious positive to this format for the favorite.
“I think that being a favorite in years past, you always know this thing is going to come down to a freaking green-white-checkered in the final race, and that's how they're going to decide a championship,” Hamlin said. “I think now it's like the bigger body of work typically bodes well for Denny Hamlin. It just always has.
“You give me more of a sample size, and we're going to prove that we're the best over a long period of time. I think that that's what our fans need to focus on is that just this is a marathon, not a sprint.”
On the other hand, Hamlin cannot pour his entire self into one single race like he did last year after being the first driver to lock into the four-driver, winner-take-all championship race.
“I think it's harder, I really do,” Hamlin said. “It’s simply because there not going to be any opportunity for me to take two weeks off and study for one racetrack. It's not physically possible.
“Now, there's an opportunity for me to spend a little bit more time on these last 10, which I will do but it will never reach the depths in which I worked for Phoenix last year. It's just simply because there's no weekends to take off.
“Maybe Talladega because there's not really much setting-up that goes into that one. That's why I said I never could imagine going through that process again that I went through preparing for that one race.”
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Several versions of the Chase for the Championship was used from 2004 to 2013 but this one is different because it will be the first to incorporate stage points. In the previous version, everything came down to finishing position, but this format will better reflect the overall performance over 10 races.
There are so many points available in each race that even a lower seeded driver can make up ground by maximizing stage points and then winning a race -- which itself carries 20 more points than finishing second.
“It's going come down to first qualifying, then, then it's the stages, right,” Hamlin said. “So, there for a while during the summer when we had a lot of stage points, it's because we were qualifying really well.
“And I do think that we just went through what I believe was our roughest patch of tracks and we still have been really, really, good. So, if we can just keep our good finishes going, we're going to continue to be good on the metric. We're going to continue to qualify well. So I think it's going to be all about the execution that happens the day before the race that’s going to lead to stage points.”
Only Hamlin and Joey Logano have raced in the Chase for the Championship, something he doesn’t even think matters this year, and he is curious to see how this version of the format changes how the races play out.
“I'm looking forward to seeing where we're at five races in,” Hamlin said. “And to think that five races in, that's over a month from now, and we're still just going to be halfway. I think everyone's going to realize pretty quickly this is a lot different format than what we've had in the past.
“We're going to see a lot of things that we think are huge moments, and they might be in retrospect when you look back. But we won't know them until the season's done in Homestead.”
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