September 13, 2022 | By Lee Spencer

Though genuinely thrilled with 23XI win, Denny Hamlin is distraught over losing

KANSAS CITY, Kan—When Bubba Wallace won at Kansas Speedway on Sunday, Denny Hamlin swapped out his driver’s helmet for his 23XI Racing owner’s hat.

But that transition came after a long discussion on pit road with the brain trust from the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team. For the second straight week in the Playoffs, Hamlin had finished second. Most drivers would be thrilled with an average finish of second in the postseason.

Not Hamlin. He’s seen this script before and knows how the story ends.

“It was a tough day,” Hamlin said. “I'm honestly just really frustrated, for sure. I mean, rightfully so. It was a good day finishing 1-2 with my team car, but I hate not winning when we have fast enough cars to win. It's just so hard to win in this series. We’re just making so many mistakes.

"And it's losing a little bit of confidence, like, ‘Well, what happens if we make the final four, right? Are we going to be able or are they going to be able to step up and give me a solid day all around?’ Because you can't make any mistakes at all if you're going to win a championship. I've said that I'm willing to go to bat for these guys—and I continue to try to do that—but, man, we've just got to get better results.”

For the last three seasons, Hamlin has advanced to the Championship 4 Round. He has never finished better than third in the current format introduced in 2014. In 2010, Hamlin finished a career-best second. The No. 11 team had a 33-point lead entering Phoenix Raceway, then the penultimate race of the year. A mistake in strategy cut Hamlin’s advantage to 15 points entering the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where he lost the title by 39 points to Jimmie Johnson.

If Hamlin feels a little snakebit, no one would blame him. In 2022, the team has been plagued by a barrage of pit road penalties—some self-inflicted when Hamlin has exceeded the speed limit on pit road. But 34 times this season, whether it has been on Hamlin or the No. 11 pit crew, they have been taken out of contention due to mistakes.

And Sunday was no exception. On Lap 27, during the competition caution, the No. 11 team was busted for equipment interference. Hamlin, who qualified 25th, had rallied to 13th over the first 25 laps. Following the infraction, he was mired at the rear of the field and was forced to claw his way to the front again. Hamlin had 147 green flag passes but never led a lap.

“This is a results-based business,” Hamlin said. “And so, I'm happy with the speed our car had—obviously the fastest car at the end, but we shouldn't be showing up with just 50 laps to go. We had the fastest car for the first 150 (laps) and we probably had an average running position of about 20th.

“So I'm mad. I'm mad at the team a little bit right now that we just can't get this issue cleaned up.

“But I'm happy about Chris (Gabehart, crew chief), Sam (McCauley, engineer), and Ryan (Bowers, engineer), those guys that build these fast cars at Joe Gibbs Racing. We have just got to fix this one part of our team if we're going to be legit contenders.

Hamlin has matured dramatically over the last decade, especially after undertaking the development of 23XI Racing from scratch.

After competing for 17 full Cup seasons under the Joe Gibbs Racing banner, Hamlin brings invaluable experience and insight in his relatively new role. His perspective from the driver’s seat has enabled Hamlin to forego some of the mistakes made by first-time team owners.

The lessons he continues to learn on the weekends allow Hamlin to tweak and evolve his own organization for the better. Recruiting fresh talent for 23Xi’s pit crews for 2023—autonomous from JGR—tops the to-do list.

“If we stink, I want it to be my fault because I didn't have the right people, didn't train them correctly or whatever,” Hamlin said. “I just need to have my hands in it. I need to have control over that personnel and how it's getting trained. Joe Gibbs Racing is largely the part and the reason why we (23XI) won the race today, but we've learned over the first two years since the inception of our team that the pit crews play such a huge role in results.

“And obviously, as long as we're with Joe Gibbs Racing, we're always going to be kind of the next in line after they get their four teams all straight. I think this team is ready to be a legit top-tier team, and to do that I'm going to have to go out and recruit guys on my own.”

As 23XI looks to expand in the future, acquiring the right people will be key to the company’s success. One hire Hamlin plans to add after the season is Eric Phillips, who previously worked with the No. 11 team but returned to Kyle Busch Motorsports to be the crew chief for his nephew, John Hunter Nemechek, last year.

“Eric is a super talented person,” Hamlin said. “He's a guy that I've worked with for the last few years on my 11 car before he went over to John Hunter and he's just so talented in the race shop and building cars. So he's certainly somebody that we view as a top-tier employee that is going to make our current employees better.

“We're going to work through a reorganization over the next couple of years, part of a bigger organizational chart as we continue to grow, and he'll be a key member in management and obviously helping train some of these young guys that come in.”

For now, Hamlin is focused on advancing through the Playoffs over the next eight weeks. With two wins this year and a solid start to the opening round, Hamlin needs just six points to advance to the Round of 12. Still, Hamlin is haunted by the wins that have gotten away.

“This will be another week where we consider ourselves having a win,” Hamlin said of the Toyota camp. “When we talk about the win/loss, where we consider a win is having multiple cars having enough speed to go out there and win, our win-loss record is right around 50 percent. So we've run 28 races. We've had multiple cars capable of winning 14 races and we’ve got (six) wins.

“So we have to identify why we're not winning and fix it. Again, it's not my company, it's not. I wish I had more control of it, but I rely on Joe and Coy to go out there and identify those things and go out there and try to fix it. But ultimately, this part of the season, you’ve got to optimize the people that you’ve got. You've got to optimize the training that you've got. We still have to do our homework to make sure we build better cars on road courses. We’ve got one of those left that we're all trying to avoid like the plague. But, yeah, we're a very, very capable race team, but we're just missing out wins that we should be winning, and that's just obviously not acceptable.”