Denny Hamlin called his shot last week when he said he would be in victory lane after Sunday’s Würth 400 at Dover Motor Speedway.
Turns out, Hamlin was onto something when he made that confident prediction. Hamlin won at Dover, his third victory of the season, fending off a charging Kyle Larson in the closing laps. Hamlin took a victory lap on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast, saying he expects to “win every week” given the confidence he has in his team.
“We told ya,” Hamlin said. “We told you it would happen, right? … I mean, I felt confident. If you listen to the post race media availability that you get after you win, someone said, ‘You know, well what prompted you to say that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m with one of the best teams. I got one of the best pit crews, I got in my mind the best crew chief, engineers, all that. I should expect to win every week.’ We’ve got some track history there where we were pretty strong and so I was pretty confident in that prediction. Just simply because I knew that if I did my job, then I was certainly going to be top-3. Then it’s just up to us to execute to get the win.”
Denny Hamlin on being 12th all-time in wins: My name ‘doesn’t really belong there’
Hamlin had every right to be confident. He entered Sunday’s race having been a contender in every race thus far this season, despite coming off P30 and P37 finishes at Texas and Talladega. Hamlin is now up to 54 career Cup Series wins, tying Lee Petty for 12th on the all-time wins list.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Hamlin said of being among the NASCAR greats on the all-time wins list. “If you put all the names on the list in the orders of the wins that they have, I don’t know, I see my name as just an outlier, one that sticks out like it doesn’t really belong there.
“I’ve been doing it a long time. You take for granted all the wins that you’ve had. All we think about is the ones that we didn’t win. I’m like, man, I feel like I should have 80 or 90 realistically. But everyone has those stories. It’s my personal goal, in my career I want to get to a number that puts me well inside that top-10 of race winners. I think that will speak for itself and the résumé.”
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