Denny Hamlin isn’t acting like a driver recovering from knee surgery. With another dominating performance, sweeping both the NASCAR Nationwide Race, on Friday night, and the Sprint Cup race, on Saturday night, at Darlington, he’s announced that he’s back in the race for the Chase to the championship.
His third win of the year, earned in the past six races, ties him with Jimmie Johnson, who was crashed out of the race, for most wins of the season. The key to this win was taking four tires versus two. “We chose to take four tires more than a lot of guys did during the course of the day, so you saw us kind of go back to 10th, 8th at times, but we always kept good tires on the racecar all the time. That set us up for a charge to the front,” he said after his 11th career victory. He led 104 of the 367-laps around the 1.333 mile egg-shaped track. Polesitter, Jamie McMurray’s Chevy held off Kurt Busch’s Dodge for second in the closing laps, about the only race going on at the time. “At the end I didn't have anything for the 11(Hamlin),” said McMurray, this year’s Daytona 500 winner. “Couldn't get our car tight enough. Kind of creeped up on it all night long, could never get the car tight enough to where I could really hustle it. It was always sort of on edge,” he said. Busch said “it came down to a strategy where I though two tires would be the way to go at the end. We had the right strategy; we just didn’t have enough speed.” Jimmie Johnson had an uncharacteristic DNF when he was struck by AJ Allmendinger’s Ford backed into his, crashing into the driver’s side by the door. Neither driver was injured. AJ had no brakes and was basically a passenger in the car when it went up the track slamming into Johnson’s Chevrolet. Fourth place went to Jeff Gordon one of this years’ lap leaders who hasn’t been able to make it into victory lane. To avoid a pit lane accident he missed the pit entrance, late in the race, and that cost him big time. "I just didn't get slowed down good enough," he said after a late-race charge back to fourth. "I was going to get run over. My fault. I made a mistake there and lost the track position. They gave me an awesome car and drove up there to fourth, pretty happy with that.” Juan Pablo Montoya had one of his better oval finishes in fifth. Jeff Burton, who also seemed poised to get back into Victory Lane had a communications problem with crew causing him to run over an air hose and be penalized. "We have to make a decision on whether we need to be a championship team or whether we want to just pretend to be one," he said "I think we're a championship team, and I think our guys will get it together and be just fine. But it's frustrating, and it's disappointing." Kevin Harvick, who finished 6th, leads Johnson, 36th in the race, by 110 points.
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