Darlington Raceway has a combination nickname/tagline. “Too Tough to Tame.” The track is one where drivers have to have the mental fortitude to battle the race track’s ever-changing conditions,bumps, and dips – all while also figuring out how to balance out their approach.
Being too aggressive will lead to wearing tires to the point of having no grip in the turns and using up your equipment almost like one might expect to see at a short track. Taking it too easy means putting a lot more pressure on your team to make good strategy calls. It can drive crew chiefs and drivers alike to the point of extreme frustration.
Darlington is also tough in that it is a track that is highly dependent on having good track position. It takes good strategy and execution to win on the 1.3-mile intermediate oval. All of those things came together perfectly for 2025 Goodyear 400 winner Denny Hamlin.
“Darlington has the same intermediate package that the other tracks have. The difference is that the speeds are so much higher at those other tracks and there is more grip. So the draft is a bigger factor. So, your setup is based on aerodynamics. Probably 80% of the grip you get comes from aero. Here, it is 50/50 mechanical grip to aerodynamics. You don’t have the draft to keep things bunched up. You don’t have long straights that allow guys behind you to close. Where you see the best NextGen racing is at the tracks that have grip, tires that bring a lot of grip, and a lot of throttle usage that keeps us bunched up.”
Hamlin went on to compare Darlington to Richmond, which perhaps non-coincidentally like the ‘Lady in Black’, is a track he excels at.
“A track like this is just a big Richmond. Sometimes the mechanical side of things can’t overcome it when the person out front has the clean air. They have such an advantage that you have to have multiple tenths of a second of speed faster than them to challenge or pass them. And there is not multiple tenths spread out between first position and thirtieth on speed.”
Hamlin pretty much hit the nail on the head about the lack of passing and ability to challenge the leader. Pole sitter William Byron, much like Kyle Larson in the Southern 500 here last Labor Day weekend, absolutely dominated the majority of today’s race. Byron led the first 243 laps (Larson led 263 back in September) and appeared to be cruising to accomplish a rare feat not seen since 2000 when Jeff Burton led wire-to-wire at New Hampshire. But with Darlington being a track where strategy is a key part of success, very rarely does the driver who leads the most laps win. For instance, in September, Larson lost the lead in the final 20 laps and Chase Briscoe went on to steal a win in the regular season finale to get into the playoffs. Today, Denny Hamlin seemingly stole a win for what would be his 2nd straight.
While Byron was building a lead as big as 3 seconds on the rest of the field, the race had a few incidents spread out through the first 2 stages. On lap 5, Kyle Larson found himself nose-first in the inside wall coming off turn 2 when he appeared to make contact with Joey Logano trying to come up the track in front of him. Twenty laps later, Carson Hocevar had a tire go down that caused him to bottom out and lose control when he slid off the banking coming off turn four. The rest of the opening stage went green all the way with Byron taking the green and white checker with ease.
In the 2nd stanza, as Byron started to lap the field, once again Hocevar was the cause of a caution being thrown. With eight laps remaining in the segment, Hocevar and Riley Herbst were battling hard off turn 4 to be the first car a lap down to obtain the free pass and get back on the lead lap at the stage break yellow. Hocevar tried to come up the track with Byron still not clear of his front quarter panel and found himself getting turned sideways into Herbst, eventually once again spinning towards the inside wall on the frontstretch. That led to the end of stage two being a 2-lap sprint to the end with Byron once again going unchallenged for the stage sweep.
The final 100 laps of the race are where two pit strategies came into play. The teams mired in traffic in the middle and back of the field decided to short-pit the final green flag stops – meaning they came in earlier than everyone else to gain track position during the pit stop cycle while hoping for a caution so they could stay towards the front. That strategy almost paid off for Tyler Reddick as in the end he cycled to the lead 3 spots ahead of Byron. Not only that, but William dropped all the way back to 4th when Ryan Blaney seemingly came out of nowhere to overtake both Byron and then-2nd place runner Christopher Bell before chipping away at the nearly 4 second lead Reddick had built.
At lap 290, Blaney successfully ran down Reddick and cleared him coming off turn 2, looking like he had the race in hand. But, the Lady in Black had other ideas. Bubba Wallace accidentally wrecked Kyle Larson a split second after Blaney took the top spot, which forced the race into overtime. That caution led to the winner being decided by a “money stop.”
In the end, Denny Hamlin came off pit road first and took advantage of the chaotic battle for 2nd behind him after the restart to run away for the win.
“I knew coming down pit road third, that I needed to have my best roll of the day”, said Hamlin of the final stop. “I needed my best roll in, my best speed into the box. I needed to put the car perfectly on the sign so that my crew didn’t have to adjust. I had to stack tenths and tenths and tenths on my side of the job. All without speeding. Even after all that, you still need a little help. The two car length gap the 12 had on us, I don’t know what that equates to.. Maybe a second of total time. So, the pit crew had to make up some time, I had to make up some time. Somehow we stacked all that together.”
The win marked the 56th career victory for Denny, and with back to back wins opens the door for the question of whether or not he can hit 60 this season – possibly even before the playoffs start. Hamlin says that he really is not worried about any of that.
“I don’t know. You never really know when you are going to win a race again. Getting these wins early in the season certainly is beneficial to getting the pressure off for playoff points and it makes me feel good to keep piling on wins.”
With Darlington Tamed (for now..) the Cup Series will head over the Appalachians for the annual Food City 500 at the half-mile Bristol Motor Speedway. Green flag will drop at 3:00 PM and the race can be seen on FS1.
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