After mentoring a young teammate, Denny Hamlin takes care of business at Dover
By Bob Pockrass - Associate Editor
Thursday, June 05, 2008
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Denny Hamlin is used to sharing information with Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Kyle Busch and Tony Stewart. If one of them finds something that works on his Nationwide Series car, they trade information.
Hamlin was asked to try something on his car during practice leading into the Heluva Good! 200 at Dover, but it wasn’t really to help his car. It was to help his teammate, rookie Joey Logano, in his series debut. So he did just that.
Logano finished sixth, thanks to Hamlin’s help. Meanwhile, Hamlin, in a textbook case of leading by example, powered his way to victory in the No. 18 Toyota.
Afterward, Hamlin and his crew chief, Jason Ratcliff, spent almost as much time talking about his new role as mentor as they did Hamlin’s own performance. The mentoring role is new for Hamlin, who is just 27 years old and less than five years removed from his first start in what is now the Nationwide Series.
“Some of the changes that [Logano’s team] made throughout practice – we applied some of that to our car and got feedback from Denny to see if it would match maybe what Joey’s feedback was, just because Denny had been here so many times and had a good feel for the race track,” Ratcliff said. “Maybe Joey didn’t know exactly where he needed to be for the race.”
Giving the No. 18 team its third win of the season, Hamlin led 131 of the 200 laps of the race, which was delayed nearly three hours because of rain.
The victory marked Hamlin’s second consecutive win at Dover (he won with the No. 20 JGR team last September). The No. 20 team has dominated this season with six wins – four by Stewart and one apiece for Busch and Hamlin.
But now it might be time for the No. 18 team to take the lead as Logano, who just turned 18 amid incredible hoopla and fanfare, gets comfortable in his new ride in the No. 20. The No. 18 team isn’t running a full schedule, but the team showed it can be just as dominant as its brethren and thrive in the role of adviser.
“You want to open up yourself to him, to the questions that he’s going to have, and he had more questions than actually I thought he was going to have leading into this race,” Hamlin said of Logano. “It’s just the little things that it takes to be competitive in these races he may not know. He definitely asked me a few questions. I feel like I was a help to him, and that’s just a role that you feel like you’d like to have.
“You’d like to have someone looking up to you and kind of having someone that you can guide along and show the right and wrong way to do things.”
Hamlin knows what his car needs at Dover. He had led 138 laps in that win last September.
“We just bided our time and ran as hard as we needed to at certain points of that race and everything paid off there at the end,” Hamlin said. “I would’ve loved to battle it out with Joey Logano, but what a great debut for him to come out of here with a top-10 finish.”
Hamlin was helped when two race contenders – Busch, driving for Braun Racing, and JR Motorsports’ Brad Keselowski – had contact on pit road, requiring both cars to pit a second time under caution and try to work their way up from 16th and 17th, respectively, over the final 92 laps.
Keselowski could never get his car to handle well again while Busch, who had led 68 of the first 105 laps, worked his way to ninth before wrecking while battling for eighth with Braun teammate Jason Leffler.
That left Carl Edwards as Hamlin’s only true challenger, and Edwards’ Ford didn’t seem to have anything for Hamlin’s Toyota all day.
“It’s not just one thing,” Edwards said. “I don’t think it’s just the engines. With as much as we have to gain in the way we do our team and our engineering and things like that, I’m just excited to be able to stay that close to them.
“I think we have a lot to look forward to, some of the things we’re starting to work on. I’m excited about hopefully catching them and being able to have them chase us by the end of the year.”
David Stremme, in a Chevrolet, finished third while David Reutimann was fourth and Greg Biffle was fifth.
Series points leader Clint Bowyer was ninth and holds a 121-point lead over Busch and a 144-point edge on Edwards.
There are still 21 races remaining in the season, but the next three will provide a test for many drivers as the Nationwide Series runs separate from the Sprint Cup Series, requiring those doing both series to fly back and forth during race weekends.
At this point of the season last year, Edwards had a 672-point lead on the other drivers planning to run the entire schedule.
“Last year, it was not an issue because we were so great,” Edwards said about pulling double duty. “For the first half of the year, we were just kind of rolling along having fun enjoying it. Now, it’s getting pretty tight, so it’s going to be exciting.”
Typically, the stand-alone events give more teams a chance as fewer Cup teams participate.
The No. 18 team isn’t even going to Nashville for the next race but will go to Kentucky with Busch in the car.
So Logano won’t have a teammate’s help at Nashville. Hamlin, who switched channels on his in-car radio before the race to talk with Logano and give him a few last-minute words of advice, isn’t sure Logano will need much mentoring.
“He’s got his first race behind him and now he can go out there and work on being more competitive next week than he was the previous week,” Hamlin said. “I think it’s just going to be a matter of time before that 20 team is back in victory lane with the fourth driver.”
If Logano is smart, he will watch a tape of the Dover race and focus on Hamlin, who drove a smart, virtually flawless race. He let Busch go by him on lap 38 for the lead because Busch had a better car at the time.
Hamlin bever forced the issue. And when he did make a pit stop, his team made the car better, especially on the final stop with 45 laps remaining.
“Even though it seemed like we had our best run and pulled away the furthest [with 50 laps remaining], we really decided when we came on pit road that we were going to make the biggest adjustments we made all day right then,” Hamlin said. “It paid off in the end because I think if we didn’t have those then we were going to be in trouble.”
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