Good fuel mileage pushes Denny Hamlin to second-place finish
Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin finished second in the Dickies 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway. // Chuck Yadmark, NASCAR Scene
FORT WORTH, Texas - Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin didn't seem to be having the best race. He said he lost positions on pit road and then bounced off the wall – but then crew chief Mike Ford opted to keep the driver on the track and conserve fuel late to net a runnerup finish in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Hamlin ran into the wall with about 80 laps to go in the race, but in the end that didn't matter as he conserved fuel and made up for it.
“Mike said we were half a lap to good, even if I ran hard like I did the previous run," Hamlin said. "I got in the wall and just made a mistake. We struggled on pit road today and really got ourselves back in the pack. Mike came through and had a great pit strategy.
"All those [other] guys were short-pitting and he decided to put our Camry out there for a while."
The team made its final pit stop on lap 269, a couple laps after the last of the other leaders had come in. Then, in the waning laps of the race as others returned to top off with fuel or for quick changes, Hamlin as able to ride it out and stay on the track.
That enabled him to snare the second-place finish two weeks after winning at Martinsville Speedway.
Hamlin said that it was nice for a fuel-mileage race to go his way. This one clearly did with the top finish that allowed him to gain three spots to eighth in the standings.
"[It] played out in our favor, for sure," he said. "Usually, these fuel-mileage races don’t go our way. Obviously, we gained some spots today on the fuel-mileage thing."
