Hamlin quietly climbing through ranks, looking for more success

Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin has had kind of a stealthy climb through the Sprint Cup driver standings this season.
   
He and his Mike Ford-led team have one win - at Martinsville Speedway - and nine top-10 finishes in the opening 18 races. Hamlin is seventh in the standings and on track for his third consecutive berth in what is now known as the Chase For The NASCAR Sprint Cup.
   
Yet, Hamlin doesn't seem that pleased with his season overall. As teammate Kyle Busch steals headlines with his sixth NASCAR Sprint Cup wins and Tony Stewart draws them for his runs at the front that keep ending with late-race setbacks, Hamlin and Ford focus on the task at hand.
   
But as he looks over the way things have gone this year, the driver is less than thrilled. Last season, both he and the JGR organization were on top of NASCAR's new car, the model formerly known as the car of tomorrow. Hamlin led laps and seemed to pace the field every time the car was on the track in its debut months.
   
This year, though, that hasn't always been the case. Hamlin expected more from this first half of the season.
   
“I don’t think we’re where we need to be," he says. "It’s kind of the place where I thought we would be or maybe a little bit worse than where we’d be. We’re in the top-10 in points, which is important for us. Right now we’ve just got to try to get a little bit more secure."
   
When he compares his 2007 season to his current one, he finds this year a bit lacking.
   
"Last year at this time we were 300 or 400 points over 12th-place or 13th-place," says Hamlin, who now 97-point lead over the 13th-place team in what is shaping up to be a tight run to the Chase. "We don’t have that huge margin this year, so we’ve got to play it a little bit more safe than where we did last year. We’re confident in knowing that if it’s just based on on- track performance then we should be fine.”
   
He does see positives. Hamlin felt that his team started out well in the new car but then lost its edge to other teams late last year. They regained some of that in the offseason. He's not worried about the tracks that are left where the car hasn't been run since he thinks his team will have a good handle on those events.
   
Still, he's not really pleased with where things stand.
   
Hamlin expects a lot - from himself and from his team. Right now, he doesn't seem to think they're performing as well as they could be.
   
Asked to grade himself at the season's midpoint, he offered a surprising analysis, though one that takes into account the slew of setbacks that have hampered his runs at the front this year.
   
“I think we have a C-plus," he said. "A lot of guys would love to be where we’re at right now, but I feel as a team I expect a little bit more from myself and from the team. They’re doing everything they can. If you throw luck and everything in it we get a C-plus. Based on performance I feel like we’re a B-plus or so."    

Don't read that to mean that Hamlin is down on his effort or his team, though. He simply sees the promise of more.
  
"[We're] not quite where we need to be," he says. "We’re on the cusp of It. We're on the edge of where we need to be.”
   
Still, he's gaining ground, as is his organization. And he's not necessarily speaking gloomily of their prospects - he's just being honest about his expectations.
   
Meanwhile, those of the organization as a whole must be high at this point. Obviously Busch, the series points leader, is on track to make the Chase. But Hamlin and Stewart are in position to make it as well, giving the team the potential to have three drivers in that elite field to determine the 2008 series champion.
   
Busch says that the three operate as one, helping the effort of all of them.
   
"Denny and I, we're real close friends," he said earlier this season. "It's easy to talk back and forth with them. … With the 11 [of Hamlin], the 18 [of Busch] and the 20 [of Stewart] all being in the same building, underneath the same roof, with the engine shop underneath the same roof, the fab shop where the chassis are made, the bodies are built, all that is in one complete – underneath one complete roof. I think it just makes it that much more simpler, I guess if that's a word. But all the guys in the shop on the floor, there's no specific team. They all work for Joe Gibbs Racing, and they all work on all the different cars. It's definitely a great system."
   
Hamlin would agree with that. And, he admits things certainly aren't bad for his team. He's just an ultra-competitive driver who has grown accustomed to challenging for wins and championships in his two short seasons of full-time competition. He's a driver who cannot settle for less than he knows his team can achieve - something that offers both a source of optimism when times are rough but also a frank honesty when it comes to addressing the level of his goals being met.
   
After all, Hamlin still possesses a bit of the wide-eyed surprise that he's even in the position that he is. The 27-year-old Virginian has had an outstanding level of success in his opening two seasons of Cup competition, finishing third in the series standings in his opening year and 12th last season.
   
So while he wants more - as all drivers do - from his season, he also recognizes that it is special to be in this position.
   
"It just happened so fast with me I really didn’t think too much of it," he says of his current standing among the sport's elite. "I just thought that I was supposed to succeed at this level. I did at every other level that I competed at, so why couldn’t I do it here?
   
"I thought maybe it would take a little bit of time. I didn’t know that we would have the immediate success that we have."
   
He's also already showing the ability to learn from his experiences, no matter how limited those might seem in terms of a long-term career.
   
And that could help him improve his grading system by season's end.
   
"Last year, we ran so strong early it was easy for us to go out and run first and second every week," he says. "Then when our cars weren’t exactly where they needed to be, I felt like I needed to make up more as a driver, and then I got myself in trouble on the race track because of it. Once you get a little hole that you’ve dug – in the Chase, after the first race we had problems – then it felt like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to catch up.’ And you just end up putting yourself in bad positions.
   
"That’s something you just have to learn over time. You can’t gain it all back in one or two races. I think the approach the first year was we were just so happy to make it that anything we did in the Chase, it didn’t matter.  If we ran 15th or 20th every week, we were OK with that. We weren’t OK with that the second year, and we put more pressure on ourselves to perform. 
   
"Now I think we have a little better perspective on what it takes.”

• Mentioned Drivers:
• Denny Hamlin