The Best 40 Seconds Denny Hamlin’s Ever Driven

Denny Hamlin’s chances to win the 2016 Daytona 500 were shot, and he was responsible. As he led the field down pit road for a green-flag stop with 45 laps to go, all he had to do was make sure his tires made it into the pit box unscathed.

They didn’t.

Welcome to Split Second, where we ask racers to recall a split-second moment that's seared into their brain—the perfect pass, the slow-motion movie of their own worst crash, the near miss that scared them straight, or anything else—and what gives the memory staying power. In this edition, we spoke to Denny Hamlin, who recalled coming off of turn four to win the closest finish in Daytona 500 history.

“On the last pit stop, [my crew] said: ‘Don’t slide your tires. We’re going to take two,’” Hamlin told Road & Track. “I said, ‘I slid them.’

“Immediately, the crew chief says: ‘Take four, take four.’”

It was a costly mistake. Hamlin, who drives for Joe Gibbs Racing and recently started his own NASCAR Cup Series team with Michael Jordan, led more laps than anyone that day. But sliding his tires and having to replace all four—not just two, like many cars around him—meant he’d slowed himself and his crew down by a few seconds.

In NASCAR, a few seconds is an eternity. Hamlin rejoined the field in seventh place.

“I was like, ‘Well, I just pissed this race away,’” Hamlin said. “‘This is where I’m going to finish.’”

It’s an odd thing to think with more than 100 miles to go, but Hamlin had good reason.

At Daytona International Speedway, cars compete in a large, aerodynamic pack, all impacting one another with a sometimes disastrous ripple effect. That spurs drafting alliances, often within teams and manufacturers. Hamlin and his four allied Toyota drivers—Matt Kenseth, Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch, and Carl Edwards—were the cars to beat that weekend, but their strategy required staying nose-to-tail in a straight drafting line ahead of the main pack.

“In practice, I noticed our times were faster than the pack,” Hamlin said. “I’m like, ‘Well, if we stay in a line, it doesn’t matter what the pack does. How are they going to pass us? It’s impossible.’ So we each just committed to: whoever was in front, second pushes; third pushes second; and so forth.

“We said we weren’t going to pass each other until the last lap. If I was out front, I knew I could defend the lead for a lap and probably win.”

But Hamlin wasn’t out front anymore.

The Toyotas rode in a tight pack for most of the rest of the race, with Hamlin climbing from seventh to fourth and Kenseth leading a long drafting line on the inside of the track. An equally long line of cars rode around the outside, consistently a few car lengths back.

“This is hard when you sit in the position those cars on the bottom are sitting in,” commentator Darrell Waltrip said with eight laps to go, as Kenseth, Truex, and Busch still led Hamlin. “Cars on the outside keep driving up there and falling back. It’s tempting to go up there with them, but like Hamlin said: You just can’t take that chance.”

Hamlin also wasn’t allowed to yet.

“You know what,” Waltrip said with two laps to go. “I’m watching Hamlin. I just think he might be the one guy that tries to spoil this party. He keeps looking to the outside of Kyle Busch. He might be saying, ‘Kyle, if you go, I’ll go with you.’”

“When I go back and watch, the commentators were all over it,” Hamlin told R&T. “I remember Jeff Gordon saying, like, ‘Denny’s not going to be okay with just riding here.’

“I wasn’t, but I also wanted to stay true to what we planned. I can’t just be selfish right now. I’m the one who screwed up and gave up the lead on pit road.”

Even if Hamlin wanted to break away from his teammates, his hopes were slim. The inside line where the Toyotas rode was strong as ever, while the outside one lagged so far back that its leader—Ford driver Kevin Harvick—hovered around fifth at best.