LEBANON, Tenn. — Denny Hamlin showed on Sunday night at Nashville Superspeedway that sometimes, it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks. It might just have to happen at approximately 180 mph.
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As Hamlin and the No. 11 team have acknowledged many times in the past, restarts have not always been the veteran driver's strength. Yet, he used a restart at the 1.33-mile concrete track to pass teammates Chase Briscoe and Christopher Bell, both of whom had fast cars.
As a result, he ended the night celebrating with a custom Gibson Les Paul guitar in victory lane.
"Well, I switched my game mid restart," Hamlin said about "fixing" his restarts. "Again, I approached three to go and two to go far different than I approached it with one to go.
"So it's almost like showing someone a defense or a shot fake and just you keep doing it and keep doing it. They then think, well, you're going to do it again. So on the last lap I said, 'No, I'm going to just do something totally different.'"
WHAT A BATTLE. Denny Hamlin WINS at Nashville! pic.twitter.com/XssA3YXC8J
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) June 1, 2026
The field took the green flag with four laps to go in Sunday's rain-delayed race. Bell had the lead with Hamlin next to him on the front row and Briscoe just behind. The Joe Gibbs Racing drivers raced side-by-side as the laps clicked down, but none could gain an advantage.
Hamlin and Bell were door to door with two laps remaining in the race when Briscoe got a huge run and took the field three wide. They took the white flag three abreast, but Bell jumped to the lead.
The driver of the No. 20 did not remain in this position. He and Briscoe shot up the track while Hamlin took the bottom line. He cleared both Bell and Briscoe for the lead, and he remained ahead all the way to the checkered flag. He captured his 62nd career win and his second of the season.
The fascinating part is that Hamlin said he recognized how he had made mistakes in past Cup Series races. His best opportunity to actually win the race was to switch up the strategy in the middle of a heated battle.
"21 years in, the game slows down to me," Hamlin said. "I'm interested to see kind of what my WHOOP (strap) says for my heart rate. I usually keep it pretty low throughout a race anyway. But I never felt any adrenaline or anything the last few laps. It was just like a regular old restart.
"I understood the stakes. I was very excited when I came off of Turn 2 side-by-side for the lead after the first corner, but in these situations, you've got to just keep a level head.
"I think there's many times that — I failed in these restart scenarios far more times than this one success and this one that I was able to succeed in. So just I'd learned from all the mistakes that I've made and knew why I was not good on restarts to start the year, and I fixed it on the last lap."
Hamlin said that he didn't have race-winning speed in his No. 11 Toyota, but he felt he could pull off the win by looking back at all the times he had screwed up.
And while crew chief Chris Gayle has all the confidence in the world in his driver, he didn't exactly expect to see Hamlin pulling off the win in this fashion.
"Over the last restart there, I don't know that any of us actually thought we were going to win the race there," Gayle said. "Everybody that's watched Denny knows restarts aren't typically his strong suit. If he has the lead, he's probably better at holding guys off. We were thinking let's just get out of here with a third-place finish and move on.
"Then they started racing really hard, and he had the inside. We're like, 'Okay, let's definitely not take all three JGR cars out. Let's let somebody else win at this point.' Neither of those happened, and we were able to get away with the end. It was a good day and surprising end for us."
Learning from these past mistakes put Hamlin and the No. 11 team in a good spot. They are now tied for second in the series with two wins. Hamlin is also second in the Cup Series standings. He is 97 points behind Tyler Reddick and 77 points ahead of Ryan Blaney in third.
Hamlin doesn't expect to catch Reddick during the regular season, but if he can remain in the top two through Daytona, he will put himself in serious contention for the championship.
