The Bass Pro Shops Night Race closed out a successful Round of 16 for Joe Gibbs Racing in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, with the Toyota-powered team sweeping all three races courtesy of Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe, and Christopher Bell.

Hamlin’s win in the Enjoy Illinois 300 proved particularly notable as it brought him to 59 in his Cup Series career, just one shy of Kevin Harvick for 10th most all-time. Now, the 44-year-old is set to continue his pursuit of a first career championship in the Round of 12, starting with the USA Today 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

The first of three races this round, the Playoff field will then be trimmed down to the final eight. And following his 31st-place finish at Bristol Motor Speedway that saw him lose a wheel mid-race, while teammate Bell headed for victory lane, Hamlin boldly predicted that among those to be knocked out would be two former champions.

“I have a weird feeling about [Ryan] Blaney,” Hamlin said on his ‘Actions Detrimental’ podcast. “He runs really, really good at Kansas. New Hampshire, I’m not sure. It’s a flat track. He should be pretty good. 

“The Roval, I don’t know. He’s not been very good on the road courses. Who am I to say? But it just…it’s not his strong suit either. 

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“And then [Austin] Cindric, [Joey] Logano, and [Ross] Chastain. I just think that he’s been prone, that the numbers would say, he’s prone to either feast or famine. And I think that if you have one famine race and then a subpar race, you could find yourself below.”

However, Hamlin also admitted to concern for Tyler Reddick, who drives the No. 45 Toyota for the team he co-owns with Michael Jordan, 23XI Racing. Hamlin described Reddick, who is 12th in the standings entering the Round of 12, three points below the cutoff line, as “vulnerable” should he have “his kind of ups and downs of execution.”

Hamlin went on to add that he’s confident Reddick will “be fine,” before noting, “he’s in a spot where he can’t afford a bad, bad race” – which he defined as 28th or lower.

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As far as his approach to the next round goes, Hamlin explained that at least for the first two races at New Hampshire and Kansas, he’ll be going lights out. “I think certainly for the first two races of every round, it’s go all out, do everything you can to win the race, have the speed, and then when you get to the third race, you have to evaluate where you are,” he explained. 

“If you find yourself plus 10, plus 15, plus five going into that last race, you have to treat it differently. You’d be foolish to not treat the race a little bit differently. 

“And a lot of times you perform a little bit worse because of that, because you don’t take the risk to go three wide middle on a restart, knowing that if I screw up here, I’m going to get a bad finish, and the person didn’t outrun me, I screwed up and gave it to them. So I think it’s just for me personally, it’s you go all out the first two, and then you figure out the third what the agenda is.”