Denny Hamlin has endured championship heartbreak before, but never quite like this.
After dominating nearly every lap of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway, the veteran driver watched the title slip from his grasp in the final mile, a moment he later described in agonising detail, and prompted an emotional family trip a week later.
The race itself had appeared to be Hamlin’s breakthrough. Starting from the pole with a time of 26.914 seconds, he controlled both the tempo and field, leading a race-high 208 of 319 laps under scheduled 312-lap distance in the Championship event.
But the turning point arrived when a late caution erased Hamlin’s advantage and sent the race into overtime. The field was reset, and from the restart Hamlin slipped out of position. Meanwhile, Kyle Larson opted for a two-tire stop and gained track position.
Larson would claim the championship while Hamlin faded to sixth. He failed to win the championship for the fifth time under the elimination playoff format. In his podcast, Hamlin broke down exactly when he realized the race, and the championship, was lost.
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“Over the last 15 years, we really took a jump towards entertainment. Race your best in this one race, and that’s going to make you a champion. That’s what they wanted it to come down to was one race, and you’ve got to perform your best during that race.”
He continued: “And for 312 laps, not one time was that ‘number five’ out in front of me… Unfortunately, he was on lap like 315.”
Even in the green-white-checker, Hamlin believed he still had a shot. “I thought I was fine… In the sense that all I remember hearing the spotter say is that you’re three-wide bottom and the five is stuck up top.”
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Then came the fatal radio call: “I thought he was the third car on the outside of me… And so when I go into Turn 3 and I clear whoever those cars are, I thought that was it. I thought I was past him at that point.”
But Hamlin’s clarity came in the dogleg: “It’s not till we cross the white and we went to the dogleg and the cars fanned out to where you could see them all, and I saw the five, and I saw him right there with three-quarters of a mile to go, and I knew at that point, oh my God, it’s over. At that point, I knew that he had won, we had lost.”
It was a brutal realization for a driver who had executed nearly flawlessly for more than 300 laps, and a reminder that in NASCAR’s championship format, dominance only matters if it lasts until the checkered flag.