Sign up to our NASCAR newsletter here.<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cOver the last 15 years, we really took a jump towards entertainment. Race your best in this one race, and that\u2019s going to make you a champion. That\u2019s what they wanted it to come down to was one race, and you\u2019ve got to perform your best during that race.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cAnd for 312 laps, not one time was that \u2018number five\u2019 out in front of me\u2026 Unfortunately, he was on lap like 315.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even in the green-white-checker, Hamlin believed he still had a shot. \u201cI thought I was fine\u2026 In the sense that all I remember hearing the spotter say is that you\u2019re three-wide bottom and the five is stuck up top.\u201d<\/p>\n
DON’T MISS…<\/p>\n
Then came the fatal radio call: \u201cI thought he was the third car on the outside of me\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Hamlin\u2019s clarity came in the dogleg: \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s over. At that point, I knew that he had won, we had lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a brutal realization for a driver who had executed nearly flawlessly for more than 300 laps, and a reminder that in NASCAR\u2019s championship format, dominance only matters if it lasts until the checkered flag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Denny Hamlin has endured championship heartbreak before, but never quite like this. After dominating nearly every lap of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,3932,2332,634,103103,43326,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-288187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-denny-hamlin","11":"tag-motorsport-section","12":"tag-nascar","13":"tag-nascar-championship","14":"tag-phoenix-raceway","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}