Hamlin, a five-time race winner at his home track, Richmond Raceway, is the last driver to win here from pole position \u2013 claiming the win from the number one starting spot in 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked Friday why the Busch Light Pole Winner has so seldom won the race recently, Hamlin paused and gave a well-thought-out answer about his hometown .75-mile oval.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the average starting position for the winner is somewhere around 6.7, something like that,\u2019\u2019 said Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. \u201cSo you just kind of put yourself somewhere in that range. I think a lot of the reason is that qualifying here is extremely, extremely technical.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say it\u2019s probably the hardest [track] to qualify to hit your marks. \u2026 I think that sometimes whoever\u2019s got the best car doesn\u2019t qualify on the pole because it\u2019s just really, really difficult to put it all together, and sometimes someone with a decent car can just hit the marks just right, and that\u2019s when they get the pole. So, I think the technicality of the actual line that you have to run makes it to where you see comers and goers here.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 37 starts, Hamlin has an amazing 8.9 starting position and has earned four career poles, the last in 2024 when he finished runner-up in the race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hamlin, a five-time race winner at his home track, Richmond Raceway, is the last driver to win here…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-858361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858361","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=858361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}