Letarte said on NASCAR Inside the Race<\/a> following Sunday\u2019s race at Las Vegas, which Hamlin won, his series-leading sixth win of the season. \u201cHe might not win the most popular driver vote, but there\u2019s zero doubt in my mind who the biggest star in the NASCAR garage is. And it\u2019s not even close at that point.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s what makes stardom. And what I mean by that is you can say it\u2019s because he owns a team with Michael Jordan (23XI Racing). You can say it\u2019s because he has his podcast, but what is the exclamation point for stardom is that you are the best at what you should be the best at, and that is him as a race car driver.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to be a star if you\u2019re just okay. So in my mind, like he has the \u2018it\u2019 factor for the garage for me, right? He flies around in jets, he\u2019s not afraid to say flies around in jets. He wears a jump man (Jordan\u2019s Nike logo) on his firesuit and he owns a race team with the guy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hamlin is celebrating his 21st year in NASCAR Cup. He\u2019s won 60 races, virtually every big race on the schedule \u2013 including the Daytona 500 three times \u2013 but he\u2019s still chasing his biggest goal, that of winning the Cup championship. With the way he\u2019s going thus far this season, this very well may be the year for Hamlin to achieve that accomplishment.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018I\u2019m okay that fans don\u2019t like him,\u201d Letarte said. \u201c(Hamlin is) polarizing, I think that\u2019s a great word, right? And I think that he gets an emotional reaction from everyone in opposite directions for some, but from everyone. That\u2019s what any sport needs. That\u2019s what NASCAR needs. And I\u2019m glad somebody is doing it on and off the racetrack. Man, everywhere you turn, it\u2019s Denny Hamlin.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Denny Hamlin may not ever win the Most Popular Driver Award in NASCAR, but in veteran crew chief…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[11050,425,99,115859],"class_list":["post-230561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-denny-hamlin","tag-nascar","tag-sports","tag-steve-letarte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}