Pocono Raceway (Long Pond, Pa.) — Denny Hamlin won for the third consecutive week and all from the pole.
And like any competitor, he wondered what could have been after his victory on Sunday at Pocono Raceway, which followed wins at Nashville and Michigan the previous two weeks.
“I’m just thinking, ‘Holy crap, man, we’re three seconds away from having five in a row with Charlotte with the rain [ending the race before I took the lead],’” Hamlin said in his post-race news conference.
Hamlin will take four wins in his last five events, as he won the All-Star Race at Dover the week before the race at Charlotte.
Here are my Pocono takeaways:
1. Denny Gets GOAT Motivation
Hamlin had an emotional few months prior to this season. He lost the 2025 title on a late caution and pit call, his 23XI Racing won a settlement in a brutal trial against NASCAR and his terminally ill father died in a house fire. He said in the preseason that he wasn’t really ready to race and that the season could go either great or awful.
It’s obviously going great. And Hamlin can trace some of it back to a preseason rally for 23XI Racing and something said by team co-owner Michael Jordan.
“I never forget Michael, when he addressed 23X1 in the offseason, he’s like, ‘What I’m interested to see is what does Denny do. Because after what happened in Phoenix, you either pick yourself up and you respond or you fold. We’ll find out,’” said Hamlin, who drives for Joe Gibbs Racing while co-owning 23XI Racing.
“He’s finding out.”
Said Hamlin race team co-owner Heather Gibbs: “He’s a consummate professional. I think for many of us that go through a lot of tough times, being at the racetrack is our home. That’s where we find the most peace and want to be back at the track. That’s normal to him. I think he wanted to be back. He had records to break. He had something to prove. He’s doing it now.”
2. Hamlin Closing In On Reddick
With 10 races left in the regular season, Hamlin — with four points-race victories — has cut Reddick’s lead in the standings to just 19 points. Reddick had five wins early in the year and had more than a 100-point lead.
The regular-season champion starts the 10-race Chase (postseason) with 2,100 points. The runner-up starts with 2,075 points.
Hamlin isn’t as strong as Reddick on road courses and the next two races are on the street course at Naval Base Coroando and the road course at Sonoma Raceway.
“There’s a lot of tracks coming up where we’re both going to be very strong at. It’s just going to be a matter of who puts together the better weekend, really, to close the thing out,” Reddick told me and other reporters after a second-place finish at Pocono.
3. Bell Feels OK
Christopher Bell said his broken left wrist, suffered in a crash last week at Michigan, impacted him some on restarts and when he wanted to make quick maneuvers in the race at Pocono.
Bell was leading until five laps to go, as he tried to stretch fuel until Hamlin caught him. It was a huge roll of the dice and Bell didn’t feel this was a race that slipped away. The JGR driver finished 26th after having to pit for fuel on the white-flag lap.
“My wrist is fine whenever I’m by myself, but certainly in like any sort of adverse conditions, like whenever I banged with [Josh Berry], getting into [Turn] 3 and then that wreck in front of me, I just don’t really have the ability to make sharp quick corrections to the car. … [And] I certainly think it affected my restarts,” Bell told me and other reporters.
Bell said he didn’t have any pain, and he’ll have to see how he is next week on whether he can race the 16-turn street course at Naval Base Coroando.
4. Three Weeks, Three Wrecks For Keselowski
Brad Keselowski has fallen outside the Chase cutoff after three consecutive weeks where his race ended early because of an accident.
At Pocono’s incident, he cleared the initial wreckage as several cars tangled. But then Bubba Wallace and Joey Logano had contact, and Keselowski had nowhere to go to avoid Logano.
“Guys run really stupid races where they’re like three-wide on Lap 5 in a race where the strategy is going to reshuffle the field three more times,” Keselowski told me and other reporters after being released from the infield medical center.
“So you’re just trying not to get caught up in their junk. And I missed the first wave of their junk but not the second. … We just keep digging the hole. I know we have good cars for these last three races, and we didn’t get any results on, so that’s not good.”
4 ½. What’s Next
NASCAR heads to a special one-off event as it conducts a race at Naval Base Coronado. The 16-turn, 3.4-mile street course will be a challenge, as a new event and one with very little room for error.
Shane van Gisbergen, who won the inaugural Chicago street race in his NASCAR debut three years ago, is the prohibitive favorite.