Denny Hamlin got off to a rough start in the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season, but he found victory lane on Sunday at Richmond Raceway.
Despite a 2021 NASCAR Cup Series regular season that saw him record 13 top five finishes, including eight in the first nine races, it took Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin until the first race of the playoffs to find victory lane.
This season, the three-time Daytona 500 winner got off to a disastrous start. For the first time in 17 Daytona 500 attempts, he failed to finish the “Great American Race”, and through six races, he had finished no higher than 13th place. He sat in 22nd in the point standings.
But on Sunday afternoon at Richmond Raceway, Hamlin turned his season around, becoming the seventh different winner in seven races in 2022.
The win was the 47th of his Cup Series career, breaking a tie for 17th on the all-time list with the late Buck Baker.
However, it brought the 41-year-old Chesterfield, Virginia native one win closer to an unwanted record: most wins in Cup Series history without winning a title.
That record currently belongs to the late Junior Johnson, who earned 50 victories in his Cup Series career. But Johnson never competed full-time; in fact, in only seven of his 14 seasons of competition did he compete in more than half the schedule.
In terms of drivers who competed full-time, no driver has won more races than Hamlin has without winning a title.
Hamlin became the winningest non-champion among full-time drivers during his seven-win 2020 season, which he started with 37 victories. With his third win of the year at Homestead-Miami Speedway, he tied Mark Martin atop the all-time list with 40. He surpassed Martin with win number 41 at Pocono Raceway.
While Hamlin has won a race in 2022, he has not yet officially locked himself into the playoffs, as there could still very well be more than 16 different race winners in the regular season; there are still 19 races to go before the postseason. In that case, the tiebreaker among single-race winners would become points.
Of the seven winners so far, the driver of the #11 Toyota ranks lowest in points; he sits in 20th place in the standings.
