MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Growing up in Chesterfield, Va., Denny Hamlin dreamed of having one of Martinsville Speedway’s grandfather clock trophies to put in the house he grew up in.
On Sunday, that dream came true for Hamlin.
“I don’t have a place (for it), but I’ll probably put it back home in Virginia — that’s where it belongs. Probably in the house I grew up in. I remember sitting there many times wondering if I would ever get one. Now that I have one, I will be putting it there.”
Hamlin’s victory in the Goody’s Cool Orange 500 at Martinsville ended a personal streak of bad luck that dates back to the Daytona 500, and it did a lot to ease his mind.
“It’s been difficult,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard to be patient. When you get so close to winning so many races and something bad happens or, you know, things just don’t work out in your favor at the end and you end up losing a win, it’s tough to maintain confidence. It’s tough — your self-esteem starts going down. It takes its toll on you — last week was just like, ‘how many times do we have to go through this?’
“Because the previous week in Atlanta I felt like, you know, as we got to second behind Kyle (Busch), we had power-steering issues. So I felt like we had a chance to probably win three in a row here, but just the first two races just had a lot of problems.”
Hamlin had chances to win in Atlanta and again the following week at Bristol, but power-steering and fuel pickup issues caught him out. Heading into Texas, Hamlin has momentum on his side for once, but he’s taking it one race at a time.
“You definitely start to have doubts. When things don’t go your way and you hear it from the veterans that have been around the sport for 10, 20 years, if you just keep having fast race cars eventually it’s all going to turn around. This bad luck’s been happening, seems like, for over a year. When the Car of Tomorrow first came out at the beginning of last year, we had a position to win five or six races easily and just things never worked out for us.”
Sunday’s victory at Martinsville was an icebreaker in many ways, coming as it did in front of a home-state crowd. Many were wearing Hamlin’s FedEx gear, too. He said it was the biggest victory of his young career.
“Without a doubt, and to see all my fans here wearing my gear in the stands — that means a lot to me,” he said. “A lot of these people traveled from my home town to come watch me race here. For these fans sticking it out — it’s amazing to have the support that we have from these race fans. They are the reason that we’re here — to weather through it one way or another. This whole FedEx team did a great job getting me off pit road when it counted. We just got it all together finally.”
He nearly had it come undone again, pitting out of the lead early in the race — alone.
“A dumb driver mistake pitting when we were leading right there — I thought more guys were going to pit behind me, but we motored back to the front. We didn’t do it with any help from cautions or anything like that — just bided our time. We made some great adjustments on the car — this was definitely not a race-winning car when we started this race, but Mike Ford (crew chief) did a great job adjusting on it and everyone on this team for not giving up — finally back in victory lane.”