Eleven Things You Need to Know About Hamlin
Matt Crossman - SportingNews.com
Sep 16, 2010
Denny Hamlin arrives at a restaurant in suburban Charlotte wearing camouflage cargo shorts, a white T-shirt and a baseball hat that says "Butter," which represents the name of a nightclub he co-owns, not an affinity for dairy products. More notable than his lazy-day summer get-up is his stride -- it's normal. No limp.
Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 Toyota, is five months removed from surgery to repair a torn ligament in his left knee. He didn't miss a race and has racked up five wins in the first 15 events, including four after surgery. "We all thought it might slow him down a little bit," 2004 series champion Kurt Busch says. "It seems to have done the exact opposite."
As the Chase starts, questions about Hamlin's knee are in the rearview mirror. But a new one looms out the windshield: Can Hamlin -- the preseason favorite to finally, mercifully, unseat Jimmie Johnson -- find enough consistency to win the Cup? That's the key question -- and nobody, not even Hamlin, can answer.
A Hamlin championship would be popular solely because it would mean Johnson didn't win his fifth straight title. But it would resonate with fans for other reasons, too. Hamlin has the back story NASCAR fans love: talented nobody from nowhere fights his way to the top by racing on nothing tracks for nothing purses. And he has an edge to him, too. He is not one of the shiny corporate spokesm en who have taken over the sport. Eleven things you need to know about the driver of the No. 11 car:
1. "Ever since he could talk," says his mom, Mary Lou Hamlin, "if you asked him what do you want to do when you grow up, he'd always say, 'I'm going to be a racecar driver.' "
He watched every NASCAR race on television with his dad. As Mary Lou cooked dinner, Denny raced die cast cars across the counter. Bill Elliott won every race ever run in the Hamlin kitchen.
"He had a Big Wheel when he was little," Mary Lou says. "He never sat in it like you're supposed to and pedaled it because it wasn't going fast enough. He would push that thing everywhere, on a track that he made or up and down the driveway, to make it go faster."
2. He ran his first race at age 7, in a go-kart. "I tried to explain to him, this is the gas, this is the brake," says his dad, Big Denny Hamlin. "These are the flags and what they do. He won the first race he ever drove the thing. And he must've driven 20 extra laps after the checkered flag. He was having such a good time he wasn't going to stop. It took about 20 daddies to stop him."
3. Racecars replaced the go-kart, and Big Denny and Mary Lou took out second and third mortgages on their home in Chesterfield, Va., to finance their son's career.
After Denny started making millions in NASCAR, he began paying them back. "Denny pulled up in the driveway one day at home back in Virginia," Big Denny says. "He said, 'You're done.' I said, 'I'm done what?' He said, 'You're done.' He said, 'You sell your business ; here's the keys to your new house. You're going to North Carolina.' I said, 'I'm not going anydarn- where.' He said, 'Yes, you are, too.' "
4. Hamlin won at Martinsville in March with a bulldozing run from ninth to the checkered flag in the closing laps. That's a newfound skill for him, one he discovered at Pocono last year. His grandmother had just died, and he barreled through the field because he desperately wanted to dedicate a victory to her. "He learned there's another 5 percent there that he could get," says his crew chief, Mike Ford. "There were a lot of races where he would be leading and get shuffled out at the end. I know that weighed on him. He wanted to be a guy who could step up and close the deal." There's more to his late-race surges than knuckling down. Hamlin is better prepared physically, too. Last year, he passed out in the shower after a race at Darlington. "Bam, down I went," he says. "I was so dehydrated, so out of it."
He started wearing a heart rate monitor during races because he wanted to know what was happening and fix it. He attached the monitor display -- essentially the face of a watch -- to the center spoke of his steering wheel. It showed a consistent pattern: His pulse would be about 130 at the start of the race, drop to 110 during cautions, jump to 160 as the race neared its end and spike to 180 on the last green flag run. The highest he saw: 186.
Hamlin changed his diet and the way he hydrated before and during races. The changes started to work -- his heart rate would still jump at the end of races but not nearly as much. His pulse slowed, but he drove faster.
NASCAR keeps track of how many positions a driver improves in the last 10 percent of each race. In the 126 races Hamlin ran up to and including the race at Darlington after which he passed out, he ranked 90th in total positions improved over the last 10 percent . In the 49 races after that, he rank ed first. If he learns to close a season like he learned to close races, he will win the championship.
5. Hamlin says his knee rehab, which is down to one day a week now, was brutal. And not just on him: "He'll kill me if he hears me tell you this," Big Denny says. "I was in his recovery room. He was all drugged up from the surgery. He reached around and patted me on the back. He hugged me and said, 'Daddy … .' I said, 'Daddy? Where do you get this Daddy stuff?' Just usually it's Dad. He said, 'Would you come home with me and stay with me two or three days and make sure I'm OK?' I said, 'Son, if that's what you want Daddy to do, that's what Daddy's going to do.' "
Sounds sweet, doesn't it? "He ran me ragged. I got one of those battery-operated doorbells. I gave him the button. Every time I laid down on the couch to take a nap, that dang thing would ring. He wanted a drink of water or he wanted this. Man, what a nightmare."
6. "He was having trouble in school with math. His teacher kept calling me. We'd go down there, and we'd talk. Finally she called me one day and she said, 'You know what, Mr. Hamlin? I figured it out,' " Big Denny says. "She said, 'I put it in different terms.' I said, 'Like what?' She said, 'Well, I would tell him if you have a mile track and you have 10 gallons of gas and you get so many miles per gallon, how many laps could you make?' And then he knew. I said, 'You've got to be joking.' "
7. Hamlin once was NASCAR's best tweeter. Example: He predicted LeBron James would sign with the Miami Heat, adding later that he had heard the news from Michael Jordan on the golf course. But in July, NASCAR fined him $50,000 for disparaging tweets about NASCAR, and his once-vibrant postings have since gone stale.
8. Let's go back to lunch. Hamlin's eyes dart to a replay of the previous weekend's race on the television. He finished second in it but took no joy from it because it was a distant second. He now seems resigned to a similar fate in the Chase -- he'll be good but not good enough. There might be some gamesmanship here -- none of the top contenders will admit to being the top contender. However real it is, the apprehension with which he is ending the regular season is a far cry from the confidence with which he started it.
"I make mistakes sometimes, but a lot of it is (expletive) breaks on stuff. We had two blown engines in the Chase last year. Give me those back, give me an eighth-place finish, and we win the championship," he says.
He also points out a wreck during last year's Chase that was his fault. "That's the only thing that worries me -- reliability. If we can just be reliable, then I feel like we'll be OK. Our performance is good enough that we can run with them."
9. Most young hotshot racers tick off veterans by overdriving. Not so with Hamlin. Now in his fifth full season, his reputation among fellow drivers is that he races cleanly and fairly. Jimmie Johnson: "He knows how to race his own races. He'll push when it's time; he's smart when it's time. He doesn't make a lot of mistakes."
Matt Kenseth: "Racing against him, he doesn't make a lot of noise, which is a good thing, a compliment. He doesn't do anything dumb to take himself out of races."
Jeff Burton: "They've been fast for years. They continue to be fast. But I think this year, every time they've put themselves in position, they've executed."
Ryan Newman: "They've got some really fast race cars. I don't think Denny all of a sudden became a great racecar driver. He's usually just there. He's not flamboyant."
10. Most drivers, when they are trying to describe to their crew chiefs the handling of their cars, will use a scale of 1 to 10. Hamlin did that at first, too, but soon started goofing around with it. He has settled on 3/16ths loose (or tight) as the harshest insult he can pay upon one of his cars.
Ford, Hamlin's crew chief, says it's tough to discern by watching Hamlin whether his car is 3/16ths loose or 3/16ths tight or deadnuts on. Teammate Kyle Busch's car swerves around like he's being attacked by a raccoon, but Hamlin's car never gets squirrelly because he catches it before it gets out of control. "His hands to his ( expletive) are tied together very well," Ford says. "He knows where he wants that combination. Anything other than that, he's going to change the inputs" -- meaning turn the wheel, accelerate and/or brake -- "to keep it at that combination."
11. Hamlin is young and rich and lives like it. He co-owns a nightclub and frequently sits courtside for Charlotte Bobcats games. He is dating a former Bobcats dancer. He owns a 10,000-square-foot house north of Charlotte, where his neighbor is his team owner, Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe Gibbs.
"Denny had a few parties," says J.D. Gibbs, Joe's son and Denny's boss as president of Joe Gibbs Racing. "My mom told my dad, 'That's way too loud. You've got to go talk to Denny.' My dad said, 'I'm not going over there.' So she went over there the next morning, knocked on the door. Denny answered. She said, 'Denny, give me your number. The next time you have a party you're getting a call. From me.'
"He said, 'I'm so sorry, Mrs. Gibbs, the pool speakers were on; it was late.' Sure enough, a few weeks go by, my mom hears the buh-bum-buh-bum, music blasting. She calls Denny right away. He said, 'Mrs. Gibbs, I'm not even home.' She goes downstairs to her pool area. It was her music. She didn't tell Denny that. She just said, 'Never mind, I've got it taken care of,' and hung up."
This story first appeared in the Sept. 13 edition of Sporting News magazine. If you are not receiving the magazine, subscribe today, or pick up a copy, available at most Barnes & Noble, Borders and Hudson Retail outlets.
----
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion
Copyright 2012 by SportingNews.com
