Denny Hamlin returned from a tumultuous off-season by scoring an eventful top-5 in the Cookout Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium on Wednesday night.
Like much of the field, it wasn’t pretty, and Hamlin survived the chaos better than his peers more than anything else, but it was a top-5. He did it in his first race this season in which he will have to start nursing a re-injured surgically repaired shoulder until the season ends in November.
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All things considered, it went well.
“The rust was real, especially the first 160, but as it started drying out there, we started to get a lot better,” Hamlin told Motorsport.com after the race. “I was like a monkey fucking a football for the first part of that race in the wet, but started to get better, but it was a good warmup overall – just a decent warmup and now it’s time to lock in for the season.”
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His crew chief, Chris Gayle, says he has complete confidence that Hamlin will be in the headspace to compete at the highest level.
“Oh, for sure,” Gayle told Motorsport.com. “I think he’ll get there a hundred percent. I have the utmost faith that that’ll happen. Obviously yes, he’s had a tremendous up-and-down off-season, right? Like it’s just remarkable the things he’s had to kind of endure and go through.
“So I think it’ll just take some time to get there, right? The Clash, I think for all of us, we knocked the rust off a little bit. You sit down for three months, and it’s a unique format, it’s hard to get fully back where you need to be in one event.”
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The up-and-down for Hamlin is well-documented in that he suffered a gut-punch championship race at November at Phoenix, but earned a positive outcome in his lawsuit against NASCAR on behalf of 23XI Racing alongside Front Row Motorsports, but then lost his father in a house fire in December.
Gayle says he’s made himself available to Hamlin but also trusts him to do what he needed to do this past month.
“Yeah, I honestly, I just let him do his own thing and reach out when he needs, send a text here or there but I don’t get too involved,” Gayle added. “I’ll send a text here or there, but I don’t get that involved in it. And you know, the few conversations we’ve had, it’s been if you need or want to talk, we can but we keep it professional.
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“We’ve mostly done our own things and that’s okay. Now, as we get back to the track and are going through some things, that might change a little bit, but I let him handle his own things and he’s mature enough to handle it.”
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