Must be a helluva thing.
You put together one of the better NASCAR careers of anyone in the nearly 80 years of the big-league Cup Series. In fact, of all who came before you, only nine won more races.
And then Kevin Harvick, a few years after retirement and fully settled in as part of the Fox Sports broadcast crew, watches Denny Hamlin punt him right out of the top 10 of all-time Cup winners.
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As he did last October, Hamlin won Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It’s the 61st win of a full-time Cup Series career that began 20 years ago.
So, obviously, it’s the first win after an offseason that redefined bittersweet for the veteran racer.
Denny Hamlin visited Victory Lane for the 61st time in his Cup Series career.
1. Once again, order restored in NASCAR
Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports filled out the entire top five finishers at Las Vegas. Two weeks into a six-week run of bread-and-butter NASCAR oval tracks, no one should be surprised.
Hamlin led the way, as he did more than any driver last year, when he won a series-high six races. The sixth of those wins last season came at Las Vegas, last October. Only seven races have passed since then, and Hamlin assumed he’d be pretty good this past weekend.
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“I don’t know if we’re much different than we were last year, and we won the most races last year,” he told the Fox Sports TV audience.
2. The whole Joe Gibbs stable runs with the lead dogs
Toyota had a great weekend, from qualifying through Sunday’s checkers. But this time it wasn’t the two 23XI frontrunners of Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace, though they hardly went belly-up.
Bubba finished ninth and Tyler 13th. Not bad, but they were hardly the Toyota water-carriers. While the Gibbs’ Toyota team won, that crew also finished fourth (Christopher Bell), fifth (Ty Gibbs) and eighth (Chase Briscoe, who badly needed a decent finish after a horrible start to 2026).
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But let’s focus on Ty Gibbs, whose four-year Cup career has been a bit of a bust after dominating the ARCA and Xfinity Series from 2020-22. After sluggish starts at Daytona and Atlanta, he’s finished fourth, fourth and fifth the past few weeks.
3. NASCAR ‘coming home’ this week. Also: Sebring
From glamor and glitz to clamor and grits. After a weekend in splashy Las Vegas, NASCAR returns to its deep roots next week with three days of racing at Darlington Raceway.
The March 20-22 weekend includes the Truck Series on Friday, O’Reilly on Saturday, and the season’s sixth Cup race with Sunday’s Goodyear 400.
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If you’re inclined to mix in some sports-car action, you’ll have practically all of Saturday to scratch that itch — the 74th edition of IMSA’s Twelve Hours of Sebring begins at 10 a.m.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Denny Hamlin wins NASCAR Las Vegas race | three takeaways
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