Historically, Denny Hamlin is one of the all-time greats at superspeedway racing even if the four years of racing the NextGen car has not been good to him.
With that said, he is more than qualified to talk about what Ryan Blaney did so well in winning the race at Daytona on Saturday night, coming from 13th to 1st in just two laps. His race craft commentary was issued on Sunday’s episode of the Actions Detrimental podcast.
“He was masterful in being patient,” Hamlin said. “What I saw was he was very patient and if you notice, he didn’t make a whole lot of moves. He allowed others to make moves and then he just held steady.
“He knows who his help is. His spotter’s doing a good job telling him who’s behind him. At the time I think it was the 99 that was pushing him. He seemed pretty committed to him, so he wasn’t one of those guys weaving between lanes and all this other stuff. He just was very patient in saying, ‘The top line is going to prevail here, so I’m going to stay in it.’ And as people start to get toward the front, they’re peeling off to block and it’s just moving him up the queue of that line.”
The likes of Erik Jones and Ryan Preece had opportunities to win as well but were each shucked out of the groove by Kyle Larson, who needed to prevent a new winner for the sake of teammate Alex Bowman’s playoff spot.
Blaney capitalized on each losing the front of the pack.
“At some point he’s probably, what, fifth on the outside line?” Hamlin said. “Well the leader just keeps pulling down, a new guy comes up front. He takes the lead, he pulls down, new guy. So he keeps moving up the queue as the laps go on. And then on the last lap, he just got the great push, he moved up.
“It was very timely and good heads up of him and his spotter to, off of Turn 4, move up in front of that top line. Because it looked like, at that time, who was on the bottom? Cole Custer off of Turn 4, I believe Cole Custer was to his inside. I thought he was going to have more help, but his help kind of died and the top lane was coming and Blaney was like, ‘I’m going to go back to the well.’ And that’s what got him pushed out to the front.”
Hamlin said there was a subtle art to what Blaney did working his way to the front. He recognized it from experience.
“While you’re 13th, you’re only actually a half a second from the lead,” Hamlin said. “It’s not that big, but still you have to, as a driver, and where Blaney was impressive, is using his skill set to know push them out and then let them make a decision, and then I’ll figure out whether that decision is the right one or not, and I might go with you and I might not.
“So that’s where I found I got much better at superspeedway racing 10, 15 years ago. It’s that not necessarily having to be the one to make the move, but pushing someone else to make them make a choice, and then you have time to process whether that choice was right or not.”
