Good to the last drop: Hamlin wins Michigan fuel mileage thriller

Denny Hamlin couldn’t help himself. He brought it back after winning the NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway on Sunday afternoon.

“Daddy, I’m sorry, but I beat your favorite driver, folks.”
Who?
“All of them.”

At the behest of his father last year, Hamlin promised to stop using a catchphrase that drew the ire of so many fans following his victory in the 2023 Bristol Night Race, cementing himself as one of the top heels of the division.

But he couldn’t be constrained after winning for the third time this season, the 57th of his career, and in his 701st start no less.

Never change, @dennyhamlin. 😂 pic.twitter.com/BJFwUrBtd6

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 8, 2025

“Yeah, no, I thought about saying it a few other times,” Hamlin said after the race. With my dad… This one, son knows best. Just going to have to live with it.”

It’s no secret that the elder Hamlin has been fighting a variety of health issues. It’s also no secret that the younger Hamlin wants to win that elusive Cup Series championship and be able to celebrate it with his dad.

He’s about to become a first-time ‘boy dad’ anytime now too.

Hamlin has said for years that ‘talking shit is my superpower’ and the 44-year-old just dipped into his longstanding reservoir.

“I was a little disappointed with my burnout,” Hamlin said. “I promised my friends in Turn 3 and 4 that I would do a burnout after we won today. I went out and hung out with them earlier this morning, took a picture with them. They had their 11 flag up on the bus. They asked me if I minded doing a burnout in front of their bus after I won.

“I said after I won, ‘No problem, I got you’ but I had to cut the frontstretch burnout kind of short. I was nearly out of the gas.”

And that was the story of the race, that virtually everyone up front ran out of gas either coming to the checkered flag or after taking it. Hamlin didn’t think his No. 11 team was going to win this race but fortune disguised as misfortune got them to the finish.

“It’s a little slower stop on the last one,” Hamlin said. “I think I restarted around 12th on that last restart. Just picked ’em off one by one. I just tried my best.

“That was not the best my car was handling on that last run. I thought we were going to be a little limited by traffic. The way our car was, we had some damage on the right side of our car from the pit road incident on that last stop. Things were not optimized, to say the least.

“But we just were very beneficial of some guys running less than 100 percent up front until we got there, then they raced 100 percent. I just worked over the guys one by one. Tried to give ’em so many different looks to surprise ’em entering the corner.”

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It was a slower stop because the jack on the left side was a little slow. It happens. But leaving pit road, crew chief Chris Gayle knew they were four laps or so to the good and would be in a position to run the leaders out of gas.

Carson Hocevar, William Byron and Kyle Larson were having to run partial throttle having taken less fuel. Hocevar was the leader and burned the most fuel. A flat left rear eliminated him from contention but he was told he was going to run out even before that and that they needed a caution.

That allowed Byron to assume the lead but that was disadvantageous from a fuel efficiency standpoint too. 

Hamlin was coming, running full-throttle, and he was going to force them to either race him and hope for a caution that never came or concede the track position and limp to the finish.

“There’s two outcomes, right,” Gayle said. “You’re going to push from the beginning, if you know your own fuel, once you catch them. They’re going to decide they’re going to let you go because they need to save enough fuel to make, then you’re in the lead. I thought we were good on fuel.

“If we would have gotten the lead earlier, we would have maintained the gap and saved fuel at that point. Or you’re going to push, they’re not going to give you the lead, you’re going to run them out. Either way it works out in your favor.”

It did.

And Hamlin is going to once again talk his shit as the benefactor.

“It’s a lot of fun for me,” Hamlin said. “I love making people feel a certain way. Positive or negative, I do not care. All the fans that I’ve been face to face with have been very respectful. What they say outside on the other side of the fence, free rein. Do whatever you want to do, say whatever you want to say. They’ve been very respectful in the small arena.

“I do have a lot of fun with it. I do thrive on it just simply because you feel like you’ve got 60,000 people that are rooting against you. When you have that, it just feels really, really good and gratifying to prove them wrong.

“I love that feeling. It makes these wins more gratifying to me.”

How it was lost

In all actuality, Hocevar and Byron especially were in a no-win scenario. The leading car burns the most fuel because it has nothing to draft with. It faces the most friction against the air. Hocevar needed a caution and that was before his left rear came apart.

“It was going to be near impossible to save four laps around here with how fast you’re going,” Hocevar told Bob Pockrass of FOX Sports after the race. “We weren’t saving to make it to the end (at the end) but we were saving to keep our pit stop as short as possible if we got that yellow.

“We were doing everything we could.”

The math didn’t math for Byron either.

“We needed one and a half more laps of fuel,” Byron also told FOX. “We probably saved three quarters of a lap, I guess. I don’t know. It was hard to save enough obviously and keep the lead. It drew (Denny) in.

“He could just run hard. He didn’t have to worry about a fuel. He got me, for sure, but I was going to run out so yeah …”

Larson’s best case scenario was that he could save enough while Hocevar and Byron ran out of fuel. That happened. But he also needed to be fast enough to fend off Hamlin while also still saving fuel. That didn’t happen.

“Early in the run, I was actually surprised with how easy it was to save fuel and kind of stay attached to (Hocevar) and (Byron). I thought I was in good shape there and I was hopeful that I had a big enough gap from the group behind us that maybe we could maintain that gap; those guys would run out of fuel in front of me and we could win.

“But they were charging hard and my balance wasn’t very good. I really faded there with 12 laps or so to go, so because of the balance being bad, I could save more fuel naturally. I just kind of had to nurse it home from there.”

Baby watch

Denny Hamlin and fiancé Jordan Fish have been expecting their first son, imminently, for two weeks now.

In fact, Ryan Truex has served as the standby driver for both Nashville last week and Michigan on Sunday. If Joe Gibbs Racing found out that Fish was going into labor during the race, they would call Hamlin down pit road for a driver swap, unless it was the final 50 laps.

“If it was after, I thought that by the time she gets her shit together and gets to the hospital, all that stuff,” Hamlin said. “You just never how it all turns out. But I think I can make it as long as I had a three-hour window. If it’s after lap 50, it’s going to take me four.

“I felt decent enough about it. We had to set some sort of cutoff of whether I was going to finish or not. So I was very nervous last night and then this morning to, like, getting the call because I knew I had a race-winning car after yesterday.”

Hamlin also conceded nervousness because at 44-years-old, even in a season where he’s won three times already, he doesn’t know when the competitive light switch might turn off. It could be any week or any season.

He wants that championship but also to reach 60 wins. So why don’t they schedule a C-section? Fish wants a natural childbirth.

“I don’t know, you just got to let her decide in these situations,” Hamlin said. “If it causes me to miss a race, it’s one of 701 races that I missed and it’s just not that big of a deal.”

They already have two daughters — Taylor and Molly so Hamlin knows what his role is once the time comes.

“I’ve been in the room before, and she needs something really hard to grab onto and my hand is perfect for it,” Hamlin said. “I’m definitely going to be there this week – hopefully – to hold her hand.”

And he really hopes it’s Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or early Thursday because it’s going to be much harder to get into and out of Mexico City, where the next race will be held.

They also don’t have a name picked yet.

“I don’t know,” Hamlin said. “I mean, we obviously had this app that is essentially swipe left and swipe right on names. You match names that you both liked. It pops up. It is like, ‘Oh, she liked it and you liked it.’

“Right now, we have, I don’t know, 13 to 15 names that we’ve matched. I have one that I was hung up on like right from the beginning. It’s interesting, she did give me the option — you either get to schedule this or you get to have the name. Which one? You can’t have both.”

Hamlin said he chose naming rights and maybe something related to this victory at Michigan makes the cut.

“So, she’s getting it her way, then hopefully I have things my way after it’s all said and done,” Hamlin said. “But it’s a great point that does something from today get in there somewhere? That’s a good thought.”

Hit after hit

The hits, both figurative and literal, keep coming for Alex Bowman.

The Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 was already struggling in 29th with an ill-handling race car when Bowman was collected in an incident between Austin Cindric and Cole Custer on Lap 67.

“It’s a bummer. We shouldn’t be back there to put ourselves in that situation,” Bowman said. “Same thing I said at Texas. But unfortunately, when you’re back there, you kind of just open the door for stuff like that to happen, and we’re better than that. We should have been in a better spot, but we weren’t and then that happened.”

Contact between the two sent Bowman nose-first into the Turn 2 SAFER Barrier, the 180 mph contact lifting the car off the ground and slamming on all four wheels. Bowman climbed out of the car with his own power but conceded this was amongst the worst hits he has taken.

And he has suffered concussions and a broken back from previous hits.

“I mean, I feel okay. It was the biggest hit I’ve ever taken in a stock car by a mile, but head-on into the wall at Michigan, it’s gonna be that way,” Bowman said. “So yeah, just try to go get them next week.”

Bowman finished 36th and it was the seventh time in nine races that he has finished outside of the top-25. It is also his third DNF during that stretch, two for crashes and one for a blown engine.

As a result, he now sits just 13 points above the current playoff cutline.

“You got any good ideas?” Bowman said about this stretch. “Because I’ll take what I can get at this point for luck-changer ideas. But yeah, it’s unfortunate, right? A lot of those races were really good runs. I would say Texas and Kansas, we were plenty capable of winning before we got damage. Charlotte was my fault. Nashville was my fault. This week, not much we can do.”

Results

Provisional Playoff Grid

Kyle Larson WWW
Denny Hamlin WWW
Christopher Bell WWW
William Byron W
Ryan Blaney W
Ross Chastain W
Joey Logano W
Austin Cindric W
Josh Berry W
Chase Elliott +142
Tyler Reddick +138
Bubba Wallace +61
Chase Briscoe +41
Chris Buescher +20
Alex Bowman +13
Ryan Preece +0
—
Kyle Busch -0
Carson Hocevar -18
AJ Allmendinger -18
Ricky Stenhouse -20
Erik Jones -36
Zane Smith -37
Michael McDowell -37
Ty Gibbs -52
John Hunter Nemechek -52
Austin Dillon -52
Todd Gilliland -57
Daniel Suarez -68
Justin Haley -88
Ty Dillon -90
Noah Gragson -98
Brad Keselowski -101
Shane Van Gisbergen -130
Riley Herbst -137
Cole Custer -147

RIP Pit Road squirrel