After running Kyle Larson up and into the wall on a late restart, Denny Hamlin was able to drive away on the final restart and earn his second win of the 2023 season, giving him the 50th victory of his Cup Series career and making him the all-time winningest driver at Pocono Raceway. Hamlin's win is the seventh of his Pocono career, moving him out of a tiebreaker he held with Jeff Gordon for the most in track history.
The winning move for Hamlin came on a restart with seven laps to go, when he made an aggressive move on Kyle Larson on the exit of Turn 1. Hamlin ran Larson tight up the racetrack and into the outside wall, completing the pass and angering both Larson and the Pocono crowd.
One more good restart and clean launch gave Hamlin the victory, as the race ended under caution when Ryan Preece spun and stalled on the exit of Turn 2.
HighPoint.com 400 unofficial results
- #11 - Denny Hamlin
- #45 - Tyler Reddick
- #19 - Martin Truex Jr.
- #4 - Kevin Harvick
- #54 - Ty Gibbs (R)
- #20 - Christopher Bell
- #47 - Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- #21 - Harrison Burton
- #43 - Erik Jones
- #9 - Chase Elliott
Hamlin's winning move was reminiscent of the one he put on Ross Chastain at Pocono exactly one year ago, but that one came with the understanding that Hamlin owed Chastain after a series of on-track incidents between the two drivers. This time around, Larson was far less appreciative -- sideswiping Hamlin's car under caution to express his displeasure -- and the crowd greeted Hamlin with a loud chorus of boos as he took the checkered flag.
"Both guys wrecked themselves. There was a lane," Hamlin told NBC Sports. "He missed the corner first, and evidently he didn't have his right side tires clean, and when he gassed up he just kept going again. You have an option in those positions to either hold it wide open and hit the fence, or lift and race it out. Those are choices they made. I didn't hit either one of them. Didn't touch 'em."
Hamlin's opinionated nature -- as perhaps best reflected by his "Actions Detrimental" podcast -- have made him a lightning rod figure within NASCAR, but he and Larson had generally enjoyed a good relationship both on and off the racetrack. Larson, though, acknowledged his displeasure with Hamlin, and he also told NBC Sports that he might have to race him differently from this point onward.
"He's always right. All the buddies know Denny's always right, so I'm sure he was in the right there as well," Larson said. "... I am pissed. And I feel like I should be pissed. I'm sure [if you] tune into 'Actions Detrimental,' he'll have a long clip about it.
"... I've never had to apologize to him about anything. Anything I've done on the racetrack. I can count four or five times where he's had to reach out to me to be like 'Oh man, I'm sorry, I put you in a bad spot there' or whatever. So eventually, like he says, you've got to start racing people a certain way to get the respect back.
"He pulled the same move on Ross last year, which Ross probably deserved it, right? With all the stuff that he's done to Denny in his career. Again, I haven't done that to Denny. So I don't think I deserve to be run into before I ever got to the wall."
Hamlin's 50th career win makes him one of 15 drivers all-time to score 50 Cup Series victories, and it moves him into a tie on the all-time wins list with Hall of Famers Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett. In addition, Hamlin's victory also marked the 600th win for Toyota in NASCAR.
Long Track, Short Tempers
While Pocono's 2.5-mile triangle configuration hardly lends itself to wrecked racecars and angry drivers, several more drivers beyond Kyle Larson were left fuming as a result of some of the 11 yellow flags -- the most in any Pocono race since 2005 -- that flew on Sunday. One of those angry drivers was Austin Dillon, who was sent hard into the Turn 1 wall after a mid-race three-wide battle with Tyler Reddick went awry.
Dillon chose to express his displeasure with Reddick by throwing his helmet at Reddick's No. 45 as it drove by. While Dillon is a former baseball player who made it as far as the Little League World Series, he may have wanted his throw back after a not-so-clean toss led to him grounding his helmet and sending it bouncing up the track.
"I felt like I was holding my own. He was at my left rear going in there," Dillon told NBC Sports. "I knew we were three-wide, I think I've got the right to at least hold my lane. I mean, I've got to turn at some point to get down ... Tyler drove it in there, obviously I feel like he drove it in deep enough where he had to come up the track into me."
While Dillon was forced to leave it at that, his younger brother Ty Dillon chose to express his apparent frustrations another way. Just as the final cycle of green flag pit stops was sorting itself out, a pivotal caution came out with 17 laps to go after Dillon appeared to dump the No. 14 of Chase Briscoe in Turn 3 -- though it's unclear exactly what led to the incident.
And even before Hamlin's incident with Larson, he had gotten on the bad side of another Hendrick Motorsports driver when Alex Bowman spun and crashed out of third late in the race. While replay showed that Bowman spun on his own, his team radio had expressed displeasure with Hamlin believing that he'd spun them -- continuing a series of run-ins the two have had over the past several years.
And as if all of that wasn't enough, the accident that brought out the race-ending caution also led to an incident on pit road after the race, where an angry Ryan Preece confronted Corey LaJoie with some choice words about contact between the two before they were separated.
Bubble Burst
Long before any of the late race drama unfolded, a restart early in the race following the end of Stage 1 would end up having massive consequences in the race for the NASCAR playoffs. After Joey Logano spun in front of traffic entering Turn 1, the ensuing scramble would bring bubble drivers Daniel Suarez, Michael McDowell and Bubba Wallace together, sending Suarez head-on into the outside wall and ending his day.
The accident had disastrous consequences for Suarez, as he went from only a point below the cut line following New Hampshire to 23 points out after a 36th-place finish. Wallace would improve to 26 points above the cut line after earning six stage points and finishing 11th, while a 19th-place finish and Suarez's troubles was good enough to give McDowell a 17-point cushion on AJ Allmendinger for the final playoff spot.
Also gaining ground on the cut line was Ty Gibbs, who is now 28 points out of a playoff spot after earning his career-best finish in fifth. For Gibbs, his best career finish came exactly one year after making his Cup Series debut in 2022, when he was hurriedly tabbed as the substitute driver for Kurt Busch.
Race Results Rundown
- The biggest beneficiaries of the caution with 17 laps to go were Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Harrison Burton and Erik Jones, all of whom had run alternate pit strategies on the final long green flag run and all of whom were able to gain chunks of track position by virtue of having recently pitted. By the checkered flag, all of them earned top-10 finishes. Stenhouse's seventh-place finish marked his first ever top 10 at Pocono, while Burton and Jones got their second and fourth top-10 finishes of the season, respectively.
- Chase Elliott and Todd Gilliland both had to start at the rear of the field after spins in qualifying on Saturday, and both would recover to finish inside the top 15. Elliott's 10th-place finish gave him his eighth top 10 in just 14 races this season, while Gilliland's 15th-place run was his eighth top-15 finish of the year.
- At long last, Noah Gragson had a trouble-free and competitive day. Gragson just missed out on a top-20 finish in 22nd, but that run marks Gragson's first finish better than 25th since all the way back in March at Circuit of the Americas. 22nd ties Gragson's third-best finish of the season overall, which he had previously set at Fontana in February.
- Corey LaJoie should have been a beneficiary of the caution with 17 laps to go, as he was the race leader by virtue of the strategy that he and his team were executing. But when he peeled off to pit road under caution, LaJoie was ruled to have passed the pace car, incurring a one lap penalty from NASCAR. LaJoie would quickly get back on the lead lap, but he was left a disappointing 27th at the checkered flag.
- While it ended up being somewhat overshadowed by his contact with Chase Briscoe, Sunday offered a positive development for Ty Dillon and his team in a year that hasn't featured many. After a spin by Christopher Bell, Dillon was able to finish second in Stage 2, the latest of several instances in his career where Dillon has finished well in a stage by virtue of strategy. He would go on to finish 28th.
Next Race
It's back down south and back to the Commonwealth for the Cup Series next weekend, as they'll make their second trip of the year to Richmond Raceway for the Cook Out 400 next Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on USA Network.
