Denny Hamlin’s pursuit of Kyle Larson is one race at a time

For the most part, there is very little Denny Hamlin can do about Kyle Larson opening the Chase for the Championship with a 2.2 average finish.

Sure, he gave away roughly 15 to 20 points last week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 team has done more to take the championship lead away than the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 team has done to lose it.

So as far as Hamlin is concerned, the final five races comes down to chipping away one stage at a time, and trying his best to be as perfect as Larson has been in the first half of this 10-race gauntlet.

“The way I see it, if I win five in a row, we’re going to be the champions,” Hamlin said on Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “I can’t win five in a row unless I win one in a row, so I have to focus on one first and go from there.

“We can’t control what the 5 team does. We have put together a great 30 races or so but we’re going to need to perform a little bit better if we’re going to overtake those guys, especially with the performance they’ve had. All we can do is control our own outcome and that’s something I don’t think we did a good job of that last week. That has to be our focus.”

Last week, Hamlin controlled the race during the first two runs, but lost track position by pitting after a caution when they could have stayed on track and trapped Larson a lap down. Hamlin was running fourth on fresher tires and chasing the leaders but spun in the marbles and damaged his splitter.

Larson only scored a single stage point but came back to finish second and it turned into the biggest points swing of the playoffs between them.

“And those other four races, that’s kind of what we had for speed,” Hamlin said of races where he’s largely been a top-5 car but no better. “Darlington was one where we left some points out there but again, I cannot go back and undo those races.

“I can only focus on winning Charlotte and doing whatever it takes to get that done.”

Hamlin has already overcome one hot start by a rival, erasing a 100 point deficit to Tyler Reddick over 10 races in the regular season. He did it by winning races.

“I think that we know it can be done,” Hamlin said. “Yeah, it’s a 10 race season and we got a little head start to that, but it’s a new season. What happened in the first 25 don’t matter when it comes down to these playoffs. And so, I think that anything is possible and if we go win, we’ll take care of the rest.”