By Matthew Thomerson/TheFourthTurn.com

DARLINGTON, SC – Denny Hamlin enters The Chase with all the momentum of a driver who may finally complete his prolonged title quest.

The 20-year NASCAR veteran and 64-time winner in the NASCAR Cup Series is once again in the conversation to win his first Cup crown and trying to prove a change in the points system can lead to a change of luck.

For Hamlin, the 2026 season has proved successful in most aspects, with four wins and top-fives in more than half the races run. All of that regular season success has led to him locking up the number one seed before the finale at Daytona last week.

That’s super important in this revised ‘Chase’ championship format, where the top-16 drivers are seeded numerically with the higher seeds having more points. Hamlin will start with the most, 25 points over second and 100 over 16th. This marks his first time entering the postseason as the first overall seed as well. Hamlin says the key to keeping his advantage falls mainly on two things.

“It’s going to come down to first qualifying, then, then it’s the stages, right,” Hamlin said. “So, there for a while during the summer when we had a lot of stage points, it’s ’cause we were qualifying really well. And I do think that we just went through what I believe was our roughest patch of tracks, and we still have been really, really good. 

“So, if we can just keep our good finishes going, we’re going to continue to be good on the metric. We’re going to continue to qualify well. So I think it’s going to be all about the execution that happens the day before the race that’s going to lead to stage points.” 

Another point in Hamlin’s favor is that he is one of two drivers in The Chase who competed in the old iterations of the format, along with Joey Logano. This could pose an advantage for a veteran driver like Hamlin with prior knowledge of how to be good over 10 straight weeks.

It will be a little different with the advent of stage points, though, something the driver of the No.11 Toyota Camry says differentiates this format from the past, as now a driver can make up extra ground even with a bad finish if they get enough points in the stages.

“It is a little different this time around because we have stages and we have more points for winning than the last time we had the Chase,” Hamlin said. “I do think that there’s an opportunity for drivers to make up more points than we had in the past. So, generally, I don’t know that my tenure and experience is necessarily an advantage other than when we see when we go from track to track. I’ve just got a lot of starts at each one of these tracks.” 

Not only does he have plenty of starts at each track in The Chase, but he’s the only driver of the 16 with prior wins at all of them, and none more successful than Darlington Raceway.

With five victories and an average finish of eighth (best all-time among drivers with multiple starts), it would seem that this weekend is the perfect starting point to make an early statement for the No.11 Toyota team. When describing Darlington, one could say it’s a pure driver’s track, and it’s also intense, having to be on the edge near the wall almost every lap.

That may as well describe the entire next 70 days, or 10 weeks ahead. The first few races will definitely begin to separate the contenders from pretenders, and it will be hard to hide if something goes wrong early. Hamlin certainly knows the intensity the field is about to experience.

“I remember very early on there was only 10 of us on the stage and then it got bigger, and the family got bigger,” Hamlin said. “I remember it and I certainly remember how we approached it as a race team. How you apply that to today’s format in terms of stages and stuff like that is a little bit different. But certainly, there’s some experience to be had there with myself and (Joey) Logano is the only one that’s been through it, to know that this is a long, long journey we’re about to go on.” 

Hamlin and the rest of the Chase field will do battle at Darlington Raceway in the CookOut Southern 500, with the live broadcast on the USA Network at 5 p.m. ET Sunday.

Photo Credit: Hunter Thomas/TheFourthTurn.com