Denny Hamlin at NASCAR Awards: ‘It was a good season, a great season. Almost a perfect one.’

PHOENIX — Tuesday’s NASCAR Awards banquet and media availability was another step of Denny Hamlin processing one of the most heartbreaking NASCAR Cup Series championship losses in recent memory.

“It was a good season. It was a great season. Almost a perfect one,” Hamlin said on stage at Tuesday night’s NASCAR Awards banquet.

Hamlin received a standing ovation after speaking and summing up the loss just hours after talking about it for the first time since Sunday.

• “Denny how are you doing?”
• “(laughs) About like you’d think.”

Hamlin raised questions about his future Sunday after saying, “I never want to race a car ever again,” after the race. Although he said the loss “cut deep,” he laid out a clearer path forward from it.

“I plan to [race in 2026], I have a contract to,” Hamlin said. “At this point, there’s just absolutely no way I don’t think about a racecar right now. I’m going to need some time right now… I’ll get over it, it’ll just take a minute.”

A minute or two — over a couple of days — allowed Hamlin to appreciate the race.

“There’s not a whole lot of second guessing… I feel like I did exactly what the format asked me to and still didn’t do it right,” he said. “They [Joe Gibbs Racing] did a really good job to prepare me a good car and give me the tools to succeed. I’ve been there in other years past where we haven’t been fast enough.”

JGR has also been through this scenario before.

Similar to Hamlin, Edwards led the 2016 championship race in the closing laps and had the championship locked up before a caution in the closing laps.

“To use Carl Edwards’ words, I knew what it felt like to be a champion. With a few laps to go, I knew it was over. I don’t have the trophy… but I did everything I could,” he said.

Like Edwards, Hamlin expressed how he couldn’t imagine going through moments like seeing Kyle Larson pass him by in overtime of an almost-perfect race like Sunday.

“Where I feel like I’ve gotten better is to move on to the next thing but I just can’t imagine having to go through the process of going through that race all over again,” he said.

Unlike Edwards, who stepped away not long after NASCAR overhauled the playoff format but kept the one-race championship in 2017, the prospect of going through that race again is unlikely for Hamlin. NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell said 2025 was likely the last year for the one-race championship.

Hamlin has been outspoken about his disdain for the format. It required him to lock in and prepare to run the perfect race — only for it to come down to overtime. 

“At Phoenix, I changed my driving style and changed my habits… I went to bed with halos in my eyes after looking at screens and data… I feel like there’s so much freed up time that it was taking up, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

Hamlin said he is only going to spend more time with family, including his kids who were in tears over the loss that felt so sudden and so unfair to them — compared to other people.

“When I walk in the bus and see my mom and give her a hug the first time, she’s just essentially the same I was post-race. She was in shock as well but was like, ‘it wasn’t meant to be’,” Hamlin said. “If they have strong emotions one way or another, that funnels into me but they do a good job of being pretty level.”

Hamlin’s parents are everything to him, including a role model for how he approaches kids. The kismet of his mom and the steadfast faith of his dad — the pair who mortgaged their home to make sure their son could even think about racing in NASCAR — was what Hamlin needed after Sunday.

“I saw they didn’t let it bother them too much so I modeled myself after them for my kids,” Hamlin said. “[So] Once I saw my mom and talked to my dad, I engaged with my kids.”

Hamlin’s kids also got to see him graciously celebrate his friend, Cup champion Kyle Larson.

“I would’ve hoped he would’ve done that for me. I hate for him that kind of the attention is shifted a little bit away from his championship… There shouldn’t be one person who questions the deserving-ness of his championship,” he said. “He’s a great friend. If it couldn’t be me, I’m glad it’s him.”

Larson also expressed a similar respect. After 28 straight weeks and 38 overall on the road each year, from Mexico to Michigan and Sonoma to New Hampshire, your friends are the ones you find consistently closest to you when everything else around you has changed.

“I think we’re all so close. We play the same opposition every week so we get to know each other personally and that plays into that factor of feeling empathy for your competitor,” Hamlin said.

Now, it’s time for a three-month rest to recharge after several months on the road — they’ll soon be back on again.

“I’m probably itching by mid-December and I probably will again,” he said.