Denny Hamlin was hit with a stiff penalty on Monday. See, a piece of tungsten fell off his No. 11 Toyota as he exited pit road for Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 which cost him a win before the race even began. As a result of that, a stiff penalty ensues. There’s no avoiding the four race suspension to the crew chief, car chief and top engineer. That’s like losing your second best player, your coach and top assistant coach for a sporting team.

On top of all of that, Hamlin had to start 29th for Thursday night’s Alsco 500. Coming from the back with backups in a shortened race.

That didn’t faze him. Hamlin, would finish a shocking runner-up in the race for his fourth top five finish in his last six Charlotte starts.

“Eventually the air pressure built up enough where it got off the race track,” Hamlin said of his early race handling issues. “The pit crew did a great job of helping us pick up spots on pit road too. They just did a great job with the car. Every time we come back to a race track for a second time are results are really, really good. We’re making good adjustments. I had a really good car. We just needed to be a little bit better on the short run there.”

How much did not having those guys available hurt him? Not much actually.

Yeah, one advantage that we did have was we left Eric (Phillips) at the race shop to prepare the cars before the whole weight thing happened, and because we had depth, we had essentially two car chiefs on our team,” Hamlin said on Thursday night. “Brandon was our car chief the year before, in 2018, Eric came on in 2019, and Brandon never left.  So he just — the team player he is, he stepped aside and let Eric take over the car chiefing role last year, but we had two car chiefs, so we left one at the race shop, and now we just switched them essentially when we had the suspension.”

Hamlin, said that even saying that, it’s a big penalty and potentially cost them a win on Thursday night’s race.

“Still a big penalty,” Hamlin continued. “It still cost us a lot, a chance to win, I can assure you of that.  We had a much faster car here on Sunday than what we did today, and the results were still good.  We’re definitely going to miss Chris, but also within our roster we’ve left engineers at home, so now if anything he’s able to be at the race shop with the engineers and coming up with decisions in not such a chaotic environment like a racetrack.”

Hamlin noted that the one-day format actually made it easier on them when facing these circumstances. If they had practice and qualifying and had to make decisions during them, it would have hurt their performance.

“I think just under these unique circumstances that we’re in, it doesn’t hurt as bad.  But like I say, if the penalty was bad enough being nine laps down after nine laps of the Coke 600, a race that I’ve been marking on my calendar for years now trying to win.  That part of it stinks, but I’m glad that we’ve got the depth to still go out here and run good.”