Denny Hamlin has had Chris Gabehart as the man in charge on top of his pit box for not even two years now. In those two seasons, Hamlin has won 10 times already, six last year and four and counting so far this season.

This combination just seems to be working. Hamlin, is on top of his game and looking like a legitimate championship contender for the second straight NASCAR Cup Series season.

The trust factor is great. That’s why they’re running so well on track. But, as Gabehart notes, the sky is still the limit. They haven’t peaked yet.

“When it comes to the 11 team, we just have so much fun,” Gabehart said. “I just believe in my guys, what we do.  We trust each other.  We trust the process.  Everybody has bought in, having a lot of fun.  In pro sports of any kind, that’s key ingredient number one to a great team.”

Hamlin, has high praise and mutual trust for his crew chief as well.

“We’ve been on a roll these last two years,” Hamlin said. “Myself and Chris have a good thing going. It just works.

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“I trust him and he trusts me. It just seems like I trust him to do the job. He trusts me to do the job. He doesn’t second guess me. I don’t second guess him. I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of the setup. That’s his forté. He doesn’t get into the driving aspect for me. 

“I drive a little bit more unorthodox than what my teammates do. He just said that it’s been successful, it’s up to me to build the car to go fast the way you do it. He doesn’t ask me to change and I don’t ask him to change. I think it just works.“

Gabehart notes that what’s making them so good this year is, this isn’t their first time to these race tracks together.

“From a very tangible point of view I’m not going through the first half of the season at all these racetracks for the first time with Denny,” Gabehart continued. “I’ve experienced Pocono before.  I’ve experienced Homestead before.  I’ve experienced Atlanta before.  I’ve experienced Bristol before.  The first half of last year, it was build a notebook, build a language with Denny and the engineers, mechanics, figuring out how to optimize a weekend.  

“While we did well going into those weekends the first time, certainly it’s our job to come out better.  We didn’t do that this year.  Now we have a notebook built up.  I think it shows.  I think the first half of our year is a lot stronger than last year’s first half, even though it was good.”

Now, Gabehart is focusing on what it’s going to take to get back to the Championship 4. You can’t rest on your morals just yet.

“The one thing I love about where the 11 team is at right now, our biggest competition is ourselves. Martinsville we had an awful race, beat ourselves.  You look at the Coke 600, we had a winning racecar there, we run second coming to Chase Elliott at the end of the race, the following few days at Charlotte, but we had a much better car at the Coke 600 in all honesty, didn’t get to show it because we beat ourselves. Phoenix beat ourselves.  Running in the top three, wrecked, didn’t get a chance to show what we had there.

“What I love about where our race team is at right now is it’s a competition against us.  Execute, execute, execute.  If you can do that, you have a shot to win.  That’s all we can ask for.”

Gabehart, says that with 10 wins already together, what makes him the one to get to Denny.

“First and foremost, Denny Hamlin is really good.  He’s been around the block for a long time.  There’s a lot of stats out there.

“The reason is very simple.  To give you the inside baseball of it, it’s simple.  Denny Hamlin has been around this sport for a long time.  He’s lived through the pressure, through the ups and downs.  He knows the racetracks, understands rules changes, knows how to work with his race team.  All that comes with experience that some of the younger guys have to get that under their belt.

“He’s still amazingly talented from a mental acuity and a physical point of view.  He’s as sharp as he’s ever been.  So it’s the best of both worlds.  Some of your rookie guys, Christopher Bell, Erik Jones, those guys, they just don’t have that experience side.  They have the talent side, but they have to learn how to apply the experience.

“It’s a whole lot more than just driving racecars.  It’s an infinite amount of pressure that those guys have to figure out how to deal with.

“As far as our relationship together, I say the same thing every week, it’s trust.  I know that any racetrack we go to, Denny Hamlin is good enough to win at if my team executes well enough to give him the opportunity.

“When I say ‘opportunity to win’, it’s just running top five.  If you’re in the top five on every given week, you have an opportunity to win the way these races shake out.  Vice versa, Denny trusts myself and the team we built.  When you put that kind of confidence around a great athlete, look out, right?  That’s where we are.  We’re having a great time.”

Gabehart notes, that he expected a rise out of Chevrolet and his other competition this year, which makes them rise up even further.

“That’s the neat thing about our sport, right?  You guys go into an off-season and hear no rules changes except for 750 packages, which aren’t a large part of our schedule.  You think to yourself, The Gibbs cars were so awesome, they’ll be awesome again.  That implies everybody is going to go home and take a nice holiday for two and a half months.  At this level that’s not going to happen.  They don’t take to losing very well, they’re winners just like we are.  They want to win.  They’re going to figure it out how to get it done.

“I honestly knew when Chevy had the new bodies coming onboard, you look at the factors that go into that, they’re not doing that to bring something just as good.  You’re not going to do that.  I knew they were going to be tough.  The Hendrick organization, all the Chevy guys are more than capable of winning races.  They’re all championship teams in their own right.

“Where does it put us now?  I think when you’re the guys out front and everybody is gunning for you, it’s sort of hard to know where you stand at times.  We understood pretty quick on the West Coast Swing where we were, we got our own organization of winners who push and strive to be better at everything we’re doing.  That’s what it takes.  That’s what it takes to win at the top level.”