Three Titles in 20 Years Is Not Enough for Denny Hamlin

Denny Hamlin wants Toyota to spend the winter working out why a manufacturer that wins more Cup Series races than anyone keeps missing the drivers’ championship.

Toyota has won 18 Cup races this year and clinched its fourth manufacturers’ title with three races to spare, yet it arrives at Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway with its two remaining contenders, Hamlin and Christopher Bell, 70 and 67 points behind Kyle Larson. Since Toyota entered NASCAR’s top division in 2007, its drivers have won the championship three times, with Kyle Busch in 2015 and 2019 and Martin Truex Jr. in 2017.

Hamlin raised the subject himself during his media availability on Friday, and his comments were reported in the NASCAR Wire Service’s weekend notebook carried by Jayski. "I think it needs to be looked at personally, internally with Toyota and JGR and LEGACY and 23XI," he said, naming Joe Gibbs Racing, LEGACY Motor Club and the 23XI Racing team he co-owns. "I think we have to figure out that the win ratio to the championship ratio has just not been as good as it needs to be." He went further, saying the group should not "just rinse and repeat" next season. "Our cars are too fast for there to be just a few, I think, two, and Martin is in there. It’s three championships in 20 years. We’ve got to fix that."

Hamlin has four of Toyota’s 18 wins this season, but the report notes that he and his team have not executed at the same level in the Chase, the playoff rounds that decide the title. He described his and Bell’s remaining hopes as roughly equivalent to winning the lottery.

Tyler Gibbs, the president of Toyota Racing Development, answered on Friday night after Kaden Honeycutt had won the Truck Series championship in a Tundra at the same track. He pointed to the Next Gen car that arrived in 2022 as a turning point. "We see some challenges there, candidly," he said, before pointing out that Toyota won 14 races last year and 18 this year. "It feels like we are getting back to a little bit of where we were in ’17, ’18, ’19." He described the Cup garage as one that will "take advantage of every single weakness," whether a mistake or a rival simply excelling in the moment, as he said had happened several times in past championship races under the elimination format. "I don’t think there’s a fundamental flaw, if you will," he said.

Gibbs also made the case for the trophy Toyota has already won. "For us, the manufacturers’ championship is a big deal," he said. "We recognize that the drivers’ championship gets more exposure, and it should. So, to have won 18 and not won the drivers’ is disappointing." He added that Toyota still had two shots at it on Sunday, with a lot of work to do and some help needed.

Those two shots start Sunday from the front of the field. Hamlin qualified second and Bell sixth for the 3 p.m. Eastern race on NBC, with Toyota’s Chase Briscoe on the pole and Tyler Reddick third, according to the NASCAR Wire Service’s qualifying report. Larson needs only to finish eighth or better to take his third title. Toyota’s own release on the manufacturers’ championship, clinched at Phoenix on October 18, counted the earlier titles in 2016, 2017 and 2019, which means the brand has now won the manufacturers’ crown four times against three drivers’ titles in the same span.

The Toyota Report Take

Hamlin is right about the ratio, and he is in a rare position to say so out loud, since he is both Toyota’s most experienced driver and the owner of one of its teams. Eighteen wins should produce a champion more often than once every seven years, and a manufacturer that dominates the regular season but fades in the playoff rounds has a pattern worth studying, not a run of bad luck.

Gibbs’s answer is the reasonable one from the company’s side, because the Next Gen era really has been harder on Toyota than the years when Busch and Truex were winning titles, and the win totals are climbing back. But the two men are describing the same problem from different ends. Toyota has fixed its speed. What it has not fixed is the part of the season where speed stops being enough, and that is the question Hamlin wants on the table before anyone starts planning 2027.

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