By Thomas Pope / The Fayetteville Observer, N.C. Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Why bother sugarcoating a sub-par performance? Denny Hamlin didn’t. Hamlin and Kyle Busch both qualified for NASCAR’s championship shootout, with Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Joey Logano on the outside looking in.
But during the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs, "We all stunk," Hamlin said. "We were terrible."
The wake-up call was a tough one.
"I think you need a season of getting your (expletive) kicked for people to wake up and realize that maybe we’re not as good as what we thought we were," he said. "As a whole, we got our tails kicked."
That could have made for a long, miserable offseason, but internal changes and the addition of a top free agent has left Hamlin brimming with confidence a month from the start of the 2012 campaign.
Not one to hold his tongue, Hamlin lobbied long and hard inside the organization for upgrades to the team’s fleet and engine program. After meeting resistance for too long a period, he said, upper management had no choice but to admit that drastic changes had to be made.
And then there was a major move atop the pit box. The Gibbs team released Mike Ford as crew chief and snapped up Darian Grubb, who had been released despite leading Tony Stewart to the 2011 title. Now Hamlin’s frustration has evolved into anticipation, and he hopes his FedEx-sponsored team can resume its place among the title contenders.
That’s exactly where it was in 2010. Jimmie Johnson amassed 39 more points than Hamlin to win his fifth consecutive crown, but Hamlin snared more checkered flags. Hamlin swept a pair of races at both Martinsville and Fort Worth, and he reigned at Darlington, Pocono, Michigan and Richmond.
Last year, though, Hamlin contends that JGR fell behind the learning curve and had to fall on its face to get a reality check: Busch won four times, but none after mid-August; Hamlin went to Victory Lane just once -- at Michigan in June -- and wound up ninth overall; Logano had the worst season of his three-year Cup career (26th) with only four top-five showings.
The problems, Hamlin said, began with a tug-o-war inside JGR to institute change.
"I can’t get a heckuva of a lot in depth with it," he said, "but some of the things we’re building in our race cars are things that, gosh, man, I’ve been wondering about that for a long time, but it’s been hard to get past the departments here and there.
"But we feel like we’re heading in a good direction, there’s no doubt about it. Toyota’s getting stronger than what they were last year. All three of our teams are on the same engine program, and we’ve got an alliance with Michael Waltrip Racing. A lot of things there are stronger this time around."
That includes the addition of Grubb to the payroll. An engineer by trade, Grubb stepped in as crew chief for Jimmie Johnson in 2006 when Chad Knaus was suspended for a rules violation, and Johnson won the Daytona 500.
When Stewart left Gibbs after the 2008 season to buy the majority share of an existing-but-winless team, he hired Grubb away from Hendrick Motorsports to become his crew chief. In three years together, Stewart and Grubb won the Sprint All-Star race, 11 points-paying events and the 2011 championship with five wins in 10 Chase contests.
But by late summer, a winless Stewart had decided to let Grubb go, and he stuck with that call despite the charge in the Chase. Grubb had plenty of job offers, both as an engineer and as a crew chief, and he picked Gibbs so he could make the day-to-day decisions for Hamlin.
"We had a huge full-court press on him, just like every other team in the garage," Hamlin said.
He added, "It’s going to take some time for him to understand what I need in my car and for me to tell him what he needs to hear, so that part’s going to be a little bit of a transition. But I think that right now, we have enough motivation and confidence to carry us until that happens."
And that’s already a change from 2011.
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