LOUDON, N.H. — Point leader Denny Hamlin finished seventh Sunday afternoon at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and wrapped up the No. 1 seed for the Chase when it begins in two weeks at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
“These are our bad days, bad-ish. But I feel good about where our team is right now, everyone is kind of clicking well and we don’t have a whole lot of weaknesses,” said Hamlin. “We’re just not as strong as the Penske cars on these types of race tracks, but Martinsville we are good, Phoenix we’ve been good, just over the last few years this has not been as strong as those guys. And when I say strong, I mean top five, top seven, so it’s something we can work with.
“The mile and-a-halfs are certainly something that’s been our strength for a couple of years now. I look forward to getting the Chase started and seeing where it goes.”
• Christopher Bell finished four, charting his 11th top-five finish of the season. Bell ranks fifth in the standings with one race remaining in the regular season.
“It was another strong performance by our 20 team,” Bell said. “Ultimately, we didn’t have enough to compete with the frontrunners. Get out of here with a top-five finish, it was a really good day, good and solid day. We had the mishap on pit road, then the team was able to persevere and finish about where we should have. Really happy with fourth place today. Just lacking a little bit right now.”
• Josh Berry continued his recent streak of top-10 finishes with a third-place effort on Sunday. Berry, who will not return to Wood Brothers Racing next season, collected his fourth straight top-10 finish after leading 73 laps at New Hampshire.
“It was a lot of fun. Our car was really good. The guys did a great job. We had a solid weekend from start to finish and led a lot of laps,” Berry said. “We were in control there for a little while, but that one caution fell and it just felt like that was one of them that was gonna bite us at some point and ultimately it did. I slid a little long and we didn’t have a great pit stop and lost a little track position, but I fought hard there.
“I was surprised we were able to get back to third and get as close as we could to those guys. I don’t know, we just needed to start a little closer.”
• The battle for the 16th and final position in the Chase tightened slightly on Sunday.
RFK Racing Ford driver Ryan Preece finished ninth and narrowed his deficit to 16th-place Shane van Gisbergen to 31 points heading into the regular season finale Saturday at Daytona Int’l Speedway.
“We did a really good job. I felt like the race, the majority of it went our way,” Preece said. “We had a really good car and before that last caution came out it looked like we were gonna go around the 23. We just got by the 21, so for whatever reason that last set of tires was just loose and that’s what killed us because I felt like on restarts, navigating through traffic and doing all of those things, we did everything right.”
“It was a tough day for what we needed. Being that fast on wet weather tires and falling that fast shows that we were missing something to have grip on the slick tires,” van Gisbergen explained. “Hopefully there are some learnings on that because Connor (Zilisch) and I just went backwards as fast as we could when the track dried. It’s just a disappointing way to end the day. We would love to have more of a cushion heading into Daytona (International Speedway), but the No. 60 (Ryan Preece) did a great job today. I don’t think the No. 2 (Austin Cindric) gained much on us, but we would love to have more heading into a big unknown race next weekend.”
• Kyle Larson brought his Hendrick Motorsports Chevy home fifth and moved up to seventh in the standings.
“I thought the balance of our No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet in dry conditions were pretty similar all race,” Larson said. “I feel like our best run was after the green flag stop, and then even after that last run, it wasn’t bad until the very end. I think fourth-place on back were really struggling. Overall, it was a great day for this team. We got the Stage One win, a fifth-place in Stage Two and a fifth-place finish at the end.
“It was a lot better overall weekend than we’ve had in a while. We scored a lot of points, which is good way to head into the regular season finale.”
