It’s not often you can draw parallels between baseball and auto racing, but we sure drew one over the weekend.
In baseball, you have to get that 27th out with the lead. In racing, you have to cross under the checkers to get to the trophy.
In the case of the Toronto Blue Jays, there’s little consolation in coming a mere inch from walking off with a World Series victory in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7.
For Denny Hamlin, where to even begin when looking for consolation?
When you saw William Byron careen into the outside wall after the last of the day’s many tire blowouts at Phoenix, it became obvious that fate has it in for Denny. How else to explain it?
And wouldn’t you know it. Fate deals its cruelest blow yet, just as Denny was winning over the public, suddenly becoming a legitimate sympathetic figure in his quest to finally bring home a championship to his ailing dad.
The sight of him sitting in the car afterward, then standing alongside it … he looked exactly as he described it later.
Numb.
Oh, by the way, Ryan Blaney won a season finale completely unlike the 11 before it, and probably unlike those that will follow. We’ll get to that, along with eventually mentioning the championship beneficiary, as we go through the gears one last time for 2025.
First Gear: Kyle Larson adds a new twist to NASCAR finale
Kyle Larson is your newest Cup Series champ. There, that’s out of the way.
“We didn’t lead a lap,” Kyle told the TV audience after climbing from his third-place Chevy.
You don’t need a marketing pro to tell Kyle, “Hey, bud, you might want to keep that fact under wraps.”
Since this format was rolled out in 2014, this has always been a possibility. If the very first championship finale in 2014 had seen the third-place driver finish ahead of the other three finalists to win the crown, everyone would’ve likely said, “Well, that’s the new way of doing things,” and lived with it.
But a finalist won the first year. Then the second, and the third, and right on down the line until 2023, when Ryan Blaney finished second but won the Cup title. We’d grown accustomed to the champion also winning the finale, so when the champ doesn’t even lead a lap, knee-jerk reactions are the only reactions to be found.
Maybe this will make you feel a tad better: If there had been no playoffs, and if the regular-season points race had continued for the ensuing 10 weeks, guess who would’ve had the most points. Yep, Kyle Larson, by 16 points over Christopher Bell and 19 over William Byron.
There were no wins after early May, but in the closing stretch, there were a lot of quality runs — in six of the last seven races, Larson finished between second and seventh, picking up points and earning a berth in the final. Though let’s keep in mind, team-by-team strategies would’ve changed often if this had been a season-long points race.
On a good note, for those of you unhappy with the result, at least it makes you feel better about Joey Logano’s 2024 championship, right? You can admit it.
Second Gear: Denny the darling? We’ll see if that works out
If we can fast-forward to next February, it’ll be interesting to see how Sunday’s heartbreak, combined with all the emotions of the final few weeks, will change the fans’ perception of Hamlin.
Over the past few years, he seemed to delight in the give-and-take with the boo birds and finger flippers. But in these tough days of late, he must’ve appreciated the thawing of relations and the fact cheers were beginning to overtake the naysayers.
In the Phoenix aftermath, Hamlin was asked about possible changes to the playoff format starting next year and how it might affect his chances to end that 20-year drought. We can all relate to his feelings about that.
“I don’t know. Golly, in this moment, I never want to race a car ever again,” he said. “My fun meter is pegged.”
And not to the full side.
Third Gear: From Dale Earnhardt to Jesse Love, a dozen rings for RCR
For 12 years now, Richard Childress has had an owner’s championship ring for every finger on both hands. For six years, he had a spare, and now he has two spares.
Jesse Love’s Saturday win at Phoenix gave the 20-year-old racer a second overall championship in the past three seasons, but also gave RCR its sixth Xfinity Series championship, to match the six Cup titles the team won in the 1980s and ’90s.
At Phoenix, Love had to beat three fellow championship competitors from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s JR Motorsports garage. That included Connor Zilisch, who dominated his first and probably only full-time Xfinity season, only to end it slumped outside his car in post-race disappointment.
Love’s latest championship comes two years after winning the 2023 ARCA title, and technically, it’s his fourth NASCAR-affiliated championship.
ARCA became a NASCAR property in 2018. In 2020 and ’21, Love won back-to-back ARCA West Series titles at the ages of 15 and 16. He’s locked in for another year with RCR’s Xfinity team next season, when O’Reilly Auto Parts takes over as the series’ title sponsor.
Childress teams, meanwhile, have won its six “Triple-A” championships under the banners of Xfinity, Nationwide and Busch. And won them with Kevin Harvick (twice), Clint Bowyer, Austin Dillon and Tyler Reddick before Love’s 2025 title.
All six of RCR’s Cup Series titles came with a driver named Earnhardt.
Fourth Gear: Michael Jordan vs. NASCAR is wild theater
What’s next?
Nothing, really, until next February.
But then again, maybe everything.
We’ve gotten accustomed to the absence of offseason testing. But this year, there’s not even an awards show to preview, since NASCAR remained in Phoenix to knock out the banquet Tuesday night.
However, looming large over the 2025 season has been the antitrust lawsuit filed against NASCAR by two Cup teams — 23XI and Front Row. For months now, as the legal proceedings and appeals to all procedural moves along the wayhave plodded along, a Dec. 1 court date for a jury trial has been practically glowing on the calendar.
The possibility of 23XI co-owner Michael Jordan (and Denny Hamlin, btw) squaring off in a totally different court environment? Intriguing, to say the least.
There was chatter about a possible pre-trial settlement a couple weeks back, but that quickly cooled. If nothing is worked out over the next few weeks, this could become the most important offseason in NASCAR history.
What’s it mean for those of us who barely know our juris from our prudence? Not sure from the vantage point of the grandstands or recliner, but inside board rooms and around conference tables, it’ll likely mean a whole lot.
— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
