Another race, another hard crash, another argument for Denny Hamlin to strongly consider abandoning the remainder of the 2013 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series campaign.
Hamlin's vicious crash 14 laps into Sunday's GoBowling.com 400 at the Pocono Raceway and the subsequent 43rd-place finish was just the latest misery in a season that has turned into the kind of nightmare you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemy. The No. 11 FedEx team, one of the best in the business, has run terrible all summer. Even on days when things have looked brighter, like they are heading for a decent finish, something happens almost religiously to derail them. Generally, it has been a brutal shot into the wall, and that is the key in the argument for writing off 2013 altogether and coming back strong next year.
Were the poor results the 11 team has endured these last several weeks the result of mechanical woes or gentle wall-dings - relatively speaking, there aren't really any gentle hits when you're speeding around the track in a race car - it would be easy to sit back and admire their tenacity in soldiering on. It would be a lesson in perseverance in the face of unbelievable adversity for a team of that caliber. Instead, it seems as though Denny nearly knocks a hole in the SAFER barrier every week. How many more hits like that can he and his already-injured back endure before there is severe, possibly permanent and career-altering damage?
Denny has already proven himself to be a championship-contending race driver. He should have won the title in 2010, and he was strong last year before a few of late-season disasters dropped him to sixth in the final rundown. Watching the Virginian short-track ace work traffic on those types of tracks is one of the great enjoyments for a Sprint Cup fan, and his wins on the bigger, faster tracks - including last year's Advocare 500 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway - has proven him to be essentially a complete driver, at least on ovals. His day in the sun as Sprint Cup champion still seems to be out there, his for the taking.
It seems as though he is risking all of that in order to soldier through what has been a lost season pretty much since the final lap of the Auto Club 400 in March, when a rival driver decided that crashing Hamlin at a track where cars race at speeds approaching and surpassing 200 mph was a fitting payback for a bump and spin at 100 mph at the Bristol Motor Speedway a week prior.
What is there left to race for? A victory, in order to ensure that he maintains his streak of winning a race each year of his career (something only Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson can claim among active drivers) seems out of the question with the way the 11 team is performing. Getting to the point that they can even contend for a win at this point also seems a lost cause.
Denny is right to say that he is the face of FedEx's NASCAR program. Had Jason Leffler not been tragically killed in June, it would have been hard for a lot of race fans to name any driver besides Hamlin to drive the FedEx race car (Terry Labonte and J.J. Yeley also took the wheel in 2005 before Denny won the ride permanently in his late-season audition). Certainly a sponsor with so much invested in their race team (only Miller Brewing Company and Lowe's Home Improvement appear on the hood their respective cars in more races than FedEx holds primary status of the No. 11 Camry) realizes what is at stake. One has to imagine they would be willing to put someone else in their car for the remainder of the 2013 campaign in order to preserve a driver who has the potential to one day be enshrined in Charlotte.
Denny Hamlin is one of my favorite race drivers, and believe me, it would be disappointing to not see him in the field at Atlanta on Labor Day Weekend. That being said, I would much rather prefer to have the opportunity to see him race for 15 more years or so at his full ability than to have him risking his career and frankly his quality of life - the back is not something to mess with much - to compete while injured. I was all for his comeback earlier this year in a bid to win some races and show that even if he wasn't participating in the Chase, he would have been a title threat. That ship has sailed, and it seems pointless to risk his long-term career any further in order to salvage whatever it is the 11 team is looking to salvage at this point.
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