No Optimism Left: Bell and Hamlin Concede the Title Is Larson's to Lose at Homestead

There is a particular kind of honesty that only shows up when a championship is already lost, and on Friday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Denny Hamlin delivered it without a flinch.

"I mean, I don't have any optimism," he said. "I don't. I'm here to try to have fun and try to win the race if possible. No matter what — I mean, there's obviously a chance you can win the lottery as well. But do you really count on that?"

Nobody at Joe Gibbs Racing is counting on it. Kyle Larson carries a 67-point lead over Christopher Bell and a 70-point advantage over Hamlin into Sunday's season finale, and the maths is brutal. Larson clinches the title by scoring as few as eight stage points. Even if Bell or Hamlin were to produce a perfect 76-point day, eight stage points for the No. 5 Chevrolet would still be enough.

It was not supposed to go like this. Hamlin walked into the ten-race Chase as the apparent man to beat, the No. 1 seed with a 25-point advantage over the next-nearest competitor. He had won three races in a row back in June and looked every inch the favourite. Since then, not a single win, and a slow bleed of points week after week until the title slipped out of reach. "I think as long as the season is, this Chase can be defined by a few really small, short moments, and you just don't really know what they are until it happens or it's post-mortem," Hamlin said. "But yeah, it's a long, grueling season, but there's just little moments that just was the turning point that you're either gonna end up winning the championship or not."

What stings most inside the Gibbs camp is that the speed was there. "I was very confident that it was going to be a Toyota driver that won the championship," Bell said. "And ultimately, I think whenever we got into The Chase, the 5 car had a pickup in performance, but I still think by the numbers there have been guys in Toyota cars specifically that have been faster than them. But we all shot ourselves in the foot one way or the other."

Toyota has not won a Cup Series championship since 2019, when Kyle Busch clinched the title at this same Homestead track. The manufacturer has three Cup drivers' championships in twenty years, a record Hamlin says needs a hard look once the season ends. "I think it needs to be looked at personally, internally with Toyota and JGR and Legacy and 23XI," he said. "I think we have to figure out that the win ratio to championship ratio has just not been as good as it needs to be. I don't think we should just rinse and repeat and let's just do this all again next year. I think we really should think about what it's going to take to win the big prize at the end, because our cars are too fast for there to be just … three championships in 20 years. We've got to fix that."

So the finale, 267 laps on Sunday afternoon, becomes a strange sort of race: a championship decider in which two of the three contenders have already made their peace with losing. Both Bell and Hamlin are still chasing their first Cup titles, and both insist they will race to win. If disaster strikes the No. 5 team, either of them can still take the crown. But as Hamlin put it, that is a lottery ticket, not a plan.