1,000 Greatest Drivers: Denny Hamlin

NASCAR's answer to Hélio Castroneves.

Unlike most stats guys except for Ryan McCafferty, I’ve never liked Hamlin at all but I can be objective and still write about him without bias, even though I don’t think this was my best work. I didn’t really have room to write about any of his controversies or even his team, but at this point I think 23XI Racing is a bit of a footnote although I might try to edit that in later if the team wins a lot more races than it has currently. I’ve been trying to figure out for quite some time how to left-justify the driver name and right-justify the country of origin, and I guess the only way I can do it is by putting some sort of character other than a space there, so although this looks kind of ugly, it probably looks less cumbersome than my previous layout choices did. While I do think Hamlin and Castroneves have had very similar careers as I detail below, I definitely think I’d rate Hamlin higher. He at least had more seasons when he was the best driver at JGR than Castroneves did at Penske, he has nearly twice as many wins against better competition (since a lot of Castroneves’s domination came in those shallow 2002-2007 IRL seasons) and he’s a lot higher in my stock car model than Castroneves in my open wheel model, but there’s definitely a connection to be made there.