Denny Hamlin is climbing up the charts.
His win at Dover International Speedway in the Würth 400 moved him into a tie for twelfth on the all-time NASCAR Cup Series wins list with Lee Petty at 54.
Hamlin passed Tony Stewart, Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett last year and is just one win behind Rusty Wallace in 11th place.
“It doesn’t seem right, I mean, if you put all of the names on the list in the order, in the order of the wins that they have, I don’t know, I see my name as just an outlier, one that sticks out like it doesn’t really belong there,” Hamlin said in Dover on Sunday.
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“I’ve been doing it a long time and you take for granted all the wins that you had, and all we think about is the ones that we didn’t win,” Hamlin said.
Hamlin thinks he could’ve had 80 or 90 wins by now if things had gone his way, but Hamlin says he has a goal in mind before he retires.
“I wanna get to a number that puts me well inside that top 10 of race winners,” he said.
The recently retired Kevin Harvick is currently in 10th place with 60 wins, while the active Kyle Busch is ninth with 63. Dale Earnhardt Sr. is next on the list with 76, which is likely out of reach for the 43-year-old Hamlin, whose best season was eight wins in 2010.
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Hamlin has three so far this year, all on short tracks, and there are plenty more to come in the final 25 races. He is also chasing an elusive NASCAR Cup Series Championship, having finished second in 2019 and three times in third.
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