NASCAR has four races it treats as crown jewels: the Daytona 500, the Coca-Cola 600, the Southern 500 and the Brickyard 400. Denny Hamlin has won the first three. He has won them seven times between them, more than any other active driver, enough to tie David Pearson and Darrell Waltrip on the all-time list.
He has never won the fourth. It runs Sunday at 2 p.m. ET on TNT.
A win at Indianapolis Motor Speedway would make Hamlin the fifth driver in NASCAR history to complete the set, after Jeff Gordon in 1997, Dale Earnhardt in 1998, Jimmie Johnson in 2006 and Kevin Harvick in 2014. The more telling number is smaller. Among Cup drivers at Indianapolis, only Juan Pablo Montoya has led more laps there without ever winning. Hamlin has led 153. His best finish is third.
He arrives in the strongest statistical position of his career. He has led 863 laps this season, more than any other driver and more than he has led through 21 races in any year he has raced. He has four wins and an average finish of 8.67, the best of anyone who has started all 21 races. He has failed to complete two laps all season. He leads the standings with 842 points, 68 clear of Tyler Reddick, the largest margin anyone has held since Nashville in late May. NASCAR's own statistics package put his odds of winning the regular season title at 11 percent after Watkins Glen in April. It now puts them at 90.
Some of that is Reddick, and the way Reddick's season came apart is worth its own paragraph. Through 14 races his average finish of 5.57 was the best any driver had posted that deep into a season since Dale Earnhardt in 1987. Then he was caught in a crash at Michigan and finished 35th. He started at the back at San Diego for unapproved adjustments and cut a tire with two laps left, 25th. Power steering failed after the first stage at Sonoma, 36th. A radiator and an oil cooler broke at Chicagoland and put him in the garage, 36th. He spun at North Wilkesboro and was penalized for speeding on pit road, 30th. Almost none of it was speed. He scored 44.6 points per race across the first 15 races and 17.5 across the last six, which ranks 25th in the series over that stretch, and Hamlin has taken 197 points out of him in nine weeks.
What that leaves is a championship picture that is close to settled and a race that is not. Five races remain before the Chase, NASCAR's 16-driver playoff, which resets the points and makes the regular season standings largely moot.
So Sunday will be decided the way Indianapolis usually decides things, which is late. The driver who led the most laps has won only three of the last 10 Brickyard 400s. The pass for the win came inside the final eight laps in five of the last eight. Six of the last eight went to overtime, including each of the last three, and the closing run to the checkered flag has been nine laps or shorter every year since 2015.
The drivers best positioned for that kind of finish are not all named Hamlin. Bubba Wallace won last year and has finished top 10 in each of his last four starts here, leading at least 26 laps in each of the last two. Kyle Larson won in 2024 and ran second in 2025, an average finish of 1.5 across the two years since NASCAR moved this race back to the 2.5-mile oval from the infield road course it used from 2021 through 2023. Christopher Bell has finished 12th or better in all three of his Brickyard 400 starts, and his 8.0 average finish here is the best he owns at any track. And Ryan Blaney, who makes his 400th Cup start Sunday, has finished 11th or better in each of the last 11 races, the longest such streak since NASCAR introduced its current car.
Hamlin does not need Sunday. The Chase will reset the points and the championship will be decided somewhere else, on a track nobody is thinking about yet. Sunday is worth something narrower and harder to get back: the fourth trophy, in the fourth race, on the one weekend a year it is available.