BRISTOL, Tenn. — How unusual would it be for two different Joe Gibbs Racing drivers to fashion three-race winning streaks in the first nine events of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season?
It could happen.
Denny Hamlin, fresh from consecutive victories at Martinsville Speedway and Darlington Raceway, goes for a third straight win in Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.
With a victory, Hamlin would match the feat achieved by teammate Christopher Bell in the second, third and fourth races of the season, at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Circuit of The Americas and Phoenix Raceway.
Last season, the spring race at the 0.533-mile short track returned to the concrete surface after three years on dirt. Hamlin won for the third time in the last eight races at Bristol and fourth time overall, second only to Kyle Busch (eight wins) among full-time active drivers.
The rate of tire fall-off in last year’s event took all the competitors by surprise and played into the hands of Hamlin, an acknowledged master of tire management.
However, the driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota believes Sunday’s race is more likely to mirror last fall’s Bristol Night Race, won by Kyle Larson.
“I think that was just kind of an anomaly,” Hamlin said of last year’s Food City 500. “We thought it was temperature, we thought it was all kinds of different things, but truthfully, there’s something that was different.
“Don’t know really what it was, but I would expect that we would have the normal Bristol (this year), where your tires don’t wear that much, if it’s the same tire. Temperatures look to be up, so I would say that we would have kind of the normal Bristol that we’ve had most of the time.”
Hamlin will have a formidable challenger in Larson, who is going for a triple of his own. Larson is competing in Friday’s NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series race, Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series event and Sunday’s Cup race, hoping to sweep the weekend, a feat achieved by Busch twice at Bristol, in 2010 and 2017.
No other driver has ever won all three national series races at the same track on the same weekend, though Larson came close three weeks ago at Homestead-Miami Speedway, winning the Truck and Cup races but losing the Xfinity race on a late restart.
No doubt Busch will be paying close attention to Larson’s effort, as he was at Homestead.
“He just tried it at Homestead an came awfully close,” Busch said. “Barring a restart late in the going, he had it. That’s what happens with the triples, man. There are so many variables that can come down to whether you get it or not.
“If somebody can beat Larson off of pit road on the final run of the Cup race and he can’t pass them, that’s what happens in that one. But I’m sure he’ll go and do well, and so be it.”
The bottom lane of the track will be sprayed with PJ1 Trackbite for all three races this weekend, a departure from the resin used last spring.
“I think that’s been the most consistent thing that we’ve done,” said Chris Buescher, who won the Night Race in 2022. “The majority of time it’s been three or four feet of PJ1 on the bottom.”
Interestingly, Buescher is the only Bristol winner in the last eight races to win from a starting position outside the top five. The Roush Fenway Keselowski driver won from 20th on the grid.
“We’ve been really good at Bristol,” Buescher said. “We’ve had good pace. Our team, (crew chief) Scott Graves and our whole group have made great strategy calls to find some track position and be able to make some big gains in that sense.
“We’ve had race cars that have run the bottom really well when (other cars) have gotten strung out on the top, and we’ve been able to pass a lot of cars that way.”
Buescher is the exception that proves the rule, but if qualifying position remains a decisive factor, that argues for Hamlin, too. He leads all active drivers with four pole positions at Thunder Valley.
Busch has two poles to his credit. No other full-time active driver has more than one.
