Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin snapped a winless streak of more than 11 months on Sunday afternoon, winning the Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway to find victory lane for the first time since he won at Dover Motor Speedway in late April 2024. The win makes him the fifth different winner through the first seven races of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Hamlin dominated the 400-lap race around the four-turn, 0.526-mile (0.847-kilometer) Ridgeway, Virginia oval, leading 274 laps on a day when passing, as it has so often on short tracks during the Next Gen era, proved to be next to impossible except for during the first couple of laps after restarts. The win is his sixth at Martinsville and first there since 2015.
As is generally the case whenever a new winner emerges during a season, now is a great time to remind fans how the playoff format really works, and more specifically, why Hamlin, despite his win, is technically not locked into the 16-driver postseason just yet.
Denny Hamlin not locked into NASCAR playoffs (yet)
The 16 playoff spots go to the regular season champion and the 15 drivers who rank next highest in wins. If there are more than 16 winners by the time the 26-race regular season wraps up, the playoff field is not expanded.
Winning twice automatically locks a driver into the playoffs, since there can be no more than 13 multi-race winners during the regular season. But winning once does not necessarily do so.
In the event that there are more than 16 playoff eligible drivers by the time the regular season ends, the single-race winners are the drivers battling for the final remaining open spots, and the tiebreaker among them becomes points.
Likewise, if there aren't enough winners to fill the playoff spots, the tiebreaker among non-winners to determine who fills out the postseason field is also points. This scenario is far more likely, and this is the scenario that has commonly played out.
But with five winners in seven races so far this year, there could still be as many as 24 regular season race winners. As a result, Joe Gibbs Racing's Christopher Bell is technically the only driver locked into the playoffs, as he is the only driver with more than one win to his name this year.
Bell won three races in a row at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Circuit of the Americas (COTA), and Phoenix Raceway.
Aside from Hamlin, the three single-race winners this season include Hendrick Motorsports teammates William Byron and Kyle Larson, as well as first-time winner Josh Berry of Wood Brothers Racing.
Even with all of that said, however, there is nobody who truly doubts the idea that Hamlin is locked into the playoffs, even if it isn't yet a mathematical certainty. He sits in seventh place in the point standings, so he finds himself in a pretty good spot.
And simply put, he is also a regular contender, so even if he doesn't win again during the regular season, it's hard to imagine him not being in a good enough position on points to get in if there does end up being a battle among single-race winners to get into the postseason.
Byron leads the standings, and Larson is second, so those two should also have nothing to worry about. Berry, on the other hand, is only 19th in points, placing him in the lower half of the field, so he is one driver who is probably already rooting against new winners emerging each week.
Race number eight on the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series schedule is the Goodyear 400, which is set to be shown live on Fox Sports 1 from Darlington Raceway beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET this Sunday, April 6. If you have not yet had a chance to begin a free trial of FuboTV, do so now and don't miss any of the action from the track "Too Tough To Tame"!