MARTINSVILLE, Va., — Denny Hamlin won Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway, beating Christopher Bell to the checkered flag by 4.617 seconds.
Hamlin cleared Bell for the race lead with 73 laps to go after a contested restart, and despite Bell’s best effort, Hamlin pulled away and rode off into the Virginia sunset with his sixth Martinsville victory and the 55th of his Cup Series career.
“It certainly felt like the old days,” Hamlin said.
Despite several dominant Martinsville performances since he last captured a grandfather clock in 2015, Hamlin entered Sunday a decade removed from his last Martinsville win.
“We’ve been stuck in a rut over the last three years or so,” Hamlin said of his recent Martinsville performances. “The fall of 2022 is the last dominant car I had at this racetrack. Since then, we’ve been hanging around third to fifth. We were always the next best behind the No. 12 (Ryan Blaney) and a couple of Hendrick cars. We came with some different stuff, just trying to get better and turn back the clock.”
Hamlin’s run on Sunday was certainly one that looked straight out of the early 2010s. Hamlin led 274 of 400 laps and won Stage 2 en route to the victory.
“The feeling is fantastic,” Hamlin said. “Life is good right now, I have no complaints.”
Bell, Bubba Wallace, Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson rounded out the top five, with Ross Chastain, Ryan Preece, Joey Logano, Chase Briscoe and Todd Gilliland completing the top 10.
Other notable finishers included Ryan Blaney in 11th, Tyler Reddick in 14th, Kyle Busch in 17th, William Byron in 22nd and Josh Berry in 33rd.
Bell came a spot shy of winning for the fourth time in the season’s first seven races, and ended a two-race slide that saw him finish 12th at Las Vegas and 29th at Homestead-Miami.
Bell hung with Hamlin for the first half of the race’s final green flag run, but as the two leaders encountered lapped traffic, Bell began to fade, becoming a speck in Hamlin’s rearview mirror.
“He beat me by almost five seconds, so even if I had cleared him, I don’t think I would’ve stayed in front of him for the whole run,” Bell said, referencing the Lap 326 restart that saw he and Hamlin battle side-by-side.
“He drove away and I was hanging on pretty good at the end,” Bell said. “Definitely the best we’ve been at Martinsville in a long time. I still feel like there’s room to improve.
“Second is a result where you feel a lot better about it the next day.”
Right behind Bell was another Toyota in Bubba Wallace, who finished third in Stage 2 and was closing in on Bell for second in the closing laps. Sunday’s race marked consecutive third-place finishes for Wallace, who sits eighth in points seven races into the 2025 season.
“You just trust in the people that you know, trust in the process, (and) these are the results you get,” Wallace said.
Stage 1 saw two yellow flags, with the first caution of the day flying for debris on Lap 32. The first incident came at the expense of Chris Buescher, who spun on the frontstretch off the front bumper of Carson Hocevar on Lap 72. After a two-lap dash to the green-checkered flag, Logano took home the Stage 1 victory.
The first caution of Stage 2 flew for Burt Myers’ No. 50 Chevrolet, which stalled on the exit of Turn 2 after losing power. In his official NASCAR Cup Series debut, Myers finished 37th of 38.
Hamlin went on to win Stage 2 despite a surge from Elliott, who caught Hamlin as he ran in lapped traffic.
Following a long green flag run to begin Stage 3, cautions began to stack up as the race neared its final quarter. After Noah Gragson and Buescher got tangled up on Lap 310, only three green flag laps were run before Logano went around in Turn 4 on Lap 318. Logano’s spin was the last caution of the day.
The eighth race of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season will take place at Darlington Raceway on April 6. The Goodyear 400 will go green shortly after 3 p.m. ET, with coverage on FS1, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
–Samuel Stubbs, Field Level Media
