Denny Hamlin continues climb in NASCAR's career wins list. With 60 in sight, how far can he go?

DOVER, Del. (AP) — Denny Hamlin has stood his ground that wins — enough of them to soon earn his place inside NASCAR’s career top-10 list — matter more to his legacy than a championship.

Easy to say, of course, with 58 race victories to zero titles.

The 44-year-old Hamlin, still driving the No. 11 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing as he’s done since his rookie season in 2006, is motivated to reach the top 10 this season over the final 15 races of the Cup season. Kevin Harvick is 10th on the career list with 60 and Kyle Busch, still active with Richard Childress Racing, is ninth with 63, giving Hamlin realistic numbers to shoot for the rest of the season.

Best to take advantage at tracks where he’s had success, such as Dover Motor Speedway, where he won Sunday for the second straight year and third time overall, compared with a track like this weekend’s race on the Indianapolis oval, where Hamlin is 0 for 16.

“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to go back to back so bad,” Hamlin said of Dover. "(Indy’s) a track that I’ve just come so fricking close to winning. I just want to cross off all the major racetracks on our schedule.”

Hamlin is a driver who thrives in the chaos like few others — if any can — in the series. His win at Dover came days after the race team he owns with Michael Jordan suffered a setback in its court fight with NASCAR. He insisted ahead of the race that the legal issues never caused a distraction for him in the race car, then proved it on the mile concrete track with a series-best fourth win of the season.

Maybe more dark clouds — like the ones that opened up Sunday, causing a rain delay just laps ahead of the scheduled finish — can fuel Hamlin at Indy.

“All I can hope is that something happens this week that derails everything and then I’ll do better,” Hamlin said.

Hamlin then turned to a NASCAR employee and cracked, “Maybe it’ll come from them.”

Can Hamlin realistically get to 60 in 2025? He won eight times in 2010, six times in 2019 and seven in 2020, all totals that would get him to 60 this year.

“When you get him in a situation where he’s got the ball in his hands and it’s time to go win the race, he finds a way to do that most times,” crew chief Chris Gayle said.

It’s a fitting analogy for a race team owned by a former NFL coach.

At his pace, Hamlin remains a contender to cash in this November at Phoenix Raceway and win his first NASCAR championship — even if he lost out on the $1 million prize in the series’ first In-season challenge.

The idea for the challenge was largely championed by Hamlin, a three-time Daytona 500 winner who floated the idea of a midseason tournament on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast. When NASCAR bought into the idea and announced the creation of the tournament last year, Hamlin called the tournament on social media “such a win for our sport and drivers.” He jokingly added, “I will collect my 1M royalty next season.”

Hamlin earned the No. 1 seed — and was promptly eliminated in the first race by Ty Dillon, the No. 32 seed.

Dillon faces Ty Gibbs next week at Indianapolis to decide the first winner of the tournament.

Hamlin said the five-race, bracket-style tournament overall was a success — but not without a few kinks. Some of the seeding was off, such as Shane van Gisbergen not qualifying for the field, then ripping off consecutive wins on the Chicago street race and Sonoma Raceway during the tournament races.

And sure, everyone loves a Cinderella in March. But two in July isn’t necessarily making the tournament the NASCAR story of the summer.

“I think it has been unfortunate, right, you probably had a lot of the top seeds get knocked out pretty early in it, but overall, I thought the implementation of it has been good,” Hamlin said.

The other side of the argument is this: Would any fan or media outlet really care about a pair of winless drivers such as Gibbs (the sixth seed) or Dillon at this point of the season without $1 million at stake?

“For a team like us, at this point in the season, we’re not exactly where we want to be yet, but we’re trending in a good direction,” Dillon said on TNT. “Our story doesn’t get told in years past. It’s mainly the guys trying to fight for the points position. It’s the guys running up front, trying to win the race. But our story and our growth in the year stops getting told. I’m grateful we’ve been able to show our personality as a team.”

Unlike the All-Star race where the winner pockets $1 million, the driver with the best finish earns the cash prize, a ring, jackets and a trophy.

Dillon had luck on his side during his run, with his lone top-10 finish coming in the first race in Atlanta. He advanced in that race after Hamlin crashed out and finished 31st. Dillon twice has finished 20th, including at Dover. He has a best finish of 13th in five career races on the Indy oval.

Gibbs, the grandson of team owner and football and NASCAR Hall of Famer Joe Gibbs, and Dillon have failed to win in a combined 374 Cup races. Dillon has only two career top-five finishes in a career that dates to 2014. The 22-year-old Gibbs has a much better pedigree, winning the 2022 Xfinity Series title, a series in which he was a 12-time winner. He has six top 10s already this season and could make NASCAR’s playoffs on points.

Gibbs has three straight top 10s in the tournament, including a fifth-place finish at Dover. Gibbs finished 23rd on the Indy oval last season.

He’s done enough to impress his grandfather.

“There’s some people there that we got off to a terrible start, it was awful, (but) I had people on that group that came to me encouraging me, ideas for me, after it. I think they care for Ty. It just was a huge deal,” the 84-year-old Gibbs said. “This sport will really measure you. But those guys have fought back.”

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

Denny Hamlin drives through Turn 2 during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Dover Motor Speedway, Sunday, July 20, 2025, in Dover, Del. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

Denny Hamlin crosses the finish line to win a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Dover Motor Speedway, Sunday, July 20, 2025, in Dover, Del. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

Denny Hamlin celebrates with a burnout after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Dover Motor Speedway, Sunday, July 20, 2025, in Dover, Del. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

Denny Hamlin celebrates in Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Dover Motor Speedway, Sunday, July 20, 2025, in Dover, Del. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

Denny Hamlin celebrates in Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Dover Motor Speedway, Sunday, July 20, 2025, in Dover, Del. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

When Indiana adopted new U.S. House districts four years ago, Republican legislative leaders lauded them as “fair maps” that reflected the state's communities.

But when Gov. Mike Braun recently tried to redraw the lines to help Republicans gain more power, he implored lawmakers to "vote for fair maps.”

What changed? The definition of “fair.”

As states undertake mid-decade redistricting instigated by President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are using a tit-for-tat definition of fairness to justify districts that split communities in an attempt to send politically lopsided delegations to Congress. It is fair, they argue, because other states have done the same. And it is necessary, they claim, to maintain a partisan balance in the House of Representatives that resembles the national political divide.

This new vision for drawing congressional maps is creating a winner-take-all scenario that treats the House, traditionally a more diverse patchwork of politicians, like the Senate, where members reflect a state's majority party. The result could be reduced power for minority communities, less attention to certain issues and fewer distinct voices heard in Washington.

Although Indiana state senators rejected a new map backed by Trump and Braun that could have helped Republicans win all nine of the state’s congressional seats, districts have already been redrawn in Texas, California, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Other states could consider changes before the 2026 midterms that will determine control of Congress.

“It’s a fundamental undermining of a key democratic condition,” said Wayne Fields, a retired English professor from Washington University in St. Louis who is an expert on political rhetoric.

“The House is supposed to represent the people,” Fields added. “We gain an awful lot by having particular parts of the population heard.”

Under the Constitution, the Senate has two members from each state. The House has 435 seats divided among states based on population, with each state guaranteed at least one representative. In the current Congress, California has the most at 52, followed by Texas with 38.

Because senators are elected statewide, they are almost always political pairs of one party or another. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are the only states now with both a Democrat and Republican in the Senate. Maine and Vermont each have one independent and one senator affiliated with a political party.

By contrast, most states elect a mixture of Democrats and Republicans to the House. That is because House districts, with an average of 761,000 residents, based on the 2020 census, are more likely to reflect the varying partisan preferences of urban or rural voters, as well as different racial, ethnic and economic groups.

This year's redistricting is diminishing those locally unique districts.

In California, voters in several rural counties that backed Trump were separated from similar rural areas and attached to a reshaped congressional district containing liberal coastal communities. In Missouri, Democratic-leaning voters in Kansas City were split from one main congressional district into three, with each revised district stretching deep into rural Republican areas.

Some residents complained their voices are getting drowned out. But Govs. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., and Mike Kehoe, R-Mo., defended the gerrymandering as a means of countering other states and amplifying the voices of those aligned with the state's majority.

Indiana's delegation in the U.S. House consists of seven Republicans and two Democrats — one representing Indianapolis and the other a suburban Chicago district in the state's northwestern corner.

Dueling definitions of fairness were on display at the Indiana Capitol as lawmakers considered a Trump-backed redistricting plan that would have split Indianapolis among four Republican-leaning districts and merged the Chicago suburbs with rural Republican areas. Opponents walked the halls in protest, carrying signs such as “I stand for fair maps!”

Ethan Hatcher, a talk radio host who said he votes for Republicans and Libertarians, denounced the redistricting plan as “a blatant power grab" that "compromises the principles of our Founding Fathers" by fracturing Democratic strongholds to dilute the voices of urban voters.

“It’s a calculated assault on fair representation," Hatcher told a state Senate committee.

But others asserted it would be fair for Indiana Republicans to hold all of those House seats, because Trump won the “solidly Republican state” by nearly three-fifths of the vote.

“Our current 7-2 congressional delegation doesn’t fully capture that strength,” resident Tracy Kissel said at a committee hearing. "We can create fairer, more competitive districts that align with how Hoosiers vote.”

When senators defeated a map designed to deliver a 9-0 congressional delegation for Republicans, Braun bemoaned that they had missed an “opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps.”

By some national measurements, the U.S. House already is politically fair. The 220-215 majority that Republicans won over Democrats in the 2024 elections almost perfectly aligns with the share of the vote the two parties received in districts across the country, according to an Associated Press analysis.

But that overall balance belies an imbalance that exists in many states. Even before this year's redistricting, the number of states with congressional districts tilted toward one party or another was higher than at any point in at least a decade, the AP analysis found.

The partisan divisions have contributed to a “cutthroat political environment” that “drives the parties to extreme measures," said Kent Syler, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He noted that Republicans hold 88% of congressional seats in Tennessee, and Democrats have an equivalent in Maryland.

“Fairer redistricting would give people more of a feeling that they have a voice," Syler said.

Rebekah Caruthers, who leads the Fair Elections Center, a nonprofit voting rights group, said there should be compact districts that allow communities of interest to elect the representatives of their choice, regardless of how that affects the national political balance. Gerrymandering districts to be dominated by a single party results in “an unfair disenfranchisement" of some voters, she said.

“Ultimately, this isn’t going to be good for democracy," Caruthers said. "We need some type of détente.”

A protester celebrates as they walk outside the Indiana Senate Chamber after a bill to redistrict the state's congressional map was defeated, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

FILE - This photo taken from video shows organizers rallying outside of the Ohio Statehouse to protest gerrymandering and advocate for lawmakers to draw fair maps in Columbus, Ohio, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Patrick Aftoora-Orsagos, File)

Opponents of Missouri's Republican-backed congressional redistricting plan display a banner in protest at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri, Sept. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb)