Sometimes you can benefit from your mistakes.

Denny Hamlin and his #11 Joe Gibbs Racing team certainly proved that theorem Sunday, when Hamlin saved enough fuel to run second to Kurt Busch in the Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.

For most of the race, a runner-up finish seemed an implausible outcome for Hamlin, who lost positions on pit road with slow stops and later scraped the wall in an overly aggressive attempt to make up ground.

“(It) played out in our favour, for sure,” Hamlin said. “Usually, these fuel-mileage races don't go our way. Obviously, we gained some spots today on the fuel-mileage thing. Felt like we had a really, really good car, but we just hurt ourselves real bad on pit road today. We lost a ton of spots. Track position meaning so much at this racetrack, it killed us.

“I was frustrated and we were behind, so I tried to make something happen, got into the wall, hurt our car. As soon as that happened, we were just in fuel-save mode. Luckily, it went green the rest of the way.”

by Reid Spencer/Sporting News