Hamlin admits to Hendrick 'frustration'.

Denny Hamlin may be well placed in the race to make the end-of-season Chase for the Championship, but that does not prevent him from being frustrated by the current run of success being enjoyed by Hendrick Motorsport.

Lying fourth overall, 332 points off standings leader Jeff Gordon, the Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolet driver has yet to win a race - and has only one pole, at Martinsville - despite running strongly almost everywhere.

"It's tough," he admits, "I'm looking in my front windshield and I see all the Hendrick cars and me. And then there's some sprinkled behind me. I'm happy that I'm the only other guy that's really being competitive week in and week out with them but, at the same token, I think we're as good as them. Myself, Tony [Stewart], JJ [Yeley] - our team is as good as Hendrick. It's just that they seem to be in the right place at the right time.

"Today, we got beat. We didn't lose the race on our own. We got beat because we got too far back at the mid-point or three-quarters of the way through the race - it just took too long to get back to the front three."

Asked if he knew what was giving Hendrick drivers Gordon and Jimmie Johnson the edge, Hamlin admitted that the whole operation appeared to be ahead of the rest of the field.

"You can argue that Hendrick has all the best drivers. It's tough to beat when you've got four very, very good teams. When you've got four like they have and they're all competitive, all up front every single week, the information they exchange is going to be better than if you've got three cars and one runs front, one runs middle, one runs back. You can't really exchange information. With all their cars, they can fine-tune them a little bit more so we need to work on basically getting our team cars closer together each week.

"We're as good as they are, we're better at times and we're worse at times. They've got all the wins because they haven't made any mistakes. I've made mistakes, my pit crew has made mistakes. Tony's guys have been in contention to win races. It's just [that Hendrick] put themselves in a position to win at the end of the races where, nine times out of ten, I'm having to battle back from something. When you've got three Hendrick cars that are very, very good up front and you keep having caution
after caution, one of them is going to win.You may be put myself or somebody else second or third, yeah, maybe we've got a shot at it. But they put themselves in a position to win and that's how they do it."