Photo: Nascar9919, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Kyle Larson ended a 51-race winless streak on Sunday at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, and that result will dominate the highlight reels. It should: the win rocketed him five spots to second in the Chase standings, nine points behind leader Denny Hamlin, and made him the only Chevrolet driver inside the top eight. But the number worth circling from the Enjoy Illinois 300 isn’t Larson’s lap times. It’s three — as in three playoff cars that lost braking function in one afternoon at a track that has no business eating brakes for breakfast.
Ryan Blaney’s Team Penske Ford failed on Lap 155 while he was working his way toward the front, a mechanical letdown that buried him in 35th and cost the No. 12 team a result his speed clearly supported. Chase Elliott and Chris Buescher lost brakes too, on a flat 1.25-mile oval that’s nowhere near as brutal on stopping power as a short track or a road course. The manufacturer split matters here: Blaney drives a Ford, Elliott and Buescher both drive Chevrolets. Brake failures crossing manufacturer lines at the same track on the same afternoon point less toward one team’s setup error and more toward how the Next Gen car’s brake package handles heat at a track that apparently demands more of it than its lap times suggest. Bristol’s tight, hard-braking corners Saturday night will be a useful test of whether Gateway was a one-off or the start of a pattern crew chiefs need to solve before the Round of 12 cutoff.
Denny Hamlin knows the stakes of a brake problem better than most of the field right now. His team wrestled a braking issue in a different form at Iowa this summer, when NASCAR wouldn’t let him address it mid-race. That the points lead he built into the No. 1 seed survived Gateway relatively unscathed, despite a couple of costly pit stops earlier in the Chase, says as much about the drivers behind him as it does about his own execution.
That points lead surviving intact is really the second story Gateway told: the Chase field is splitting into two tiers, and it happened in just two races. Chase Briscoe sits eighth, the last name inside a group within 59 points of Hamlin. Everyone from Carson Hocevar in ninth to Daniel Suárez in 16th is already down 88 points or worse, a group that includes 2020 champion Chase Elliott, Bubba Wallace and William Byron. Eight races remain before the championship finale, technically enough room to climb back. But Elliott’s and Buescher’s brake failures weren’t just bad luck Sunday. For two teams already racing from behind, they were mistake-free weekends they couldn’t afford to lose this early.
Carson Hocevar’s climb to ninth deserves its own mention, if only because of how it happened. He gained three positions in the standings during a week largely defined by his run-in with Brad Keselowski rather than his results, proof that aggression eventually shows up in the point standings even when the headlines are about something else entirely.
Team Penske’s afternoon deserves its own line item, too. Joey Logano won the pole, led a race-high 96 laps and still only finished third, a result that reportedly left him “bitter.” The math explains why: a win would have delivered 74 points; third only paid 54. At a track built for Penske’s cars, that 20-point gap is the difference between sitting comfortably in the Chase’s top tier and fighting for playoff survival with everyone else, and it’s not a mistake the team can count on avoiding again at Bristol.
Bristol Motor Speedway hosts the Bass Pro Shops Night Race Saturday, and while this particular date carries no elimination stakes for the Chase field, the venue’s recent history should worry two Hendrick Motorsports drivers specifically. Elliott has only two top-five finishes at Bristol since the Next Gen car debuted in 2022 and has finished 15th or worse in three straight visits there. Byron has just one top 10 in his last four tries. Larson, by contrast, is a different driver entirely at the track: three wins and nine top fives in his last 12 Bristol starts. Hendrick’s Chase hopes may increasingly run through one driver’s car instead of three. Hamlin, meanwhile, arrives with two wins and seven top 10s in his last eight Bristol starts, a record that should make his uneven start to this Chase look more like an aberration than a trend, assuming his pit crew and his brakes cooperate this time.
Saturday’s field also includes two recent Bristol winners worth watching beyond the points battle. Ty Gibbs won his first career Cup race there this spring in a photo finish with Blaney, with Larson right on their bumpers, and Christopher Bell defends after winning last year’s Night Race off a late restart. For fans tuning in, the real storylines go beyond who takes the checkered flag: whether Bristol produces another mechanical failure that echoes Gateway’s brake troubles, whether Logano and Blaney finally convert Penske’s speed into finishes that match it, and how much longer the bottom half of this Chase field can afford to lose ground it may not get back.
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