Photo: Nascar9919, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
One point. That is all that separates Kyle Larson from Denny Hamlin with seven races left in the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Chase, and it undersells how strange the last three weeks have been. Hamlin spent the summer as the most reliable points machine in the garage. Then the Chase started, and the machine started coughing. Larson now holds the lead with 2,206 points to Hamlin’s 2,205, and the series heads to Kansas Speedway for Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400.
The timing matters. Kansas opens a run of racetracks where Hamlin has been close to untouchable this year, and the calendar that follows gives him more of them than anyone else would probably like.
A 55-point head start, gone in three weekends
NASCAR’s reset format for 2026 handed Hamlin the top seed and 2,100 points when the Chase began. The second seed started at 2,075, the third at 2,065, and every spot after that dropped by five. Work Larson’s current total backward and he began the Chase on 2,045, which lines up with the seventh seed and a 55-point deficit to Hamlin. That number is not random trivia: 55 points is exactly what a race win pays under this year’s revised scale.
Larson erased it without needing anyone else’s help. Fifth in the Southern 500, a win at World Wide Technology Raceway and second at Bristol produced 161 points. Hamlin’s 18th, ninth and eighth produced 105. Net swing: 56 points, or one win plus change. It’s also a neat illustration of what NASCAR said it wanted from the format, which was consistency across the season with a fat bonus for winning. Larson has done both in the same three-week span.
The Darlington result is the one that should nag Hamlin most. He led 68 laps there, more than race winner Christopher Bell’s 46, and still left with 18th place and 35 points. At Gateway and Bristol he didn’t lead a lap. Leading doesn’t bank anything by itself unless it coincides with a stage end or the checkered flag, a lesson Ryan Blaney learned the hard way when he led 202 laps at Bristol and walked away with 19 points. For a driver whose regular season was built on rarely having a bad day, three middling Sundays in a row is out of character.
The schedule turns into Hamlin’s home turf
Four of the final seven races are on 1.5-mile ovals: Kansas this weekend, Las Vegas on Oct. 4, Charlotte’s oval on Oct. 11 and the Homestead-Miami finale on Nov. 8. Phoenix, Talladega and Martinsville fill the gaps. For a title fight this tight, that’s a lot of weight sitting on one track type.
Hamlin’s numbers on that track type this season are borderline rude. Across the five 1.5-mile ovals the Cup Series has visited in 2026, he finished first at Las Vegas, fourth at Kansas in April, second at Texas, third in the Coca-Cola 600 and third at Chicagoland. That’s a 2.6 average finish with 391 laps led. Run the same five races for the rest of the Chase field and the next-best is William Byron at 6.2. Nobody else in the 16-driver group averages better than 10th.
Larson’s line on the same five tracks is 7, 2, 34, 5, 34, a 16.4 average. Those two 34ths do all the damage: at Texas he completed only 180 of 267 laps, and at Chicagoland he finished two laps down despite leading 23. Strip them out and Larson has been quick everywhere, including a runner-up finish at Kansas in April after leading 78 laps. So the honest read isn’t that Larson is slow on intermediates. It’s that his intermediate results have been volatile, and Hamlin’s haven’t.
Why that gap matters in points: below the winner, every finishing position on NASCAR’s scale is worth one point. A difference of roughly 14 spots in average finish is about 14 points a race before stage points or a 55-point win enter the equation. Over four intermediate races, that’s the kind of margin that decides championships without anyone noticing it happening.
What April at Kansas actually told us
The spring race is the best rehearsal available, and it cuts both ways. Hamlin started second and led 131 of 274 laps. The race needed overtime to finish, running seven laps past its scheduled 267, and only three cautions flew for 20 laps. That’s a long-run race, the kind that rewards a car whose balance holds up as the tires wear rather than the team that wins the pit-road sprint.
Hamlin had that car. What he didn’t have was the finish. Tyler Reddick won by 0.118 seconds over Larson, with Chase Briscoe third and Hamlin fourth. Dominating the middle of a race and losing the end of it is exactly the pattern that has shown up again at Darlington, and it’s the thing to watch Sunday: not whether the No. 11 is fast, but whether it is still at the front when the final restart comes.
Logano and Bell are close enough to matter
This is not strictly a two-driver story. Joey Logano sits third, 16 points back, after winning at Bristol, and Bell is fourth, 17 back, after taking the Southern 500. Their intermediate résumés point in different directions.
Logano finished 30th and two laps down at Kansas in April, and his other 1.5-mile results (15th at Las Vegas, eighth at Charlotte, 12th at Chicagoland) look like a team surviving these tracks rather than attacking them. If the No. 22 is going to stay in this, it probably needs the short tracks and Talladega to carry more weight than the intermediates.
Bell is the more dangerous intermediate threat. He was runner-up at both Charlotte and Chicagoland and fourth at Las Vegas. His spring Kansas race unraveled after he led 47 laps, ending 20th and a lap down, but the speed was clearly there. Worth noting, too, that Bell and Hamlin share a Joe Gibbs Racing shop, so whatever the No. 11 learns on these tracks isn’t exactly a secret from the No. 20.
Behind them, Ty Gibbs is 42 points back and Blaney 52 back after his Bristol exit. Both need the leaders to stumble, not just to run well themselves. And Gateway already showed how quickly mechanical trouble can reshape the gaps in this Chase.
The finale is a 1.5-miler, too
There is a bit of history hanging over this. Hamlin finished runner-up in last year’s Cup title fight after losing the winner-take-all finale at Phoenix. That format is gone. This year the champion is simply whoever has the most points after Homestead, which means a good-but-not-perfect day at a 1.5-mile track in November is worth exactly as much as it was in September. For a driver whose best trait is stacking top-five finishes on this kind of track, it’s hard to design a more favorable way to settle it.
Favorable isn’t the same as safe, though. Larson has proven in three weeks that he can make up a win’s worth of points on anybody, and he was 0.118 seconds from winning at Kansas five months ago. Hamlin’s spreadsheet says the next month belongs to him. Larson’s recent form says spreadsheets don’t drive.
What to watch at Kansas
Practice and qualifying run Saturday, and the 267-lap, 400.5-mile race goes green at 3 p.m. ET Sunday. Keep an eye on long-run speed in practice rather than single-lap pace, because April’s race was decided by who could stay fast deep into green-flag runs. Watch whether Hamlin turns early speed into stage points, which is where his Darlington afternoon leaked. And watch Larson’s consistency: if he finishes in the top five again, the intermediate advantage Hamlin is counting on starts to look a lot smaller than his season average suggests.
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