Kyle Larson, 2026 Las Vegas Spring, Cup. Image credit: Nascar9919/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Kyle Larson heads into Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway needing nine points to lock up a third Cup Series championship. Seventy points separate him from Denny Hamlin, 67 from Christopher Bell, and the part worth studying is how little Martinsville did to change that. The answer is a pit-strategy call Larson’s team made on purpose: it copied the guy chasing him.
Same plan, very different job
Hamlin’s crew chief, Chris Gayle, kept the No. 11 on track for all 130 laps of Stage 1 at the Xfinity 500, while most of the field pitted around the halfway mark. William Byron, who went on to win, stopped on Lap 65. Hendrick Motorsports put Larson on the same plan, a move NASCAR.com described as shadowing the No. 11. By the end of the stage Hamlin was 17th and Larson was 23rd, one lap down.
Here is my read: that is a sensible call for the leader and a bad one for the challenger. When you’re ahead, matching your rival’s gamble is a free roll. If it works, the gap holds. If it fails, it fails for both of you. But Hamlin, who was 73 points back before the race, needed a strategy Larson didn’t share. Gayle said afterward that the plan’s worst case was a P3 to P5 run if a caution came early enough. Even that outcome doesn’t erase a 73-point deficit, and the stage ended with both cars buried. Hamlin called the day “a microcosm of a bad last nine weeks.”
The caution that rescued the leader
Then came the irony. On Lap 216, contact from Joey Logano sent Bell spinning into Hamlin entering Turn 1, and the resulting caution helped Larson get back onto the lead lap. Both chasers recovered to top-10 finishes (Hamlin sixth, Bell 10th, after Bell also served a pit-road speeding penalty), but the title fight’s two live challengers were the ones caught up in the incident that bailed out the points leader. Hamlin gained three points on Larson on the day and Bell gained seven. Hamlin, 45 and still chasing a first title, said the deficit had needed to be in the 40s to be viable.
Bell, for his part, didn’t blame Martinsville. He pointed to earlier rounds of the Chase, naming Talladega, Gateway and a steering issue at Las Vegas, as where the championship slipped away.
What Larson actually has to do
Larson’s math is simple. Nine points locks the title regardless of what his rivals do, and with no stage points, a 28th-place finish is enough. This is a points race, the 10th and final event of the Chase and the 36th points-paying race of the season, so there is no winner-take-all shortcut for Bell or Hamlin. They need maximum points and a Larson meltdown. He last won at Homestead in March 2025, and a title would make him the first back-to-back Cup champion since Jimmie Johnson’s five straight from 2006 to 2010.
That kind of meltdown isn’t theoretical. Larson lost ground to a Phoenix tire failure earlier in the Chase, and couldn’t clinch at Martinsville without winning. Still, Homestead is a 1.5-mile oval, and the thing to watch is how Hendrick plays Stage 1. If the No. 5 team stays conservative while the Gibbs cars take risks, we’ll learn whether Gibbs has any gamble left that Larson has to answer.
One more wrinkle for the field: Spire Motorsports took Carson Hocevar out of the No. 77 for Homestead following his on-track actions at Martinsville, and Justin Haley will drive it. The race airs Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on NBC and HBO Max.
Lead image: Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, 2026. Credit: Nascar9919 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
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