Chase Briscoe did everything a Cup driver can do on a single Sunday under the 2026 rules. He won Stage 1. He won Stage 2. He led 175 of 267 laps at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and took the checkered flag 1.376 seconds clear in the South Point 400. That adds up to 75 points, the most any driver can score in one race.
The championship leader still left Nevada further ahead than he arrived.
Kyle Larson spent part of the first stage a lap down, bounced his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet off the Turn 4 wall on the last lap, and limped across the line second. That was worth 36 points. It also stretched his lead over Denny Hamlin from 26 to 40 with five races left in The Chase. Briscoe climbed from eighth to sixth in the standings and is still 84 points behind.
The 39-point ceiling
This is how the 2026 format does its sums. A win is worth 55 points, and each stage win adds 10. A driver who finishes second and picks up a single stage point leaves with 36. So a perfect day only gains 39 points on a rival who finishes second, and Larson has been finishing second or better a lot lately.
Under the elimination playoff NASCAR used from 2014 through 2025, a Vegas win would have punched Briscoe’s ticket to the next round. This year there are no eliminations and no bankable playoff points. The 16 drivers carry one running total to Homestead, and the highest number at the end wins. A victory counts for more than it used to, but in the end it’s still just points. We broke down the same arithmetic after Ryan Blaney led 202 laps at Bristol and came away with 19 points. Las Vegas shows the other side of it: even the best possible day only moves you so far.
To erase 84 points in five races, Briscoe needs to outscore Larson by about 17 points per race. Hendrick says Larson’s 2.2 average finish through the first five Chase races is the best opening stretch of any postseason in NASCAR history.
| Pos. | Driver | Points | Gap before Vegas | Gap after Vegas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kyle Larson | 2,318 | — | — |
| 2 | Denny Hamlin | 2,278 | -26 | -40 |
| 3 | Christopher Bell | 2,263 | -50 | -55 |
| 4 | Joey Logano | 2,247 | -67 | -71 |
| 5 | Ryan Blaney | 2,238 | -91 | -80 |
| 6 | Chase Briscoe | 2,234 | -123 | -84 |
| 7 | Tyler Reddick | 2,212 | -111 | -106 |
| 8 | Ty Gibbs | 2,208 | -94 | -110 |
Briscoe won it on pit road
Briscoe’s No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota was fast from the start. He started fourth, ran in the top three from the opening laps and was leading by the end of the first stage. Speed isn’t what kept him in front on a 1.5-mile track where the leader gets clean air and everyone behind is stuck in turbulence. His pit crew did.
The race turned on the caution after Stage 2. Every lead-lap car pitted, and Briscoe’s crew got him off pit road first. On the restart a few laps later, he ran side by side with Ryan Blaney and cleared him off Turn 4. He made his last stop of the final green-flag cycle about 50 laps from the end. While Blaney, Michael McDowell and Christopher Bell stayed out longer and took turns leading, Briscoe sat third. He was back in front by lap 228 after McDowell pitted and he passed Bell on track. After that, the only thing that slowed him down was lapped traffic.
Tyler Reddick, who finished third, put the value of that track position plainly. “If we could have stayed ahead of him leaving pit road, I think we get to those cars first and maybe don’t burn up as much,” he said of Larson. “I think we could have won today.” On this kind of track, the car that reaches lapped traffic first sets the pace through it, and the cars behind wear out their tires in its wake.
How Larson turned a lost lap into 36 points
Larson’s car was poor on the first run. Crew chief Cliff Daniels used the first green-flag stop to make big adjustments, and the long stop cost Larson a lap. The rulebook got him back. The first caution came out when Zane Smith spun with a flat right rear. Larson stayed off pit road and took the wave-around, which lets lapped cars that don’t pit go around the pace car and restart at the back of the lead lap.
Back on the lead lap, Larson still scored no stage points in Stage 1. He was 23rd at the break and 10th at the end of Stage 2, which got him one point. He took the rest of his points on the last run. He passed Bubba Wallace for second with 11 laps left, then cut into Briscoe’s lead while Briscoe was working through traffic. On the white-flag lap he went all in.
“I was just trying to push it through (Turns) 3 and 4 to build some momentum at him and try to get by him down the straightaway,” Larson said. “I just got really loose and overcorrected it into the wall. Thankfully, I was able to limp it home.”
He slowed after the contact, and Reddick’s No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota ran into him and slid through the infield grass. Neither lost a position. Reddick’s day had gone wrong much earlier: his team changed the battery during a stop and he had to fight his way back to the front. He still gained five points on Larson and is 106 back.
The damaged car carried a recreation of Kyle Busch’s 2007 Bristol-winning No. 5 Hendrick scheme. It was the Cup Series’ first trip to Las Vegas, Busch’s hometown, since his death. “I wish I could have won in this paint scheme while honoring Kyle because that would have been in very Kyle Busch fashion,” Larson said. Finishing second with the right side of the car caved in from the wall comes fairly close.
Hamlin’s lap 78 cost him more than track position
Hamlin’s weekend started well. He won the pole and led 39 laps. On lap 78, while running fourth, he got up into the high line in Turn 4 and spun without hitting anything. NASCAR left the race green.
That made it worse. With no caution there was no free pass and no wave-around, so Hamlin had to make up the lost ground under green. He was 28th at the end of Stage 1 and 14th at the end of Stage 2, scored no stage points and finished 16th. He arrived 26 points behind Larson and left 40 behind. As we noted last week, Hamlin’s record on 1.5-mile tracks is the strongest card he holds in this Chase. He has fewer races left to play it.
Christopher Bell shows why stage points matter so much in this format. He finished 23rd, a lap down, after trouble in the second half of the race, and still scored 31 points because he had already collected stage points. He lost only five points to Larson on a day when his finishing position was poor.
What to watch at Charlotte
Race 6 of The Chase is the Bank of America 400 on Oct. 11, and the fall race is back on Charlotte Motor Speedway’s 1.5-mile oval. It’s the first time since 2017 that this race hasn’t been run on the Roval. That’s good news for anyone whose strength is intermediate tracks. Vegas showed what matters on that kind of track: pit road, clean air and getting to lapped traffic first.
After Charlotte come Phoenix, a Talladega race with a revised rules package and stage lengths, Martinsville and Homestead-Miami. That’s five races and a maximum of 375 points still available. The leader can lose a big chunk of his lead in one bad race. Briscoe showed that a perfect day only takes back so much from a driver who keeps finishing near the front, and Larson has done that in every race of this Chase so far.
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