Chase Briscoe's right front tire was coming apart over the last few laps of the Bank of America 400 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday, and Christopher Bell, his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, closed in on him. The two Toyotas made contact coming to the line. Briscoe got there first by 0.029 seconds, the second-closest finish in the speedway's history, according to NASCAR.
It was Briscoe's second straight win, a week after he won at Las Vegas. He led twice for 62 laps in the No. 19 Toyota. It is his eighth win in 212 Cup Series races, his third this season and his first Cup win at Charlotte Motor Speedway in seven starts. Ryan Blaney finished third, Josh Berry fourth and Denny Hamlin fifth.
"It just quit turning"
Bell led when the race's sixth and last caution came out on Lap 206. Briscoe's crew got him off pit road first. He led from Lap 207 to the finish, and the final green-flag run, 57 laps, was the longest of the race. "The last stop was unreal," team owner Joe Gibbs said.
With about six laps to go, Briscoe caught a pack of lapped cars. "All of a sudden I noticed my car quit turning all at once, and then after a lap or two I realized that my right front was about to go down," he said. "I was just kind of hanging on."
His crew chief, James Small, said the right front had unraveled. "It's halfway gone," Small said. "That's why our pace kind of plummeted right at the end."
Briscoe called the finish "probably the biggest gap ever blown of a race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, but glad we were able to hold on."
Bell's side
Bell started 17th, won the second stage, one of two segments that pay points before the finish, and led every lap from the restart after it, Lap 173, until the last caution. He led three times for 93 laps in all.
Briscoe got by him on pit road, and Bell nearly got the lead back on the track. "I got a lot closer than I thought I was going to," he said. Asked whether an earlier call to stop saving fuel would have made a difference, he said, "I don't know."
Small had no complaint about the contact. "That's just good hard racing," he said. "Yeah, you can't get mad about that at all. Thankfully it hurt Christopher a little more than us."
Briscoe said he met Bell racing online when he was probably 12 or 13. "Of all the people that I could have raced against there to the line, Christopher is the most respectful guy in the garage," he said.
Bell gained four points on the Chase leader, Kyle Larson. "I mean, we should be really good at the next couple of races," he said. "Yeah, hopefully we can keep bringing these fast race cars and see what happens."
Where the Chase stands
Larson leads the Chase, NASCAR's 10-race championship playoff, with 2,367 points. Hamlin is 49 back, up from 40. Bell is 51 back, Briscoe 65, Blaney 85 and Joey Logano 92. Four races remain.
Larson started on the pole, led five times for a race-high 97 laps and won the first stage, then finished sixth. "I was not in a position of power. I was hanging on," he said. The top two pushed hard, he said, and he settled in to save his tires, then got loose: "I was just hanging on the last 15, 18 laps."
Hamlin was sent to the rear for a pit-road safety violation early and scored no first-stage points. Once it cooled off after dark, he said, "we just lost the edge that we had."
Three other Chase drivers had worse days. Bubba Wallace and William Byron were collected in a Lap 77 crash with Alex Bowman near the exit of Turn 2 and finished 37th and 39th. Ty Gibbs was caught in an early incident with Brad Keselowski and finished 34th, eight laps down.
"Step on their throats"
Briscoe came to Charlotte 84 points behind Larson and gained 19. "The only way you're going to ever cut into that gap of now 65 points is you have to win races and get that big chunk of points on him," he said. He called Talladega, the second of the four remaining races, the tipping point. Small called it "an absolute wild card."
"I think we've got to step on their throats while we can," Small said. "You've got to keep winning. It's still a big gap."
Is Briscoe that kind of driver? "Definitely not," Small said, to laughter. So how does he get him there? "He puts his helmet on and he's silent, but he's like a silent assassin," Small said. "He may not show it on the outside, but I know deep down he wants to win as bad as us."
The Cup Series goes next to Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, Oct. 18.