A week ago at Kansas, Chase Briscoe took the lead from Kyle Larson on Lap 238 of 267 and lost it back to him on Lap 261, and Larson won. On Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Larson came after him again in the closing laps. This time Briscoe held on. Larson got loose on the last lap, scraped the wall and still finished second, 1.376 seconds back.
Briscoe won the South Point 400 in the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. He led 175 of the 267 laps and won both stages, the segments that award points along the way. It is his seventh Cup Series win, his second this season and his first at Las Vegas in 12 starts.
It was the first Cup race in Las Vegas since Kyle Busch, the two-time series champion and a Las Vegas native, died in May. Larson, who was a lap down early, chased Briscoe down in a car painted to honor Busch, and Briscoe bowed on the frontstretch after the win. Asked later about the Busch tributes, he said the bow "was special for sure."
Larson widened his lead in the Chase, NASCAR's 10-race championship playoff, from 26 points to 40 over Denny Hamlin, who started on the pole and finished 16th. Las Vegas was the fifth Chase race, so five remain. Briscoe is sixth, 84 points back (full standings).
"A little deja vu"
Briscoe had a cushion late. Then it went away. "With four to go, I had a pretty big gap on Kyle, and I thought I was good, and he just started hauling the mail again and caught me," he said. "It was a little deja vu like last week, truthfully."
His crew chief, James Small, put it this way: "It was like Jaws coming with Larson once he started running the fence," meaning racing right up against the outside wall. He also joked about what would have happened if Briscoe had lost: "Better mark me up on murder charges. I was a little worried I was going to have to throw him off this building if he gave this one away after last week."
Briscoe said Kansas was in the back of his mind. "You don't want it to be two weeks in a row where you lose a race in the last five to ten laps," he said. "I just feel like your confidence from the team guys, like, in their driver can go away really quickly." Had he lost again, he said, the crew would not have let him forget it: "They would have all kicked my butt."
Asked what changed from Kansas, Small kept it short. "Main thing is we didn't hit the wall a number of times," he said. "That was a positive."
Larson's last try came through Turns 3 and 4. "Just was trying to push hard through three and four to just build some momentum at him to, I don't know, try to get by down the straightaway," Larson said. "Yeah, just got really loose and overcorrected in the wall. Thankfully I was able to limp it home." Tyler Reddick finished third.
Before Larson arrived, Briscoe said, Bubba Wallace nearly got him. After the last pit stops, with about 35 laps to go, Wallace stayed right with Briscoe, who said he made "a pretty late block" on Wallace into Turn 1. "He was an inch away from getting me," Briscoe said. "If that happens, I feel like I probably don't win."
Larson, from a lap down
Larson was a lap down before Lap 50. His No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet was well off the pace on the first run, and the fix on pit road took long enough to cost him a lap. A spin brought out a caution on Lap 45, and the wave-around, a rule that lets lapped cars rejoin the lead lap, put him back on it. "Yeah, we came out a lap down," he said. "I think thankfully that caution came out and we were able to do the wave."
Briscoe, who did not know what had happened to Larson until a reporter told him afterward, put it in three words: "Caution saved him."
By the end, Larson said, he had caught Briscoe but used up his tires doing it. "My tires were getting kind of burned off by the time I got there," he said. "I moved up I feel like at the right time and did a decent job with it."
A tribute weekend
Larson said he wished he had won it in the tribute car. "I wish we could have won in this paint scheme and honoring Kyle, and that would be very Kyle Busch fashion," he said.
Briscoe said winning in Busch's hometown meant something. "If Kyle was in that position, he wouldn't have thrown it away, right?" he said. "To be able to do something I felt like would have earned his respect is obviously really important." Then: "Just miss him, truthfully. Still doesn't feel real."
The rest of Joe Gibbs Racing
Joe Gibbs Racing's Hamlin and Ty Gibbs started first and second. Hamlin led the first 34 laps and finished 16th. Gibbs, second on the grid, was penalized for speeding on pit road on Lap 35 and finished 17th. Christopher Bell led eight laps and finished 23rd, a lap down. "The 19 had a great day," team owner Joe Gibbs said. "Our other three cars all had issues."
Reddick, third in the No. 45 Toyota but still 106 points out of the Chase lead, fought through early alternator trouble and a slow pit stop, and was not celebrating. "We gained five points. Whoop-de-doo," he said. "We have to capitalize when we have Toyota Camrys as fast as this."
Austin Cindric finished fourth, Ryan Blaney fifth, William Byron sixth, Chase Elliott seventh, Wallace eighth, Shane Van Gisbergen ninth and Joey Logano 10th.
Still a long way back
Larson has 2,318 points. Hamlin is 40 back, Bell 55, Logano 71 and Blaney 80. Briscoe is 84 back, ahead of Reddick at 106 and Ty Gibbs at 110.
Briscoe pointed to Larson's own climb: 55 points back when the Chase began, 26 ahead four races later. He listed the points he has given away, including a late mistake at Bristol that dropped him from fifth to 25th, and Kansas, and still called his gap "definitely doable." Then: "It's still going to be extremely, extremely difficult, but I at least kept myself in the ball game." He thinks his best chance is Talladega, where cars race in tight packs and one crash can collect many of them, so contenders can finish "30th on back," he said: "We've used so many mulligans, right? You just can't have a bad race at Talladega."
Small's plan is simpler. "Keep winning," he said. "Pretty simple." He said the team will need to win at least two or three more times.
The Cup Series goes next to Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday, Oct. 11.