Joey Logano won the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night in the No. 22 Ford, taking the inside lane past a side-by-side battle for the lead on Lap 494 of 500 and beating Kyle Larson, who started first, to the line by 1.248 seconds. It was his 40th career Cup Series win.
His Team Penske teammate had led more laps than anyone. Ryan Blaney, in the No. 12 Ford, started 29th, led 202 laps, more than twice Logano's 93, and won the second of the race's three stages. He finished 33rd after a wreck with Carson Hocevar of Spire Motorsports while the two raced for second, and after the race they traded punches on pit road.
Larson's runner-up finish put him atop the standings in The Chase, NASCAR's 10-race, 16-driver championship playoff, one point ahead of Denny Hamlin with seven races left. Logano is third, 16 points back.
How Logano got there
Logano's crew chief, Paul Wolfe, kept him on the track during an early caution while others pitted, and Logano won the first stage. He still had to pit afterward, which he said left him 16th, and he finished the second stage third.
Late in the race the lead belonged to Ty Gibbs, who led 120 laps, including every lap from 435 through 491, in a Toyota carrying a throwback M&M's paint scheme honoring two-time Cup champion Kyle Busch, who died in May.
The last of 10 caution periods came out on Lap 487. On the restart Gibbs and Hocevar ran side by side for the lead, with Larson behind Hocevar in the top lane. Logano, who restarted fourth, said he expected Larson to dive to the inside. When Larson went high instead, Logano took the bottom.
"I was like, okay, I'll just do the opposite, I'll go to the bottom," Logano said. "Hopefully they wash each other out, and that's exactly what happened. Just rolled underneath him."
Hocevar led Laps 492 and 493. Logano led the last seven, Larson followed him through to second, and Gibbs faded to fifth. Gibbs said he had stayed high "a little bit too long" through Turns 1 and 2, which "shut the 77 off," Hocevar's car, and let Larson's No. 5 get in.
A week earlier at World Wide Technology Raceway, Logano had led the most laps and finished third. "This time they all just kind of cleared the way and the seas parted for me and around I went," he said.
On the frontstretch he called it a gift. "I thought there for a minute, I was like, okay, I might just finish third or fourth here tonight, but all kind of worked our way up and I was like, well, merry Christmas to me. I got a gift there."
Some of the crowd booed him. "That's all right," Logano said. "There's a lot of 22 guys out there too."
The win was his third this season and tied him with Mark Martin for 20th on the all-time list. It was also his 38th for Team Penske, the most by any driver in team history, one more than Rusty Wallace.
Hocevar finished third, Christopher Bell fourth and Gibbs fifth. Josh Berry was sixth, and Bubba Wallace, Hamlin, William Byron and Ryan Preece completed the top 10. NASCAR's post-race inspection found no issues.
The wreck, and the fight
On Lap 457 Blaney passed Hocevar for second and, according to NASCAR's official race report, moved down the track to block Hocevar's line. The two made contact, and Blaney's Ford went into the outside wall in Turn 1. The car was too damaged to continue.
Logano was close behind and nearly collected. "Fortunately last minute Blaney slid down off the wall and we just shot the gap there," Wolfe said in his news conference.
The two drivers do not agree on what happened.
Blaney's complaint was that Hocevar never lifted off the throttle. "I just felt like he didn't lift," Blaney said. "I left him plenty of room for a lap before that. I didn't chop him. I didn't run him into the fence or nothing like I easily could have. I protected the bottom, and he just decided he wanted to be there and didn't lift and wrecked me."
Hocevar's account is that he had the momentum to pull alongside on the inside. "I wasn't trying to wreck him," he said in a pit road interview after the race.
On pit road Blaney approached Hocevar with a hand to his shoulder, and Hocevar landed two punches, the report says. Blaney lost his balance and fell backward, got up and landed a left hand to Hocevar's face before officials and crew members pulled them apart.
"There wasn't a whole lot of talking," Hocevar said in the same interview. "He just kind of said one thing and then went after me, and I wasn't going to take it." Later in it he said: "I got a run to cross him over. It looked like he spun himself and then he wants to instigate a fight."
Logano said he had not seen the fight. "They'll probably forget who won the race," he said.
The Chase
Bristol was the third of those 10 races. The 16 drivers' points were reset to between 2,000 and 2,100 before the first one, and Saturday paid Logano 73 points and Blaney 19.
Larson has 2,206 points, Hamlin 2,205. Logano is third at 2,190 and Bell fourth at 2,189, 17 back. Gibbs is fifth, 42 back. Blaney fell to sixth, 52 back. Hocevar is eighth, 85 back.
Larson is the only driver with a top-five finish in all three Chase races: fifth in the opener at Darlington, a win at World Wide Technology Raceway and second at Bristol.
"It's three top 5s to open the Chase and looks like leading the points now by just a point," Larson said.
The Cup Series goes next to Kansas Speedway for the Hollywood Casino 400 on Sunday, Sept. 27, at 3 p.m. ET on USA Network. Larson leads by one.