Chase Briscoe Holds Off Kyle Larson in Wild Final-Lap Finish to Win the South Point 400

LAS VEGAS — Chase Briscoe spent most of Sunday afternoon showing the NASCAR Cup Series exactly how a race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway is supposed to be won: out front, in clean air, untouchable. Then, with one lap left in the South Point 400, he had to survive the kind of chaos no dominant car deserves. Kyle Larson pounded the outside wall coming off Turn 4, collected Tyler Reddick in the wreckage, and both of them skidded across the finish line behind Briscoe's No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. Briscoe won by 1.376 seconds — his second victory of the season, the seventh of his Cup Series career, and his first at Las Vegas.

The finish was a mirror image of a week ago, and Briscoe knew it. Last Sunday at Kansas, he grabbed the lead with 30 laps to go, held it for 23 circuits, and watched Larson drive by with seven laps left before hitting the wall himself and fading to fourth. This time the roles held. "I hope that was a good race," Briscoe told the crowd after climbing out of his Bass Pro Shops/Tracker Toyota, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal. "From my seat there at the end, I don't know what else more you could want from a cat-and-mouse standpoint."

For most of the afternoon there was no cat and no mouse — just Briscoe, gone. He swept the first two stages, his first stage wins of the entire year, and banked 75 of a possible 76 points, missing a maximum day only on the fastest lap. According to USA Today, no other driver led more than 39 laps all day. Briscoe took the lead for good with 39 laps remaining when his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell lost power steering and had to give up the point, per Field Level Media.

Larson's run to second was the day's great salvage job. A 26-second pit stop on Lap 34 — an eternity for a right-front adjustment — dropped the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet a lap down and buried the points leader in 32nd. He clawed back onto the lead lap, scratched his way to a single stage point with a 10th-place run in Stage 2, and was all over Briscoe's bumper in the closing laps. "I was just hoping lapped traffic would work in my favor. I moved up at the right time," Larson told PRN after the race. "I got loose and overcorrected and thankfully made it to the finish line, and thankfully Reddick did too. A bummer to not win, but a lot better than where I thought it'd be."

Then came the final lap. Larson, running second, got loose off Turn 4, slapped the outside wall and slid down the track into Reddick. Reddick spun through the infield grass. Somehow both kept rolling — Larson limped home second, Reddick salvaged third after being forced to finish down pit road, according to Sports Illustrated. Austin Cindric came home fourth, his second consecutive top-five finish, followed by Ryan Blaney, William Byron, Chase Elliott, Bubba Wallace, Shane van Gisbergen and Joey Logano.

The win moves Briscoe to sixth in the Chase standings, 84 points behind Larson, who stretched his advantage over Denny Hamlin to 40 points with five races remaining, per the Tennessean's updated standings. And Briscoe admitted the Kansas heartbreak was fueling the whole afternoon. "I'll be honest, with about 35 to go, I was like, 'I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull this off,'" he told PRN in victory lane. "Especially after last week, you just don't want to lose two in a row with under 10 laps to go." Then came the joke that told you everything about the week he'd had: "I don't think I would have been able to get on the plane (if I had not won)," Briscoe said. "They would've all kicked my butt. (Crew chief James Small) definitely. I was scared to death to see him if I didn't pull that one off."

Hamlin's day was the disaster the box score only hints at. The polesitter — 28.910 seconds at 186.787 mph in Saturday qualifying, per NASCAR Wire Service — led 39 laps early and was chasing a third straight Las Vegas win, according to the Review-Journal. Then he spun by himself with two laps left in Stage 1, tore up the splitter cutting across the apron, and opened the final stage with fuel-pressure trouble. Sixteenth. No stage points. A 14-point swing to Larson, gone. His one consolation, per USA Today: the fastest lap of the day at 29.57 seconds.

Bell's power-steering failure cost him a shot at the win, too — second in Stage 1, third in Stage 2, then 23rd at the flag. He sits third in the standings, 55 points back. "Disappointing to not be able to capitalize on a day like today," Bell said in his post-race TV interview. "Some other guys had issues. It looked like it was an opportunity to make up some points and it didn't happen."

And then there was the reason the whole weekend felt different. This was the first Cup weekend at Las Vegas since Kyle Busch — the two-time champion, the hometown kid — died in May. The track held a "Moment of Rowdy" on Lap 8. Kurt Busch drove the pace car. And Larson spent the entire afternoon in a throwback to Busch's early Hendrick days, the yellow, blue and red Kellogg's colors with 'Tiny Kyle' on the door — then nearly won the race in it. (Read about the full tribute weekend here.)

It was a four-caution race on the hottest day of the season — upper 90s in the stands, 130 degrees inside the cars, per Field Level Media. Zane Smith's spin on Lap 43, a debris caution on Lap 94, Ty Gibbs busted for speeding on pit road. The kind of attrition afternoon the Chase always seems to produce at its halfway mark. Notably, per the Associated Press, a non-playoff driver has still never won a Cup playoff race at Las Vegas.

Next up: Charlotte and the Bank of America 400 — another weekend of Busch tributes, with a public Celebration of Life scheduled for Friday after the Truck Series race, per USA Today. Briscoe, meanwhile, leaves Las Vegas with the one thing he couldn't buy a week ago: proof he can close. "We were able to hold on. Awesome day," he said. "It definitely jumpstarts things a little bit more." With five races to go and 84 points to make up, he'll need every bit of that jump. It was quite a way to spend a Sunday in Las Vegas — and quite a finish to a wild sports weekend in this town.