Kyle Larson took over the lead for the final time on Lap 223. A caution would quickly fly three laps later for Ty Gibbs’ tire literally falling off of his No. 54 Toyota bringing out the 7th and final caution of Sunday’s South Point 400 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Larson would not only lead the field to pit road for the final time of the race, but his pit crew got him out first to lead them out of pit road as well.

Larson would get a great launch of the final restart and never look back in leading the final 45 laps en route to the win in the Round of 8 opener which as a result of Larson’s 23rd career NASCAR Cup Series victory, 4 of which coming this season alone, the Hendrick Motorsports driver to advance to the Championship 4 for the second time of his career. The other came in his championship winning season of 2021 for which he won 10 times and led 2,581 laps.

On Sunday, Larson would lead a race-high 133 of 267 pushing him over the 1,000 laps led for 2023 (1,031). 9 of his 23 wins now have come in the postseason tying him with Carl Edwards and Kyle Busch for 7th all-time.

On paper, the win looks like it came easily. Most laps led (133). Swept both stages. Win. However, he lost control of his No. 5 Chevrolet while exiting Turn 2 late in the second stage but he’d rebound to not slow him up to win the stage outright.

Then, pole sitter Christopher Bell was chasing Larson hard in the closing laps of the race and nearly got him at the line as Larson beat Bell by just .082-seconds.

“Thankfully, Christopher always races extremely clean,” Larson said. “Could have got crazier than it did coming to the start-finish line. Thank you to him for racing with respect there. What a job done by my team, too. Just a great race car. I almost gave it away there in (Turns 1 and 2), getting sideways, hitting into the wall. Had to fight back there with our balance. They got it much closer there in the lead.”

Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski and Ross Chastain rounded out the top five in a thrilling race.

William Byron felt like he was going to have a better car but faded in the first stage to 10th. They’d work on his car but it wasn’t a top 5 car as he came home 7th. He’s +9 in the standings.

Truex and Hamlin are each +2 after finishing 9th and 10th respectively. Tyler Reddick gambled from 12th to take 2 tires at the end of the first stage to come out of the pits in 3rd. He’d finish 4th in the opening stage and those 7 stage points helped soften the blow as he’s -16 after finishing the race in 8th. Ryan Blaney went from -10 to -17 despite finishing 6th and netting 8 stage points. Chris Buescher had no stage points and finished 11th dropping him from -3 to -23.

Larson Championship Front Runner

Hendrick Motorsports has now won the first race of each of the three rounds thus far. Kyle Larson won the Southern 500 (Round 1). William Byron won the second-round opener at the Texas Motor Speedway. Now, Larson picks up his 2nd win of the playoffs on Sunday in Vegas. If they can go 4-for-4, then HMS will score their 15th Cup Series title.

They’ve got a great shot now too.

The winner of the Round of 8 opener has gone on to win the championship in 3 of the last 5 years including 2 straight. It’s a massive advantage that Larson utilized in 2021.

Last year, Joey Logano had the rare advantage as well as being the only driver from the Round of 8 to spend the last two weeks knowing that he’s racing for a championship in Phoenix. He won the third-round opener in Las Vegas. With Larson winning in Homestead a week later, it meant that Logano came into Martinsville (the cutoff race) as the only one still knowing that he’s racing for a championship. Why would the other 7 dream of Phoenix when they first have to get to Phoenix?

“We’ve had three weeks to think about our race car and how we want to play the race out, how we want to run practice,” Logano said a year ago in this moment. “We’ve had the opportunity to really, really dive deep into Phoenix, so we’ll take that to our advantage and move on.

“Well, it’s really nice because it’s even a bigger advantage than it was when we were racing in Miami because the car has to leave sooner now, right? We had to leave Wednesday noontime to get here on time.

“If you imagine, like, you got to be really prepared because if you race Sunday and you finally realize you’re in, then you have Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday you better be done with everything.

“In that time, the driver has to go do media, the driver has all these other things they got to do on top of that. There’s not time to prep the correct way, whereas our team, we’ve had a couple weeks to really focus in 100%, at least 95%, on Phoenix.

“We had a conversation about Miami. Yeah, sure, sounds good, let’s do it. What about Phoenix? That’s how our conversations were, as they should be. The only one that matters is Sunday.”

That backs up what he said a couple of weeks prior after scoring that South Point 400 win.

“Doesn’t hurt,” Logano said then. “I think it means a lot, if I’m being honest.  I think it does.  I’ve lived this story once where you really just kind of — you’re not last minute trying to throw together a championship car for Phoenix because you’re trying to build so many other ones.  It just gives the team time to really start focusing on a car that can put us in the position to win.

“If you only have so much time in the day, you got to prioritize, you’re going to prioritize to get yourself in the Championship 4 first.  Now that we did that, we’re going to have 100% of our time to Phoenix.”

In saying that, you could in theory approach the final two weeks of the third round differently which could also be a detriment.

“We approach them to win, just like we always do,” Logano said on his approach over the next two weeks. “Same meetings and prep like we always do.  I just assume that we’ll probably focus a little bit more on Phoenix at this point.”

So does that make Larson THE championship favorite?

It could be easy for the Larson to fall into that trap of letting loose the last couple of weeks. Not having to worry about points or wins or anything truly could keep them into a dangerous position of falling out of that competitive fire. For drivers everyone else, they’ve had to fight the entire postseason to make it here. They’ve not had the luxury of letting their guard down like Larson will for the next two weeks.

Can you just flip that switch all the sudden back to the highest of levels and match the other three in Phoenix?

“Of course it means a lot, particularly to win that first race in the final round of the Round of Eight I should say, because it lets the team, at least the 22 car team, I won’t say relax a little bit, but use the two following races, which they did at Homestead and last Sunday at Martinsville, to, I’ll say, fine-tune the game, to rehearse, to a certain extent, for Joey to stay sharp,” said Walt Czarnecki of Team Penske last Fall.

“He and I talked about it before the race. Believe me, he wasn’t sitting back. He wasn’t waiting. He wanted to stay sharp. He wanted to stay in the game, so to speak.

“That’s what it really allowed us to do. That’s without having the tension of gosh, we’ve got to do something here at Homestead or something here at Martinsville to make the show.”

Cliff Daniels doesn’t necessarily agree.

“I don’t know that it’s a lot different just because of the new car,” he says. “To me, just from the team exercise dynamic of things, if we say we’re just going to cruise for the next two weeks, then you’re not operating with the edge that I think you’re going to need to win it in Phoenix.

“There’s two more races to win. So now the way I see it is this. Now that we’re in the position that we’re in, we get to play those races to win, a late call, flipping a stage, if a caution comes out, whatever it may be, versus having to play the race for points. I think that’s the position it puts us in the next two weeks.

“From a team exercise, all those other guys are so good, they’re going to be pushing hard to win the next two weeks. I think we have to match that intensity so we’re going into Phoenix with the right level of intensity ourselves, get there with strength.”

Next up is Darlington and Larson is the defending race winner. Then, it’s to Martinsville to where Larson won the race there this past spring. Can he win out is the real question.

---

Bell’s Championship Shot Comes Up Just Short

Christopher Bell should be celebrating a runner-up finish in Sunday’s South Point 400. However, he was in no mood for smiling after coming home just .082-seconds away from a second straight Championship 4 berth.

Bell started on the pole and led 61 of the 267 laps on Sunday but just didn’t have enough to get to Larson on the final run to net just his second win of the season.

While Bell tried hard chasing Larson down and made a move for the victory, it wasn’t enough. Despite scoring 17 stage points (2nd most) on the day and coming home 2nd, Bell is still 2 points below the cutline heading to Homestead next week. It gained him just 6 points as he entered -8.

“I feel like that was my moment,” a disappointed Bell said. “That was my moment to make the Final Four. Didn’t quite capture it. I don’t know. Coming to the checkered there, I knew that he was going to be blocking, so I’m like, I’m going to try to go high. He went high. I don’t even know if I had a run to get by him there coming to the line. Just wasn’t enough.”

It makes you wonder if this was his shot.

For Homestead, Bell has just one Top-10 finish in three Homestead Cup tries (11th last year) and was also sixth, fifth, 14th and 23rd respectively in his last four Darlington starts.

Then at Martinsville, he was always a fade until his playoff win in this very race last year. Bell had three Top 8’s, two of which are Top 5’s, in four Truck Series starts at Martinsville. However, in five Cup Series starts entering last October’s race, he finished 28th, 15th, seventh, 17th and 20th respectively with nine career laps led…Then he went out and led 150 laps to take a clutch victory. This past spring, he was back to his old ways in a 16th place finish without any laps led. On short tracks this season, he’s also finished sixth, fourth 16th, sixth, 29th, 20th, third too.

While he’s finished 8th, 3rd, 4th, 14th, 15th, 2nd in the last 6 weeks, he’s going to eventually have to find victory lane if he wants a shot at Phoenix.

His only win in 2023 was on dirt.

“I know we may not be the championship favorite,’’ Bell said on Saturday. “But I know we have everything we need to do it.’’

“We’re in a good place.”

Now, he may not be.

He’s 0-for-6 when starting from the pole and among the 32 Cup Series races here, just once did the pole winner wind up in victory lane. That was Kyle Busch 14 years ago in 2009.

---

Truex Rebounds But Pit Call Cost Him Dearly

Martin Truex Jr. was grateful for a Round of 8 reset. He had to be thanking his lucky stars that he had such a strong regular season to net him 36 playoff points. He’s had to lean on them in each of the first two rounds. Coming into Sunday’s race, Truex had finished 18th, 36th, 19th, 17th, 18th, 20th this postseason. He’s led no laps. In fact, if you go back to the regular season finale at Daytona, he had finished 18th or worse in all seven races.

That’s why Sunday was so big for him. He couldn’t afford to start off on the backfoot again. At Darlington, he finished 18th. For the Round of 12 opener at Texas, he was 17th.

But, this was at Vegas. He qualified 4th. This track is better suited for him anyways. Truex had 11 Top-8s’s in his last 12 Las Vegas starts entering this weekend. He was sixth and fifth respectively at Kansas last season and eighth and 36th this year. He’s had a Top-8 finish in four of the eight intermediate races this season too.

Could he capitalize on a great starting spot?

He did in Stage 1 coming home 5th netting him 6 stage points. Unfortunately, this is the part of the race to where it all unraveled. His crew chief James Small made a questionable call to leave Truex out at the stage break. It was to get him clear air in the lead. He saw that a handful of cars pit for 2 tires on their pit stop towards the end of the opening stage and felt like with four fresh tires just a few laps earlier, why not gamble and see if it helps.

Unfortunately, it didn’t. Truex quickly fell backwards. he was 16th by time a caution came for Carson Hocevar’s crash in Turn 2 on Lap 110. He’d ride outside the top 10 for much of the rest of the way. He was 20th at the end of the second stage and looked like he was going to be below the cutline leaving here.

Then came a rebound. Truex had a great car over the final stint and would leap back into the top 10 to finish 9th in his No. 19 Toyota. That put him +2 in the standings which is far better than it was looking.

“I don’t know what we had going on,” said Truex Jr. “Restarting up front, we were pretty good, and then on the long runs, really good — I thought — probably a third-place car, but once we got back there — 16th, 18th whatever it was — it was just really bad on the restart. I would lose three, four, five spots every time and then once we got strung out and got going, I would pick them off and work our way forward, but then we would get another caution and I would lose a couple more.”

The Monday morning quarterback says they should have pit and they’d have been in contention for not just more stage points for the second stage but a likely top 5 finish in the end, but was he better than Larson or Bell? He was probably a 3rd-5th place car so that comeback to get to 9th really only lost him 4-6 points.

It was the loss of second stage points.

Still, to finally get a top 10 finish could be the momentum they need.

Next up it’s to Homestead to where he has 3 top 2 finishes in his last 5 and would have been 4 if not for an issue on his final pit stop a year ago. 

Martinsville winds the Round of 8 down with Truex winning 3 of the last 8 there.

“We’ve won races this year, we’ve won the regular season championship, just got to get back to things clicking,’’ Truex, who could join Busch and Logano as the only multi-time champions in the series said on Saturday. “All it takes is having a good day today (in qualifying) and a good day tomorrow and we’re right back on track. We know what we can do. …I feel good about our team and where we’re at.

At one point, Truex was a 1.5-mile master. Among his first 19 race wins, 11 of them were on these tracks. 2 more were at Pocono and 1 at Fontana. He had just 1 win on a track that’s 1-mile in size or shorter and that was his first career win at Dover. 

Over his last 14 races wins however, 10 of which were on tracks 1-mile in length or shorter. His only wins since the end of 2019 were 3 at Martinsville (2019, 2020, 2021), 2 at Richmond, 1 at Phoenix (2021), 1 at Dover (2023), 1 at Loudon (2023), 1 at Darlington and 1 at Sonoma.

---

3 of 4 Eliminated Last Round Nab Top 5’s

Brad Keselowski was wondering, “what if” about Talladega. What if he doesn’t push Carson Hocevar too hard late. Maybe he’s in the Round of 8.

Kyle Busch was wondering the same about his early race crash at Talladega and the week prior at Texas. Maybe he’d be still dancing too.

Ross Chastain had to be wondering what if about the Talladega crash with Busch. Maybe he’d be still alive too.

Even more so now for this trio.

Busch brought his No. 8 Chevrolet home third in Sunday’s South Point 400 for his second straight third place finish. Keselowski was 4th in his No. 6 Ford for his 6th top 10 result in the last 8 races on the season. Chastain was fifth in his No. 1 Chevrolet for his second top 5 in the last four races. He had 2 in the previous 17.

Busch was quietly solid all day after qualifying 6th and finishing 8th and 7th in the pair of stages.

 “Really appreciate Randall (Burnett) and all the guys giving me a great piece when we unloaded here,” said Busch. “We qualified up front and ran top 10 all day. Our weak spots are just restarts. I just get into bad spots and lose spots at times and can’t get my way forward, like a couple of other guys can do a better job at doing that.”

Chastain overcame a speeding penalty early to get back to second by the end of the second stage and while he tried multiple times to get Bell for the lead in the final stage, he lost spots to finish P5.

“It feels good to be competitive — just be able to drive by cars,” he said. “We were just a couple of adjustments away and we got it there late in Stage Two. We drove from 12th to second, and from there, just both sides of the balance — too loose for our No. 1 Worldwide Express Chevy, and then too tight there at the end. If we nailed it, balance-wise, I think we had a shot.”

Keselowski was the best of all. He started 21st but took 2 tires late in the opening stage to end up third. That track position healed all. He was 5th in Stage 2 and ended up 4th in the end. Keselowski led 38 laps on the day.

“We just executed really well on pit road, with strategy and on restarts,” Keselowski said. “We executed really well, but I feel like we needed a touch more speed and a few breaks to go our way to be able to win. Kyle was just a little faster. If we were in front of him, I think we might have been able to hold him off, but he was just really fast.”

---

HMS/JGR Dominated Again

It’s no secret, when you come to the four annual stops between Las Vegas and Kansas, you’re going to have to go through Hendrick Motorsports and Toyota’s in general if you want to win on these 1.5-mile tracks. That didn’t change on Sunday.

Hendrick Motorsports led 134 laps while Joe Gibbs Racing led 93. Combined, that’s 227 of 267 laps led among this grouping.

Toyota’s led 319 of 534 laps in the last two Kansas spring races and 177 of 535 in the Fall. Hendrick Motorsports led 164 of the same 534 laps in the pair of Kansas spring races and 262 of the 535 in the Fall.

In Kansas 1 in 2022, Toyota (171 of 267 laps led) went 1-3-4-5-6. HMS went 2-9-16-29 after leading 64 of 267 laps. In Kansas 1 this year, Toyota (148 of 267 laps led) went 1-4-8-9 while HMS (100 of 267 laps led) went 2-3-7-25.

For the last two Fall races, Toyota (94 of 267 laps led) went 1-2-3-5 and 1-2-8-14-32-36 (83 of 268 laps led). HMS went 4-6-8-11 (116 of 267 laps led) and 4-6-10-15 (146 of 268 laps led).

For Vegas, it’s just as good. The last two spring races, Toyota led 123 of 541 laps while HMS led 292 laps themselves.

In Vegas 1 of 2022, Toyota led 107 of 274 laps while HMS led 51. This past year, Toyota went 4-5-7-11 and led 16 of 271 laps but HMS led 241 of 271 in going 1-2-3 for the race, 1-2 in Stage 1 and 1-2-3 in Stage 2.

Combined, that’s 415 of 541 laps led in the spring Vegas races.

En fuego.