- Kyle Larson wrecked on the final lap at Las Vegas Motor Speedway while running a paint scheme built to honor Kyle Busch, the Las Vegas native who died in May.
- Larson finished second behind Chase Briscoe and said after the race he wanted the tribute car in Victory Lane, not just on the track.
- The runner-up finish still grew his points lead to 40 over Denny Hamlin as the push toward NASCAR’s championship race at Phoenix continues.
A Paint Scheme Pulled From a Decade-Old Rivalry
Kyle Larson came off Turn 4 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway with his tires worn through and the lead within reach. He got loose, caught it, then lost the fight and slid into the wall. The car that limped home in second place wore a paint scheme pulled from 2007: the gold and red Kellogg’s livery Kyle Busch drove to victory at Bristol, in a car he spent that whole weekend complaining about. Larson wanted that car in Victory Lane. “I wish we could have won it in a paint scheme honoring Kyle Busch,” he said after the race.
Busch died in May. He grew up one freeway exit from Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and the South Point 400 is the closest thing the Cup Series schedule has to a race in his backyard. Hendrick Motorsports gave up its usual HendrickCars.com sponsorship on Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet for the weekend so the car could carry Busch’s old scheme instead, the exact one he wore when he won at Bristol in March 2007 in the Car of Tomorrow’s debut race. Busch hated that car. He climbed out of it in Victory Lane and told reporters, “I can’t stand to drive them. They suck.” He won in it anyway, his fourth career Cup victory and the last one he would get driving for Hendrick.
The Same Number, Told Twice
Larson has driven the No. 5 Chevrolet for Hendrick from 2021 on, the same number Busch carried from 2005 through 2008 before Dale Earnhardt Jr. took the seat. Casey Mears, Mark Martin and Kasey Kahne all drove it in the years between. When Larson signed with Hendrick, he asked for that specific number back. He has won 26 points races and two championships in it over that stretch, building a case as the best driver of his generation in a car number that already carried a long history before he arrived.
The connection between the two drivers runs deeper than a shared digit on a door panel. Larson has talked for years about watching Busch race as a kid and measuring himself against him once he got to the Cup garage. “To me, he’s just the best driver I’ve gotten to compete with in stock cars,” Larson has said. Off the track, Busch coached Larson’s son, Brexton, in junior racing, the kind of relationship that turns two rivals who spent a decade trading paint into something closer to family. That history is why Larson wanted Sunday’s result to go differently. A tribute livery that finishes second is a nice gesture. One that wins is a story people repeat for years.
How Las Vegas Slipped Away
Chase Briscoe led a race-high 175 of 267 laps in his Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and swept both stages, building a lead that looked comfortable in triple-digit heat on the Las Vegas asphalt. Larson spent the afternoon chipping away at it lap by lap, patient in a car that was off the pace on the first run and only came alive as the run went long. By the closing laps he and Tyler Reddick had cut Briscoe’s advantage to under four-tenths of a second, close enough that a caution or a single mistake up front could have handed Larson the lead.
Instead the mistake came from Larson. Pushing through Turns 3 and 4 on the final lap with tires that had nothing left, he got loose, tried to catch the car, and clipped the wall hard enough to end any chance of catching Briscoe. He crossed the line second, 1.376 seconds behind the winner once the gap opened back up in the race’s final moments. Reddick held on for third. Briscoe called the win, his second of 2026, a response to a race he narrowly lost the week before at Kansas. “So thankful to get this Toyota back in Victory Lane,” he said. Larson described his own afternoon more plainly: a fight, patience rewarded only partly, tires that ran out before the car in front of him did.
A Lead That Keeps Growing
The finish still worked in Larson’s favor where points get counted. His points lead over Hamlin grew to 40, up from 26 heading into the weekend. Christopher Bell sits third, 55 points back, with Joey Logano fourth at 71 back and Ryan Blaney fifth at 80 back. Briscoe’s win moved him up in the standings as well, keeping Joe Gibbs Racing in the championship conversation alongside Hendrick.
- Top five at Las Vegas: Briscoe, Larson, Reddick, Austin Cindric, Blaney.
- Denny Hamlin started from the pole and spun in traffic, finishing 16th.
- Christopher Bell led laps before losing power steering in the second half and finished 23rd.
None of it was the storybook ending Larson wanted to write in Busch’s honor, at a track thirty minutes from the neighborhood where Busch learned to drive. But NASCAR’s point system does not care how a car gets to the line, and a second-place run in a must-perform stretch of the season is not a result Larson can afford to treat as a disappointment, whatever the paint scheme meant to him personally.
What Comes Next
The Round of 8 moves to Charlotte Motor Speedway next, for the Bank of America 400, the track’s first fall oval race in nine years. Four more races stand between Larson and a shot at a third championship: Charlotte, Homestead-Miami, Martinsville, and the title race at Phoenix in November. A 40-point cushion is not nothing, but Hamlin, Bell, Logano and Blaney all know what it takes to close a gap like that over a short stretch of racing, and Larson has spent the last several seasons proving he can be beaten on a bad day.
A Season Spent Carrying His Name
Busch finished his career with 63 Cup wins, ninth on the all-time list, plus two championships, in 2015 and 2019. He also holds the record for wins in both the Xfinity Series and the Truck Series, a run across all three national series that nobody else in the garage has matched. He died in May at 41, a loss NASCAR, his family and Richard Childress Racing called sudden. Vegas was never just another stop on the schedule for him. He was born in the city, and the track sits close enough to where he grew up that fans who watched him race as a teenager could drive twenty minutes and see him compete as a two-time champion.
NASCAR has worked tribute moments into the schedule all year, from a moment of silence before the Daytona 500 to the Celebration of Life that drew drivers, crew members and fans to Charlotte earlier this month. Larson’s Las Vegas scheme fit into that pattern, but it carried more meaning than a logo change. It put Busch’s old number, his old sponsor, and his old habit of winning uncomfortable cars back on a Cup track for one Sunday. Larson spent the second half of the race trying to make sure that tribute ended with a trophy instead of a tire mark on the outside wall.
For now, the tribute car goes back in the shop, and Larson moves on to Charlotte still wearing the points lead he came to Las Vegas with, plus a little more. The next time Hendrick puts Busch’s name or number on a car, Larson will likely get another shot at the finish he wanted on Sunday. Whether that chance comes before the season ends, or whether it becomes a yearly tradition the way so many NASCAR tributes eventually do, is a question nobody at Hendrick has answered yet. What is clear is that Larson is not finished trying.
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