- Chase Briscoe blocked Bubba Wallace by a single car length in the final laps at Las Vegas, admitting after the race he thought the move had failed.
- The win pulled Briscoe out of a historically bad start to 2026, when he scored one point in three of his first four races.
- Crew chief James Small says Phoenix and Homestead both favor Briscoe’s car, keeping his title hopes alive heading into the next round.
A block that almost didn’t work
Chase Briscoe thought he had lost the race. Coming to the white flag at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on October 4, he threw a block on Bubba Wallace entering Turn 1, the kind of move that either wins a race or ends one in the wall. “I thought I was in big trouble,” Briscoe said afterward. “I made a pretty late block on Bubba entering Turn 1. He was an inch away from getting me, and if that happens, I don’t win.” He held the line. Wallace backed off by the width of a fender. Briscoe crossed the line first, his second win of the season and his first at Las Vegas, and the kind of victory that keeps a season alive rather than ending it.
Behind him, the race nearly swallowed two more contenders. Kyle Larson lost the rear end of his Chevrolet on the final lap and collected Tyler Reddick, who slid into the infield grass and somehow kept his car pointed the right way to finish third. Larson held onto second. Denny Hamlin, who started on pole and ran the fastest lap of the day, finished 16th and was shut out of stage points entirely, a quiet disaster buried under Briscoe’s headline.
The season that almost never got here
Briscoe’s 2026 started so badly that a playoff spot looked like fiction. Over his first four points races, he scored a single point in three of them, each time through no fault of his own: mechanical failures and contact from other cars left him parked early, watching the field drive away. By the time the dust settled on that stretch, he sat 21st in the standings, five spots outside the 16-driver postseason field, in a season where Joe Gibbs Racing had brought him in specifically to contend.
He climbed back one race at a time. A win at Chicagoland gave him his first trip to victory lane in 2026. A second-place run at Richmond’s Cook Out 400 in August added more points. A third-place finish at Kansas pushed him past Shane van Gisbergen on the bubble and into the playoff field outright. None of it looked dominant. All of it mattered. NASCAR scrapped the win-and-advance format for 2026, replacing the four-round elimination bracket and winner-take-all finale with a single ten-race points battle that runs straight through to Homestead-Miami Speedway on November 8. There is no Championship 4 anymore, no cutoff race that erases every number that came before it. Every point from the regular season carries forward, which means Briscoe’s miserable April still costs him something today, and his Las Vegas win is worth exactly as much as it would have been in June.
A crew chief who has seen worse
James Small, Briscoe’s crew chief, has spent the back half of the season talking his driver through exactly the kind of math most teams would rather not do out loud. “If we can have more solid weeks, anything’s possible,” Small said after Las Vegas. “We’ve still got some really good tracks coming up for us, so we’re definitely not out of it. Phoenix is gonna be a great track for us, and we get Homestead.” It’s the language of a team that has learned not to get ahead of itself, built across a year of near-misses, DNFs, and one race at a time recoveries that never quite looked like a trend until they suddenly did.
Briscoe knows what a title shot with Gibbs means, and what it cost to get back here. A year ago, in his first season with the team after Stewart-Haas Racing folded down to a single car without Tony Stewart in the ownership group, Briscoe advanced deep into the playoffs and made his presence felt immediately. Repeating that with a car that nearly missed the field altogether carries a different kind of satisfaction, the sort that comes from clawing rather than cruising.
What Phoenix and Homestead actually demand
The next round opens at Phoenix Raceway on October 18, a flat, grinding mile that rewards patience over outright speed, followed by a return to Charlotte’s road course configuration for the first time on the oval layout in nine years, and then the stretch run to Homestead. Small’s read on his own car, that Phoenix and Homestead suit it, is not an idle comment. Briscoe’s strongest runs this year have come at medium-speed tracks where handling counts for more than horsepower, and both of those venues fit that description better than the high-banked superspeedways where his season nearly ended in April.
Bubba Wallace, for his part, had no complaints worth repeating in the media center. He had spent the closing laps running Briscoe down inch by inch, the kind of pursuit that usually ends with a pass completed rather than denied, and he simply ran out of racetrack. That is the version of racing Las Vegas Motor Speedway tends to produce in its October date: long green-flag runs, tires that fall off just enough to open a door, and a final restart that turns a comfortable lead into a coin flip. Briscoe’s block worked for one reason: he committed to it a half second before Wallace expected him to, closing the gap to the wall before Wallace’s nose ever arrived. A half second later and the story would read very differently today.
Kyle Larson still sits atop the points table, and Denny Hamlin, chasing a first championship after six career wins at Las Vegas alone, remains the most dangerous name in the field on raw speed. But a ten-race points format rewards consistency over any single Sunday, and Briscoe has now shown twice in five months that he can produce exactly that when a season threatens to collapse under him. The inch he kept between his car and Bubba Wallace’s nose on October 4 bought him nothing more than a chance. For a driver who spent April watching his season evaporate one DNF at a time, a chance is still the rarest thing on the board.
What happens next depends on whether Briscoe can turn one strong week into four. The format gives him no shortcut, no single win that erases a bad points day, only the same grind that put him 21st in April and sixth after Las Vegas. He has already proven he can climb. Whether he can keep climbing all the way to Homestead is the only question left on the board.
For Joe Gibbs Racing, Briscoe’s recovery means something beyond one driver’s championship odds. The team fielded four cars as recently as a few seasons back and has leaned on its depth to cover for a slow start from any one of them. Briscoe’s April collapse tested that depth in a way the organization hadn’t faced in years, and the response, win at Chicagoland, podium finishes layered in through the summer, now a Las Vegas victory with a playoff spot on the line, reads like the kind of season a team points to when a driver’s early numbers scare off outside doubt. Briscoe never stopped saying he expected to turn it around. Few outside his own shop believed him until Chicagoland. Fewer still believed it again until Las Vegas.
Sources:
- https://www.nbcsports.com/nascar/news/chase-briscoes-win-in-las-vegas-keeps-his-nascar-cup-series-championship-hopes-alive
- https://www.nascar.com/news-media/2026/10/04/2026-cup-series-las-vegas-chase-race-recap-results/
- https://beyondtheflag.com/chase-briscoe-out-panic-mode-these-5-nascar-playoff-drivers-arent-01kp2rwemrhw
- https://www.nascar.com/news-media/2026/10/04/cup-series-2026-chase-las-vegas-larson-reddick-last-lap/
