Chase Briscoe Is Handing Kyle Larson the Perfect NASCAR Championship Gift

George Howson|October 16, 2026|
  • Chase Briscoe has won two straight NASCAR Cup Series playoff races, but a NASCAR.com model says that streak is mostly helping the man he’s chasing, Kyle Larson.
  • Larson now sits at a 72.5% title favorite, with Christopher Bell at 10.6% and Denny Hamlin at 8.9%, largely because Briscoe’s wins at Las Vegas and Charlotte stole victories away from Larson’s closest rivals.
  • Briscoe himself is closing fast, down to a 65-point gap in fourth place after trailing by 123 before the streak, a remarkable turn for a driver who had no ride at all two years ago.

Every Win Builds the Championship Case of the Man He’s Chasing

Chase Briscoe has won two races in a row, in a Cup Series playoff format built to reward exactly that kind of hot streak, and the math still points at someone else holding the trophy in November. That’s the strange position Briscoe finds himself in heading into the Round of 8, four races from Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and the Championship 4 at Homestead-Miami. He’s driving the best stretch of his career. He’s also, according to the numbers, the driver doing the most to hand Kyle Larson a third Cup title.

“I don’t know what it is about these finishes,” Briscoe said after Charlotte, the second of his back-to-back wins. “I have to quit making it so exciting at the end.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Both wins came down to the final laps, with Briscoe managing equipment, traffic and his own nerves while a field of contenders closed in behind him. At Charlotte, he held off his own Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, Christopher Bell, for his eighth career win and third of the 2026 season, leading 62 laps on a night when his right front tire started giving out underneath him.

“When I got beyond those final lapped cars with five or six laps to go, I felt like I was going to knock the wall down,” Briscoe said. He said the tire “just quit turning” late in the run, and he held the line anyway, nursing a car that had nothing left to give.

A Model That Flips the Script on Who Benefits

NASCAR.com analyst Neil Paine ran the numbers after Charlotte, and they tell an odd story. Larson sits at 72.5% to win the championship. Bell, the man Briscoe just beat for his second straight win, is at 10.6%. Hamlin, who won the regular-season title but has struggled to close in the playoffs, sits at 8.9%. Briscoe, despite the two wins, comes in at just 4.6%.

The reason is simple math, not bad luck. Every race Briscoe wins is a race Bell or Hamlin didn’t win, and those two are the drivers sitting closest to Larson in the standings, the ones with the most to gain from taking points off him directly. Briscoe’s victories remove opportunities from Larson’s real threats without doing nearly enough damage to Larson’s own lead. Paine put it plainly: the driver who’s been doing Larson the most favors might suddenly become his biggest threat, if the streak keeps going. Three wins in a row would push Briscoe to a 20% title shot. A fourth, at Talladega of all places, where a crash or a late wreck can scramble the whole field in seconds, would flip him to the favorite at 55%.

That’s the tension sitting underneath every lap Briscoe runs the rest of this Round of 8. Keep winning races at this pace, and eventually the math stops helping Larson and starts hunting him.

From No Job to a Championship Garage in Days

None of this makes sense without going back to early 2024, when Stewart-Haas Racing shut its doors a few months into the season and let go all four of its Cup drivers at once: Briscoe, Josh Berry, Noah Gragson and Ryan Preece. Briscoe was SHR’s only former race winner on the roster, which made him the hottest name on a suddenly crowded free-agent market, but hot names still need a seat, and good seats were scarce.

So Briscoe texted Joe Gibbs Racing president Dave Alpern out of nowhere. He called it “a total shot in the dark.” Two days later, Alpern called back and set up a breakfast meeting with JGR executives that Friday. Joe Gibbs himself called Briscoe the next day and arranged a Sunday sit-down. Gibbs told him flatly that he’d know by Monday whether Martin Truex Jr. was returning to drive the iconic No. 19 car. Truex chose retirement instead, and within days Briscoe had signed.

Briscoe has described the swing in blunt terms: no job, twins on the way, and then one of the best rides in the garage landing in his lap within a week. He called the timing “nuts” and “perfect.” Briscoe is open about his Christian faith and says he sees that stretch of days as more than coincidence, and he credits JGR’s culture with giving him room to talk about it without flinching.

The Near-Miss That Set Up This Run

His first season at JGR wasn’t a smooth coronation. Briscoe took the Daytona 500 pole in 2025, finished fourth in the race, then got hit with a 100-point penalty tied to spoiler-base issues that was later overturned, a reversal he called a major relief. He made the playoffs that year off a walk-off win at Darlington, a moment that landed him on Netflix’s “Full Speed,” and he carried that momentum all the way to the Championship 4, posting a career-high 95.2 Driver Rating along the way. It was his first trip to NASCAR’s title-deciding race, and he left it without the trophy.

This season reads like the sequel nobody fully saw coming, and it’s chasing something Briscoe has never had: a first career Cup title, and a first-ever back-to-back playoff appearance in the Championship 4. The Charlotte win wasn’t clean theater for everyone involved, either. A crash elsewhere in the field tangled up Bubba Wallace and William Byron, and Alex Bowman, who wasn’t directly at fault, still felt it. “I hate that for the No. 24 and No. 23 teams,” Bowman said afterward.

Everyone Else Is Watching the Same Math

Joe Gibbs had his own version of nerves during the Charlotte finish, watching two of his own cars race for the win and knowing either outcome was fine except a wreck. “That’s always when I’m the most nervous, when a couple of our guys are running up front,” Gibbs said. He wasn’t worried about who crossed the line first. He was worried about both of them crossing it at all.

For Hamlin, the frustration is compounding. He locked up the regular-season title, the kind of accomplishment that used to carry real weight into the playoffs, and he’s still fighting to find speed when it matters most. “We got to execute better, be a little faster, all of the above,” Hamlin said. “We’re giving it all we got right now.” Larson, for his part, sounded almost unbothered by any of it, calling Charlotte a “good, solid day” and noting he was glad to stretch his points lead by nine. Chris Buescher, not fighting for a title spot but racing the same track, offered the simplest read of the night: “Charlotte has so much character.”

Four Races Left, and the Math Is Still Moving

Talladega looms as the round’s wild card, a superspeedway where a single late crash can rearrange the whole championship picture in an instant, which is exactly why Paine’s model treats a potential third Briscoe win there as a real turning point rather than a footnote. Phoenix, Martinsville and Homestead-Miami each carry their own elimination stakes, but Talladega is the one spot on the schedule where Briscoe’s low floor and high ceiling both show up at once.

Briscoe trails Larson by 65 points in fourth, a gap that has shrunk by nearly half since his streak started. He’s not just the driver making Larson’s path easier. He’s also the driver with the most room left to close it, race by race, if the finishes keep coming down to the same nerve he showed over those final laps at Charlotte. Two years after he had no seat at all, Briscoe is one more hot week away from being the biggest problem Larson has.

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George Howson

Engineer, Father, Travel addict, Writer, but most of all, a motorsport nut who is never afraid to ask the questions most would back out of and I always tell it like it is.

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