- Denny Hamlin can become only the second driver to win three straight Cup races at Las Vegas, joining Jimmie Johnson’s 2005 to 2007 run, when the Chase returns to the track this weekend.
- Kyle Larson holds a 26 point lead over Hamlin after a dominant Kansas win, the largest cushion of the 2026 Chase so far.
- Hamlin is 21 seasons into a Cup career that has produced 34 wins and zero championships, and he has called the drought 20 years of frustration.
A Pair of Aces, 26 Points Apart
Kyle Larson scored every point available to him at Kansas Speedway. Both stages, the fastest lap bonus, the race win, a maximum 76 point day under the current scoring system. Every other Chase driver lost ground. It was the kind of afternoon that turns a one point lead into a 26 point cushion and makes a championship look like it is already decided.
Denny Hamlin finished third that day and still watched his points lead evaporate. Now the Chase moves to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the South Point 400, a track where Hamlin has won the last two Cup races and can become only the second driver in history to win three in a row there, joining Jimmie Johnson, who did it from 2005 to 2007.
“We just gotta, I mean, do what we’ve been doing in Las Vegas,” Hamlin said after Kansas. “That’s a track that, you know, I feel like I’ve got a great feel for, especially in the race, and so we’ll see how it all plays out.”
The Streak That Matches Jimmie Johnson
Hamlin’s command of NASCAR’s 1.5-mile tracks goes well beyond one venue. Across six intermediate races this season, he has finished first, fourth, second, third, third and third, a 2.67 average finish that ties Jimmie Johnson’s 2005 mark and Bobby Labonte’s 1999 mark for the best start to a season on these tracks in NASCAR history. He is the only Chase driver to finish inside the top five in all six 1.5-mile races this year, and he has spent 83 percent of the laps run on those tracks inside the top five. His eight race streak of top-five finishes on 1.5-mile ovals, dating back to last fall, matches Johnson’s 2004 to 2005 run among the longest such streaks the sport has seen.
Larson knows exactly how fast that math can flip. “I only have a 26, I think, point lead on Denny,” Larson said. “That could be swallowed up in a hurry. I scored 76 points today. So, Denny could go have a max points day next week, and I could blow an engine, like Noah Gragson did in the first stage, and I’m down 70-some points right there.”
Larson has his own case for Las Vegas. He owns three Cup wins at the track, has led more laps there than anyone in its history at 881, and carries an 8.9 average finish that leads all drivers with more than four starts there. Since joining Hendrick Motorsports, he has finished first or second in six of his 11 starts at the track. In the Next Gen car alone, Larson has led 657 laps at Las Vegas, nearly three times Hamlin’s 232.
Twenty Years of Frustration
What separates this Las Vegas weekend from a normal points battle is what sits underneath it for Hamlin. He has raced full time in the Cup Series since 2006. This is year 21. He has 34 career wins, 10 top-five finishes in the final standings, and no championship to show for any of it. Last November at Phoenix, a title was pulled away from him three laps from the finish, a defeat close enough that Hamlin still brings it up unprompted.
“20 years of trying, 20 years of frustration,” Hamlin has said of the chase for a title that has eluded one of the winningest active drivers in the sport. He has been blunter still in lighter moments. “They don’t want me to be a champion,” he quipped on a podcast earlier this year. “The one time you win the regular season, they get rid of it.” On the Phoenix defeat specifically, he has joked that he nearly asked car owner Joe Gibbs to let him retire on the spot. “I would have begged Joe to let me quit had I won that race,” Hamlin said. “I would have, just because it would have been the perfect way for me to go out.”
Hamlin enters this Chase as the No. 1 seed off one of the strongest regular seasons of his career, four wins, 14 top-five finishes and 17 top-10s. None of that erases two decades without a trophy, and none of it will matter if Larson’s points lead holds through November. Las Vegas is where Hamlin has the clearest statistical case to start closing the gap, and it is also where the gap could just as easily grow.
A Different Kind of Track
Hamlin is wary of assuming Kansas simply repeats itself in Nevada. “It’s a lot different track,” he said. “You got to have something for the bumps, and so I feel like we struck a good balance of that over the years, and it’s taken many years to get us to that point, but hopefully we’ve still got the speed that we had there in the spring.”
Christopher Bell sits a distant third among Chase drivers in laps led on 1.5-mile tracks this season, with 145 to Larson’s 412 and Hamlin’s 393, and NASCAR writers have floated him as the driver most likely to break up the two-man show at the top. For now, though, the conversation belongs to Hamlin and Larson, two of the sport’s biggest names walking into a 1.5-mile track with very different hands. Larson has the points lead and the recent form. Hamlin has the track record and two decades of waiting behind him. Whichever one leaves Las Vegas with the advantage, the other will have six weeks left to take it back.
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