Kyle Larson has won the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at the fastest half-mile short track in the world in Bristol, after dominating throughout the event.
His Hendrick teammate Alex Bowman took pole position, with the 2021 champion alongside on the front row, and the #48 led the opening 32 laps.
From then on though, only six out of the remaining 468 tours around the circuit saw the #5 cross the line not in the lead.
Larson said: ”Great execution all weekend by the team, we practiced and qualified well and had a great car.
“We dominate a lot of races, but we might not close them all out, so it feels really good to close one out.
“I had a phenomenal car, so I could manage it well and pass a lot of cars right at the end.
“This is my favourite racetrack, and I hope you guys enjoyed that race and the methodical lapped traffic run!”
The 32-year-old led more laps in one event than any Hendrick Motorsports driver in Bristol history, including legends like Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon.
He also won both stages accumulating seven playoff points and assuming the lead in the postseason standings, 15 clear of the second seed Christopher Bell.
He is 39 points clear of two-time champion Joey Logano on the cutline as we head into the next three races and the Round of 12.
Playoff exits for four contenders confirmed
Ty Gibbs, Brad Keselowski, Martin Truex Jr and Harrison Burton have failed to advance past the first stage of the postseason.
The youngest of the quartet, Gibbs, who was the 2023 Rookie of the Year, got into the playoffs for the first time this season.
The Joe Gibbs Racing prodigy failed to get a top-ten finish in the last three races though, with 15th at Bristol being his best result of this stint.
He said: “It was just unfortunate there, we were really good in practice and qualifying, just a little bit too loose tonight.
“We fired off too tight so it’s just unfortunate, the speeding penalty we got was on me, we were running to the line so close.
“I got a little bit too much I guess, my fault, but I’m proud of my guys and all the effort they’ve given me and we’ll keep hammering down.”
Despite the #54 driver’s inability to win this year, he has achieved seven finishes inside the top five and 11 top tens, with a best finish of second in the spring at Darlington.
The 21-year-old will look to build on his sophomore season and hope for a better playoff berth in 2025.
One of the two former Cup Series champions who went out of the postseason this year is the RFK Racing driver, Brad Keselowski.
The winner of the 2012 championship is in his third campaign as an owner-driver, and while his teammate Chris Buescher missed the playoffs, Keselowski didn’t.
His victory at the Darlington race in May secured his top-16 championship placing, but poor runs in the previous three events scuppered his chances.
Keselowski said: “We didn’t have the pace from our car, we ran as hard as we could but there wasn’t anything there!
“Executed what we had on pit road and took the chances we needed to take but we’ve just got to be faster.
“We don’t just want to make the playoffs; we want to go deep in the playoffs and obviously we didn’t do that this year.
“We’ve got to keep working on it and find more pace.”
Getting only one finish higher than 20th place since Atlanta was never likely to grant Keselowski an opportunity to go further in the fight.
The 40-year-old can be confident that his team is on the up though, as he and Buescher could have easily amassed numerous wins by this point.
Another former champion who has fallen at the first hurdle is another JGR car driven by Martin Truex Jr, who will retire at the end of the year.
The #19 has failed to achieve a result higher than 20th in eight races, so his exclusion from the postseason is unsurprising.
Ever since the announcement that he will not be continuing in 2025, the 2017 champion has made countless errors, such as tonight when he sped on pit road.
Despite that, seeing a well-respected, clean and talented driver very emotional following the chequered flag was a tough sight for all.
Truex Jr said: “It’s tough when it’s 0.09 miles per hour that screws your whole chance at a good season up.
“I don’t know how that happened, I didn’t know I was that close, and it felt the same as every other stop.
“It’s on me, it’s obviously my mistake, they said we were going to have to run second or third to have a chance.
“So I don’t know if we could’ve done it but it would’ve been nice to see if we had a chance, I hate that I screwed it up, I wish we could’ve at least seen if we could’ve done it.”
Truex Jr had impressed by running in the top five in the middle part of the night, but his speeding penalty for being a narrow margin too fast cost him a chance.
The last driver knocked out of the playoffs at the first time of asking was the #21 of Harrison Burton, which was no surprise.
The Wood Brothers‘ machine was the 34th-best car in the regular season points standings, even including their surprise victory at Daytona earlier this summer.
With only six top-tens all year, anything other than a first-round exit would have been a monumental success for Burton.
He will move back down to the NASCAR Xfinity Series full-time in 2025, taking over the #15 AM Racing machine.
Preparing for more postseason chaos
The three tracks that make up the second round of the playoffs include two wildcard events to spice up the action and potentially lead to a surprise exit for some competitors.
The first race of this stretch is at Kansas Speedway, a venue that hosted the closest finish in Cup Series history earlier in the year.
Kyle Larson beat Chris Buescher by a mere 0.001 seconds, which is proving the reason why the circuit is loved by fans for its close action.
Next up after Kansas is a race at Talladega Superspeedway, a 2.633-mile flat-out, wide and scary drafting race.
There is a high chance we will see an underdog winner here, just like we did earlier in the season at Daytona.
Despite only a singular “Big One” happening in the spring race at Talladega, this was an anomaly, and we are surely bound to see chaos.
The last race in the Round of 12 will be held at the Charlotte Roval, held on the infield layout of the legendary track.
Changes have been made to the circuit since last year, with the tightening corner after Turn 5 being replaced by a short-shoot and a tighter right-hander.
Then the two corners that previously led the drivers back onto the banking have been replaced by a sharp hairpin, which is bound to cause some chaos.
The Round of 12 consists of a cookie-cutter 1.5-mile circuit, a perilous superspeedway, and a road course, so what could possibly go wrong?
Tune into the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Motor Speedway on September 29th at 3pm EST on the USA Network.
