Through four Chase races, the first-place driver in the standings has come to life, the runner-up lies dormant and winless over 3 1/2 months, and the third-place guy is just out there lurking.
The title-chasing trio — two-time champ Kyle Larson plus Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell — appears to have made the championship hunt a three-man breakaway as they prepare for the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday.
That could all change if a racer gets hot and wins three of four, but the next two races are on 1.5-mile tracks in Vegas and Charlotte and entirely different layouts at flat-track Phoenix and high-speed Talladega.
Get 75 bonus points by taking the checkers in three of four, and a driver outside Bell (-50 points) — say, a Team Penske driver such as Joey Logano (-67) or Ryan Blaney (-91), or JGR’s Ty Gibbs (-94) — could put a serious dent in the top three’s hopes, but only if coinciding bad luck happens up front.
Larson won for the fourth time in Kansas and the third time in six starts there, allowing the Hendrick hotshoe to extend his lead over Hamlin to 26 points.
“There’s still six races, and I only have a 26-point lead on Denny,” Larson said. “That could be swallowed up in a hurry.”
Mired in a 14-race winless streak, Hamlin has not won since Pocono in June, the last of three straight victories that vaulted him past Tyler Reddick, the driver for Hamlin’s 23XI Racing team who had led the points race the entire season up until that point.
Hamlin has won the past two Vegas events, and the cars surrounding him in the standings were right there.
Last October, Hamlin qualified first and led Larson, Bell, Chase Briscoe and Reddick to the checkers. The No. 11 Toyota started second in the spring and was victorious with Bell fourth and Larson seventh.
Larson’s worst finish in the playoffs is his fifth at the postseason-opening Southern 500 at Darlington, but the No. 5 Chevy racer ranks eighth overall this year with an average finish of 15.2. Hamlin leads at 8.4 and Bell is sixth at 13.5.
Major off-track news broke Monday as driver/part-owner Brad Keselowski and RFK Racing, led by Jack Roush, suddenly decided to part ways after this season following a widely publicized radio rant Keselowski aimed at the No. 6 Ford’s ownership.
Just after Logano whizzed by him at Madison, Ill., the 36-time Cup race winner lashed out about having inferior engines to the other blue oval drivers.
The 2012 champ has only earned one of RFK Racing’s seven wins since it formed in 2022, a fortuitous one in 2024 while running third when teammate Chris Buescher and Reddick got together with 10 laps left at Darlington.
“The Roush regime, even though he was part of the ownership, they didn’t let him do what he wanted to do,” former driver Kenny Wallace said this week of Keselowski’s outburst. “Remember this: Winners and champions know what they need.
“If you don’t give it to them, they get aggravated. … Roush was in Brad Keselowski’s way.”
In superiority and power, RFK Racing is a lap down to Ford stablemate Team Penske, where Keselowski won his title 14 years ago, but whether Keselowski has a plan in place or if he was just spontaneously burning a bridge remains to be seen.
