BRISTOL, Tenn. — It was a story of absolute domination on the part of Kyle Larson, who led 462 of 500 laps at Bristol Motor Speedway and won Saturday’s Bass Pro Shops Night Race by 7.088s over Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott.
Larson’s advance to the round of 12 in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs was hardly in doubt, but the vicissitudes of the elimination race were unkind to Ty Gibbs, Martin Truex Jr., Brad Keselowski and Harrison Burton, who are no longer eligible to compete for the series championship.
Sweeping both stages in front of a massive crowd on a near-perfect night, Larson set a record for laps led in a single race by a Hendrick Motorsports driver. He has now led 1,351 laps at Bristol, his most at a single track.
No driver has led as many laps in a victory at Bristol since Cale Yarborough led 495 in 1977.
The victory was Larson’s second at the 0.533-mile track, his series-best fifth of the season and the 28th of the career. He enters the round of 12 as the top seed as the series moves to Kansas Speedway for the Sept. 29 Hollywood Casino 400.
“Man, that was just great execution all weekend by the team,” Larson said. “Practiced good. You’ve got to qualify good; we did that. Yeah, just had a great car. Thanks to the whole No. 5 team. They’re the best in the business.
“We dominate a lot of races, but we might not close them all out, so it feels really good to close one out here in this Hendrickcars.com Chevy. We’ve got (team owner) Rick Hendrick here today, too. He hasn’t been to many races this year …
“Just a phenomenal car, could kind of manage my stuff and then really pass some cars there at the end.”
Unfortunately for Gibbs and Truex, Saturday night’s race also was the story of crippling penalties. Gibbs was flagged for speeding on pit road during the first stage break and spent the rest of the race fighting his way toward the front.
By lap 500, however, Gibbs had worn out his right rear tire, finished 15th and lost the final round of 12 position to Daniel Suárez and Chase Briscoe by 11 points.
“Speeding penalty is on me,” Gibbs said. “You run the lights so close … it’s my fault. Unfortunate.”
Entering the race 14 points below the cut line, Truex ran fourth in the first stage and second in Stage Two, but the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota sped on pit road during the fifth and final caution and finished 24th, 21 points short of advancing to the round of 12.
“We did good in the first two stages—we got a lot of points,” said Truex, who will retire from full-time Cup racing at the end of the season. “I guess we would have had to run second or third to make it through. Who knows if we would have been able to. I wish we could have seen if we could have done that.
“I’m just gutted for my team. We worked so hard this week. We all put in a lot all season long, and in the last three weeks, just snake-bit. Can’t do anything right … 0.09mph (over the pit road speed tolerance) hurts really bad to take the chance away to know if we even could have done it. I don’t know if we could have run second … maybe. We were close to it all day, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. I feel terrible for my guys.”
Non-playoff driver Bubba Wallace finished third on Saturday night, followed by Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell and defending series champion Ryan Blaney, all of whom secured spots in the round of 12.
Hamlin entered the race six points below the cut line but maintained a presence in the top five all race long.
“My aspirations were to win it, but it looked like the No. 5 (Larson) there was better than all of us,” Hamlin said. “Solid car. I thought we were really good towards the middle of the stages, and then at the end, got too loose and couldn’t hang onto what we had.
“Overall, top-five day, good stage points, kind of in the mix, just not really as good as we’ve been here the last few times. But overall, I want to thank this whole FedEx Toyota team for giving me something I can move on with.”
Ryan Preece ran seventh, trailed by Briscoe and pole winner Alex Bowman, who was locked into the next playoff round after finishing seventh in Stage Two. Austin Cindric (13th Saturday), William Byron (17th), Tyler Reddick (20th) and Joey Logano (28th) also were among the 12 drivers to advance.
Logano already had secured his spot with a victory in the playoff opener at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Larson took charge early, passing Bowman for the lead on lap 33. Adroitly working traffic as the first 125-lap stage progressed, Larson lapped three playoff drivers in succession — Suárez on lap 64, Burton on lap 86 and Keselowski on lap 104.
Bowman led a lap under caution during the first stage break, but Larson had the top spot back out of the pits one circuit later and continued to assert his authority in Stage Two. Suárez lost a second lap to the leader on lap 194, putting his Playoff future in dire peril—temporarily.
Burton suffered the same fate on lap 207, all but assuring his elimination. His fate was sealed when he took his No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford to the garage on lap 235 to repair a power steering issue.
Gibbs’ penalty was the saving grace for Suárez, who finished 31st, four laps down but was able to move on.
“It was a struggle,” Suárez acknowledged. “Since yesterday when we unloaded the car for first practice, we just didn’t have the speed. As you know, with a short amount of practice, qualifying, and going to the race, if you don’t have speed out of the trailer, it’s very, very difficult to bring it back to speed.
“We made it better, but it wasn’t good enough. We were running 30th, 28th, 32nd all night long, and that’s what we had. Luckily, we had a great Atlanta (a runner-up finish), decent Watkins Glen after a broken wheel, and we were able to build a cushion, and we definitely used every single point out of that cushion.”
Interestingly, the rapid tire fall-off that exerted a profound influence over this year’s spring race at Thunder Valley was a non-factor on Saturday. Before the race, after consultation with the drivers, NASCAR opted to spray PJ1 traction compound on the bottom two feet of the track.