Chase Briscoe holds off Larson to win Las Vegas, keeps title hopes alive

Chase Briscoe won the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, holding off a late charge from points leader Kyle Larson to keep his NASCAR Cup Series championship hopes alive, per www.foxsports.com.

Briscoe led a race-high 175 laps and swept Stage 1 and Stage 2, collecting a maximum 75 total race points. The victory was a validation of Joe Gibbs Racing’s intermediate track program, but it was far from comfortable.

With fewer than 35 laps to go, a thick wall of lapped traffic stacked up, and a charging pack that included Bubba Wallace, Tyler Reddick, and Larson closed the gap to bumper-to-bumper margins. Briscoe said he made a late block on Wallace entering Turn 1 to survive.

“I thought I was in big trouble,” Briscoe said. “I made a pretty late block on Bubba entering Turn 1. He was an inch away from getting me, and if that happens, I don’t win. Once you lose that clean air, it’s just so hard to get back.”

The win was nearly a must-have. Briscoe entered Las Vegas facing a 123-point deficit, and victory was virtually the only currency that mattered. With the result, he jumped from eighth to sixth in the standings and now sits 80 points behind Larson.

“It’s still a long way to go, but we kept ourselves in the ball game,” Briscoe said. “When you go home on Monday, you just want to wake up and mathematically still be in the mix. We still have a couple of irons in the fire.”

THE LATE-RACE SCRAMBLE

With fewer than 35 laps to go, a thick wall of lapped traffic stacked up ahead of Briscoe, threatening to swallow his lead whole. The clean-air advantage he had managed so carefully all afternoon began to erode as he picked through slower cars.

The charging pack behind him — Bubba Wallace, Tyler Reddick, and Kyle Larson — closed the gap from multiple car lengths to bumper-to-bumper margins. Every corner became a negotiation, every straightaway a chance for one of them to commit to a move.

Briscoe’s save came on the entry to Turn 1, where he threw a late block on Wallace. Per www.foxsports.com, Briscoe said Wallace was “an inch away from getting me,” and that if contact happened, he wouldn’t have won. The margin was that thin.

“Once you lose that clean air, it’s just so hard to get back,” Briscoe said.

The lapped traffic had turned what looked like a controlled race into a knife fight in the closing laps. Briscoe’s 175 laps led and stage sweep had built the foundation, but the final 35 laps tested whether he could finish the job when the air got dirty and the mirrors filled up.