Winners and Losers From a Wild NASCAR Weekend at Gateway

Kyle Larson erased a 51-race drought, Hendrick Motorsports dominated the finishing order and several Chase contenders watched their championship hopes take a serious hit.

There are races where a strong car determines the winner.

Then there are races where simply reaching the checkered flag feels like an accomplishment.

Gateway was the second kind.

Kyle Larson obviously leaves as the biggest winner. He started second, won Stage 2, led 80 laps and survived the late-race chaos to score his first Cup victory since May 2025. More importantly, Larson entered the weekend 49 points behind Denny Hamlin and left only nine behind. Few drivers gained more from Sunday than the defending champion.

Hendrick Motorsports as a whole had an outstanding afternoon. Alex Bowman stayed out of most of the trouble and finished second, giving Larson the pushes he needed on the final restarts before taking the runner-up position himself. William Byron somehow recovered from a Lap 141 accident to finish fourth. Three Hendrick cars inside the top four is an impressive afternoon anywhere, but surviving Gateway makes it even more significant.

Joey Logano should leave both encouraged and irritated. He won the pole by 0.276 seconds over Larson, an enormous qualifying margin by modern Cup standards, then led all 45 laps of Stage 1 and a race-high 96 laps overall. He finished second in Stage 2 and third in the race, trimming his deficit to Hamlin from 72 points to 51.

That is a very good day.

It probably doesn't feel like one.

Logano had the winning car for long portions of the race, but Larson’s four-tire strategy gave the No. 5 an advantage on the repeated short runs at the end. Still, the No. 22 team left Gateway looking far more dangerous than it did entering the weekend. Our crew noticed the same thing during the race, repeatedly pointing out how well Logano could recover through traffic.

Ross Chastain quietly deserves a spot on the winners side as well. His strategy produced one of the strangest position graphs of the afternoon, but he eventually came home fifth for only his second top-five finish of the season. Austin Dillon finished sixth, while rookie Connor Zilisch took seventh. Carson Hocevar finished eighth despite spending the entire weekend under a microscope because of the Keselowski rivalry.

Then there are the drivers who will be happy to never watch the Gateway replay again.

Ryan Blaney leads that group.

Blaney’s car had legitimate race-winning speed. He earned points in both stages and was running sixth when his right-front brake rotor exploded on Lap 155. Instead of battling Larson and Logano for the win, Blaney finished 35th and dropped 33 points behind Hamlin in The Chase.

The result could have been far worse for his championship hopes if other contenders hadn't suffered problems too, but that's not much consolation when you know the car was capable of contending.

Chris Buescher and Chase Elliott were two more major victims of the brake failures. Buescher’s apparent rotor failure on Lap 238 sent the race into overtime. Elliott’s failure resulted in a violent crash that also collected Chase Briscoe. All three went to the garage before the race ended.

Christopher Bell experienced another huge momentum swing. One week after winning the Southern 500 and moving to second in The Chase, Bell became part of the late four-car crash that also involved Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick. Bell finished 19th and fell to third in the standings, 18 points behind Hamlin.

The deeper you go into the standings, the more painful Gateway becomes.

NASCAR’s official recap notes that Byron, Cindric, Buescher, Ryan Preece and Daniel Suárez are now all more than 100 points behind the championship lead. There are still eight races remaining, and Gateway proved how quickly one chaotic afternoon can reshape the standings, but the margin for error is disappearing fast.

Brad Keselowski gets an unusual honorable mention on the winners side despite finishing 12th. He started 23rd, led 55 laps and spent portions of the race looking like a legitimate threat. More importantly for the storyline everyone expected entering Gateway, he and Hocevar managed to race around one another without settling their disagreement by destroying race cars.

That may actually make the story more interesting going forward.

Denny Hamlin probably deserves the strangest classification of everyone.

He finished ninth.

He wasn't particularly dominant.

He survived.

At Gateway, survival was enough to keep the championship lead.

Sometimes the biggest winner isn't the guy who had the cleanest afternoon.

It's the guy who still has something left when the wrecking finally stops.