For a while Sunday, NASCAR’s longest race looked like a one-man show starring William Byron. The kind of show where you could nod off for a few hundred miles and wake up to find nothing had changed. Byron swept all three stages and looked completely untouchable. A repeat performance from Saturday’s Xfinity race, where he also swept the stages and waltzed off with the trophy.
And then—well, it wasn’t.
In the final act on Sunday night, Denny Hamlin decided to spice things up. But in a Hollywood twist worthy of Michael Bay—with just slightly fewer explosions—it was Ross Chastain who came charging out of nowhere and rewrote the ending.
It all came down to fuel. And, crucially, two-lap fresher tires. Byron was leading, Hamlin was stalking, and both needed one final stop. That stop came 53 laps from the end under green. Byron dove in, Hamlin followed. They came out side-by-side, Byron just ahead, and once he rejoined the track, he lit the afterburners. By lap 382, he’d cycled back to the lead and looked poised to finish what he’d started.
It was fuel strategy that got Hamlin the lead earlier, too. Byron had passed him on lap 291—just nine laps before the end of the only Stage 3 on the calendar that doesn’t wrap up a race—and added another stage win after a short-lived scrap with Hamlin.
But during the pit stops that followed, Hamlin’s crew gambled. Nine seconds of fuel. Byron’s took 10.4. That extra second gave Hamlin the edge off pit road, with Carson Hocevar tagging along like an annoying little brother who didn’t know when to go home.
Hocevar restarted next to Hamlin, but by Turn 1 his Chevy began billowing smoke like a haunted waffle iron. Down the backstretch, he slowed, rode the outside wall, and then Chris Buescher plowed into him. Hocevar’s car nosed into the inside wall, and that was that—out of the race and, frankly, out of everyone’s patience.
With the kid sent to bed early, it was back to Byron and Hamlin. And that final green-flag pit stop would prove decisive.
Enter Ross Chastain.
After wrecking his primary car in practice, his crew pulled an all-nighter to prep the backup. He started at the rear. And then… he started coming. Quietly. Steadily. By the time Tyler Reddick nearly looped it on the backstretch in front of Byron, Chastain had slipped past Hamlin for second with 25 laps to go.
No one had noticed it yet, but Chastain had pitted two laps later than the leaders. Two laps. Enough for a splash more fuel. And fresher tires. The kind of small detail that wins or loses 600-mile marathons.
With six laps to go, Chastain pounced. Byron tried to mount a counterattack, but the magic had evaporated. Chastain pulled away and crossed the line .673 seconds ahead—for his first win of the season and one of the gutsiest heist jobs in recent memory.
“When I left the shop last night, I went over and sat in this car for the first time. It was about 10 o’clock when I left,” Chastain said. “They worked until 2:30. They were back at 5:30 this morning. Most of them drive 30, 45 minutes home. A little shower, I think. I don’t even know if they slept. Back there at 5:30. They get this thing ready, and that’s the dedication it takes from Trackhouse.”
Byron had led 283 laps. Chastain? Just 8. Six of them when it mattered. The other two? When the others were busy refueling and praying.
For much of the race while Byron ran the front, the real chaos was behind him—specifically, in Turn 4. Or, as Hendrick Motorsports might call it, the Bermuda Triangle.
It started with Kyle Larson. Fresh off the heartbreak of his double-duty Indy 500 bid, Larson came out swinging. Started second, took the lead on lap 9, and looked every bit the redemption story. He even scraped the wall in Turn 3 and didn’t lift—because lifting is for people who value their fenders.
Then, on lap 43, Turn 4 said enough of that. Larson’s car snapped loose, tagged the wall, and skated across the frontstretch like a 3,400-pound ballerina with vengeance issues. The toe link broke. The magic fizzled. His crew patched it up, but he was effectively neutered—still on track, but no longer a threat.
Three laps before the end of Stage 1, Turn 4 struck again—this time, Alex Bowman. Quietly lurking in the top ten, Bowman got yanked into the exact same fate: wall, grass, busted dreams. Whatever’s in the Turn 4 concrete, it clearly has a grudge against Concord Chevys.
And then, just for nostalgia’s sake, Turn 4 came for a legend. Jimmie Johnson—yes, that Jimmie Johnson, seven-time champ and part-time miracle worker—had spent the morning chauffeuring Tom Brady around Indianapolis in an IndyCar like some kind of race-track Uber driver. He made it back to Charlotte in time for his 700th career start. And Turn 4 gave him a cake made of concrete. On lap 99, Johnson got dumped into the wall. Day over. Milestone celebrated. Exit stage left.
But Turn 4 wasn’t finished.
By lap 247, it was hungry for more and decided to throw a party. Daniel Suárez came out of the corner three-wide on the bottom—because of course he did—and things got tight. Suárez drifted into polesitter Chase Briscoe, who bounced into Ryan Blaney, who absolutely did not sign up for any of this.
Blaney ricocheted off the wall. Suárez spun like a lawn chair in a wind tunnel and then played pinball: first with Justin Haley, then into Larson—who by then really should’ve parked it and gone home. What followed was a demolition derby across the frontstretch that looked like someone shook a shoebox full of Matchbox cars.
Somehow, Briscoe emerged from the wreckage and went on to finish third. Suárez? Done. Blaney? Done. Larson? Finally—mercifully—also done. Turn 4? Still insatiable.
When the dust settled, Byron had led nearly five times more laps than the rest of the top five combined—and still finished second.
“Well, I was just defending, but it was just — yeah, he was catching me, and I was trying to just defend,” Byron lamented. “I was getting a little bit tight. Then the scenario there with the cars we were around, it was tough. So, yeah, he got a run on me and was able to get to the bottom and clear me off of two.
“Disappointing just to lead that many laps and such a great effort by our whole team. Yeah, I guess just could have anticipated that last run a little better. I ran in dirty air for a long time and heated my tires up. Then we lost a chunk of time, and the 45 about crashed in front of us. Yeah, sucks.”
Chastain played the long game and won. Behind Briscoe in third, AJ Allmendinger and Brad Keselowski rounded out the top five. Chase Elliott, the only Hendrick driver to survive the Turn 4 massacre, finished sixth. Michael McDowell was seventh, with Christopher Bell, Ryan Preece, and Noah Gragson closing out the top ten.
And just to make sure nobody missed it, Chastain smashed a watermelon into the Charlotte pavement with enough force to make Gallagher proud. The night belonged to Byron until it didn’t. The race belonged to Hendrick—until Turn 4 got hungry. But the trophy? That now smells faintly of watermelon rind and victory.
RACE RESULTS
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.