The sting of a near-miss from last weekend’s event at Sonoma Raceway won’t last very long for Chase Briscoe, who drove his No. 19 Bass Pro Shops Toyota Camry XSE into Victory Lane in Sunday’s Eero 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.
Briscoe paced the NASCAR Cup Series field for 51 of 267 laps and used a strategy decision by James Small to come to pit road one lap earlier than the race leader at the time, William Byron, to move into the lead and defend for the entirety of the race’s final run on tires.
At first, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver had the task of holding off William Byron, who led a race-high 94 laps on Sunday, but as the run progressed. The handling on the No. 24 changed; both Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin made huge gains on the leaders – with a couple laps newer tires – and made the Mitchell, Indiana-native sweat it out.
Briscoe beat Bell to the start-finish line by 0.276 seconds, the closest finish at Chicagoland Speedway since 2008.
.“What an unbelievable weekend,” Briscoe said after getting out of his race car. “I feel so American winning in the Bass Pro Shops Red White & Blue car, Fourth of July Weekend, 250 years, and what an unbelievable car. James [Small] did a great job; the team did a great job. Honestly, did not see this coming. I kind of felt like I was struggling in practice and qualifying but yeah, James and the group did a great job, and so cool to get this paint scheme back in Victory Lane.”
It’s the first win of 2026 for Briscoe and his fourth since moving to Joe Gibbs Racing at the beginning of last season.
Also looking for his first victory of 2026, Christopher Bell finished in second place, his fourth runner-up result of the year. Denny Hamlin made it a 1-2-3 for Joe Gibbs Racing, and had it not been for some late-race wall contact, may have been in the fight for the victory with his two teammates.
William Byron and Alex Bowman, teammates at Hendrick Motorsports, finished fourth and fifth. Bubba Wallace was sixth, with Ryan Blaney seventh, Ty Gibbs eighth, Corey Heim ninth, and Riley Herbst rounding out the top-10.
Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick both looked in line to compete for a solid finish in Sunday’s event at Chicagoland but ran into separate issues, with the No. 45 having some fly through the radiator and sending him to the garage for 30 laps. Larson led laps early in the going, but spun into the grass in Stage 2, putting him two laps down and giving him irreparable damage to the car.
Aside from a first-lap accident involving Ryan Preece and NASCAR Cup Series rookie Connor Zilisch, and a couple of run-ins between sets of drivers (Zane Smith and Carson Hocevar, Austin Hill and Shane Van Gisbergen) the event was rather clean.
Leaving Chicagoland, Denny Hamlin now holds a 44-point lead over Tyler Reddick with just seven races remaining in the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season.
The NASCAR Cup Series heads to EchoPark Speedway for its next race on Sunday, July 12 at 7:00 PM ET on TNT Sports, PRN, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90.
