Who… should you be talking about after the race?
After winning the 2024 Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway, Austin Dillon saw his last-ditch playoff push slip away after NASCAR revoked his eligibility for intentionally wrecking both Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin for the win.
Back for more in 2025, Dillon was on his best behavior, and his team made the right adjustments and tire calls all night to earn him the win and the playoff spot that came with it.
Dillon started 11th and finished fourth in both of the first two stages before taking the lead for good with 48 laps to go.
The key to the win this year was tire management. With a new tire that fell off well before the end of a fuel run, teams had to plan carefully to make their allotted sets last all night, especially on the long final run. With no cautions in the final stage, strategy didn’t really play out the way some teams expected, but the long green-flag run played to Dillon’s advantage, allowing him to easily hold off a faster Alex Bowman in the closing laps.
It’s Dillon’s sixth career win in 12 seasons. His 107 laps led are a career high for a single race. The win gives him his sixth career playoff berth.
On the other hand…
Pit stop woes hit a lot of teams on Saturday night. Slow stops and penalties reared their heads for Hamlin, Ty Gibbs, Kyle Busch, Chase Elliott, Christopher Bell, AJ Allmendinger and a handful of others.
Perhaps none was as hard to swallow for a team as a loose wheel for Bubba Wallace.
Heads up help from the No. 19 crew, a fellow Toyota team, and the fact that the wheel rolled behind Wallace all the way into the No. 19 pit box meant the damage was minimized—but it was done.
Despite having what looked like the car to beat, Wallace lost two laps thanks to the botched stop and the penalty for pitting outside of his assigned box, finishing 28th. Wallace finished second in the first stage, won stage two and led a race-high 138 laps. He also scored the bonus point for the fastest lap of the race.
What… does this mean for the points standings?
William Byron locked up the regular season title and the 15 playoff points that come with it, with his 12th-place finish on Saturday. Despite his first DNF of 2025, Elliott remains in second, 68 points back and five points ahead of third-place Hamlin. A top 10 at Richmond moved Kyle Larson back into fourth, displacing Bell, who finished 21st after a pit road penalty.
Fifth-place Ryan Blaney also got by Bell after a third-place finish. Bell fell to sixth, with Tyler Reddick, Chase Briscoe, Bowman and Wallace rounding out the top 10.
Dillon’s win ousted 11th-place Chris Buescher from the playoffs (a whole conversation for another day). That means that without a win next weekend at Daytona International Speedway, RFK Racing will not have a representative in this year’s title hunt. Buescher’s teammate Ryan Preece and Busch are also in the top 16 in points but will need a win to make the playoffs.
That leaves Bowman on the bubble heading into the final race of the regular season. Both he and Reddick can lock in on points by starting at Daytona, provided a driver below them in points doesn’t win.
Where… did he come from?
On a night where tire management could make or break a team, one team that did everything right was the No. 22 of Logano. Logano started last after not posting a qualifying time, but from the drop of the green flag, he worked his way forward.
The defending series champion is already locked into the playoffs, so his team worked their own strategy, and while Logano didn’t rake in any stage points, he finished the night with a fourth-place finish, a net gain of 34 positions on the day.
On a night where just three drivers who started in the top 10 finished there, others with the biggest gains included sixth-place Larson (+26), Blaney (+17) and Daniel Suarez (+14).
The variety of pit strategies meant that teams could make big gains by timing stops just right, a strategy which won Dillon the race with a slightly early final stop and hurt a number of others, including polesitter Preece, who wound up 35th after leading a season-high 60 laps.
When… was the moment of truth?
Were there or weren’t there? After his runner-up finish, Bowman was upset with Jesse Love, who was racing him very hard from laps down while Bowman tried to cut into Dillon’s lead with a faster racecar.
Love, one of Richard Childress Racing’s full-time Xfinity Series drivers, was making one of his select Cup starts in a third RCR car, the No. 33. Bowman was vocal about possible team orders. He backed off a bit after some time to cool down, but was he in the right? And if there were team orders, how far is too far?
Bowman probably wasn’t entirely wrong. Love was racing awfully hard for being laps down and Bowman not being the race leader in position to gain a lap back. Whether the holdup actually cost him the race is more questionable.
However, Love might have gone a little too far. Holding up a car for a corner when a teammate is leading is acceptable for a lap-down car, but more than that is too long.
It certainly didn’t rise to the point where NASCAR should have stepped in other than perhaps reminding the No. 33 that Bowman was racing for the win, but it is something the sanctioning body does need to keep an eye on as the playoffs get underway.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
There’s just one race left before the playoff field is set, and it’s at Daytona International Speedway, a recipe for maximum chaos on Saturday night.
While that might not make for the best way to determine the most deserving outcome, it will certainly keep race fans on the edges of their seats with plenty of mayhem.
Byron won the Daytona 500 in February to open the season for the second year in a row, so he’ll be a favorite to pick up another win, but he’s not the only former Daytona winner with nothing to lose in terms of the playoffs. Hamlin tops the list along with Byron with three wins, but Dillon, Austin Cindric, Logano and Blaney also have wins and can afford to take chances to get another.
Among the drivers needing an eleventh-hour win to make a title run, Buescher is the most recent winner on the list, taking the summer race in 2023. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has two past Daytona wins to his name.
Other past winners looking to steal a spot include Busch, Michael McDowell, Justin Haley, Erik Jones and Brad Keselowski.
As for the drivers on the bubble? Neither Reddick nor Bowman has a particularly notable record at the superspeedway, with Reddick posting a 23rd-place average finish and three top fives in 12 races and Bowman with a pair of top fives and a 14.7 average finish. They’ll be gunning for the win, but they also have to avoid trouble.
How… did this race stack up?
After a few years of lackluster races and sparse crowds, Richmond lost a race date in 2025. The one remaining race, a Saturday-night special, did exactly what NASCAR had hoped for as the track posted its first sell-out in years.
And thanks to a tire that produced excellent grip for a few laps but fell off very quickly, the racing was improved as well. The race isn’t going to go down in history as a great one with a margin of victory of 2.471 seconds and low attrition, but it was a step in the right direction.
Restarts had good action, with drivers able to race two and three-wide for position. A driver with a good-handling car could hold off one on newer tires for a while, as Blaney demonstrated by battling with Dillon for several laps in the final stage.
It wasn’t a great race, but it was decent with some good moments. It was certainly enough to keep fans engaged, despite the large lead at the end and a winner they were lukewarm on. A caution during the final tire run would have spiced things up for sure but just didn’t materialize.
There was a time when one might have materialized under the guise of “debris” but thankfully those days seem to be well in the rearview. This one played out naturally, and it turned out fine, with a variety of strategies and an emphasis on clean pit stops and drivers managing their equipment.
Fans might not remember it in a year or two, but they won’t be talking about it being terrible either.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.