Chase Briscoe put on a drubbing in Sunday’s (Aug. 31) Southern 500 that hasn’t been seen in generations.
His 309 laps led marked the most led by one driver in a 500-mile Darlington Raceway race since 1986, and it was the most laps led by one driver in a Southern 500 since 1971, when Bobby Allison led 329 en route to victory.
Briscoe became the first NASCAR Cup Series driver to win back-to-back Southern 500s since Greg Biffle in 2005 and 2006, and he became the first driver to win back-to-back Southern 500s with different car owners since 1973 and 1974, when Cale Yarborough accomplished the feat with Richard Howard and Junior Johnson, respectively.
Sunday also broke a long, long dry spell for drivers who have thoroughly dominated the race. I wrote a column about this very topic one year ago. From 1985 to 2024, seven drivers managed to lead more than 200 laps in a Southern 500, but only one of them went on to win: Kevin Harvick in 2014.
The Southern 500 is a brutal beast with constantly changing track conditions, and it’s far more important to be the best car at the very end than it is to be the best car overall. That was on full display Sunday, as the long-run conclusion to the race was the weakest Briscoe looked all night. Tyler Reddick and Erik Jones were ready to pounce on the No. 19 car at any point in the final 20 laps, and if it wasn’t for the overwhelming clean air advantage at Darlington with the Next Gen car, they probably would’ve gotten by.
But Briscoe and the No. 19 team ran a flawless race with perfect pit stops, an unbeatable short-run car and a decent long-run car that was good enough to hang on at the end.
Sunday was a career-defining race that launched him into Cup Series stardom (if he hadn’t reached that point already), and he bucked a near-40-year trend of dominant drivers being unable to seal the deal in one of NASCAR’s most prestigious events in the process.
Moreover, his domination isn’t surprising when looking at the 2025 Cup season as a whole. From ludicrous margins of victories (a.k.a. Shane van Gisbergen on road courses) to absurd numbers of laps spent out front, 2025 has been a year of lopsided outcomes in individual races.
For example, seven of the 27 Cup races this year have seen one driver lead at least two-thirds of the race; five of those drivers went on to win, and the other two finished second.
From 2022 to 2024 — the first 108 Cup races with the Next Gen driver — a driver had led two-thirds of the race on just six occasions. Six of 108 (5.6%) in the first three years of this car, versus seven of 27 (25.9%) in year four.
The Next Gen car still provides a ton of parity in year four, with 14 winners in the first 25 races of 2025. You can’t truly pinpoint a driver or team that has stood out above everyone else this season, and there are still weekends when even the best teams find themselves out to lunch (look no further than Hendrick Motorsports on Sunday).
But for the individual races themselves, the teams that unload with the best cars on any given weekend are beginning to figure out how to dominate from start to finish consistently.
The blueprint to Briscoe leading more than 300 laps at Darlington was quite simple: he qualified on the front row, he nailed the restarts, he had the fastest car on short runs by a country mile, and he had flawless pit stops all night long. All those attributes masked the deficiencies his car had on the long run, as it was usually time for the field to begin a round of pit stops the moment anyone came close to approaching him.
The one-two-three punch of clean air/track position, short-run speed and executing on pit road is a common theme for drivers who have taken over races this season. And as the field continues to get more and more experience with the Next Gen car, it will be fascinating to see if the field gets closer or if the frequency of lopsided races continues to grow with each passing year.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf