Denny Hamlin won Sunday’s (Oct. 12) NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the 60th victory of his Cup Series career.
Hamlin, who was on four fresh tires, got around Chase Briscoe and his two tires with four laps to go and drove away to score the win.
Hamlin had to find his way through the pack on the final restart in order to get to victory lane. The win secures Hamlin’s berth in the Championship 4.
“This one means a lot,” Hamlin told USA Network. “This is the point where I kinda give the fans some sh–, but not today. I appreciate all of you so much. Obviously, I want to say hi to my dad. I just put the pedal down those last 10 laps and made it happen. I just held it down. That’s all I could do, just go for it and try to punch the ticket now.”
Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, Briscoe, Tyler Reddick, Joey Logano, Alex Bowman, Kyle Busch, Ryan Preece and Brad Keselowski rounded out the top 10.
Briscoe was unable to hold off Hamlin, who had fresher tires in the closing laps.
“I was hanging on,” Briscoe said. “I thought I was in a really good spot there. The first three or four laps after that restart, my car drove really good. As I ran, I was absolutely sideways.”
Larson was passed by Hamlin for second-place before Hamlin passed Briscoe for the race lead.
“I thought I had enough of a gap on the backstretch to go to the top and get rolling momentum,” Larson said. “His car, the Toyota in general, were really fast on the short run.”
Logano bounced back from early struggles to finish sixth, but is still 24 points below the cut line.
“Just needed to get track position early in the race,” Logano said. “Couldn’t quite get to the cleaner air near the front because our restart weren’t good enough.”
Late in stage one, Ryan Blaney blew a tire and made hard contact with the wall in turns 3 and four. Blaney exited his vehicle and finished the race in 38th.
With 31 laps to go, William Byron crashed into Ty Dillon after Dillon unexpectedly pitted. Both Byron and Dillon were knocked out of the race.
With 23 laps to go, a huge crash occurred on the lap 245 restart. Shane van Gisbergen, Cody Ware, AJ Allmendinger, Ty Gibbs, Todd Gilliland and Justin Haley were all involved.
Byron won stage one, while Larson won stage two.
South Point 400 Results
The Cup Series will return at Talladega Superspeedway on Oct. 19, with race coverage at 2 p.m. ET on NBC.
A member of the National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA), Samuel also covers NASCAR for Yardbarker, Field Level Media, and Heavy Sports. He will attend the University of Arkansas in the fall of 2025.