Chase Briscoe won Sunday’s (Oct. 19) YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, holding off a snarling pack after Kyle Larson ran out of fuel on the final lap.
Briscoe had enough of a push from Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Ty Gibbs in the tri-oval to hold on and score his third victory of 2025, which also ensures him a spot in the Championship 4 alongside Denny Hamlin.
“Ty Gibbs, just an incredible teammate there,” Briscoe told NBC. “I could not have won that race without Ty. Just an amazing team effort. I can’t believe I won a superspeedway race.”
Todd Gilliland scored a career-best NASCAR Cup Series finish of second, tying the best finish of his father, David Gilliland, who finished second with Front Row Motorsports at Talladega in 2013.
Gibbs finished third, while Bubba Wallace — who led the white flag lap — crossed the line in fourth. Cole Custer scored his second top-five finish of the season in fifth, with Carson Hocevar close behind in sixth. Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, Zane Smith and Brad Keselowski completed the top 10.
Bell was the only other playoff driver to finish inside the top 10. That’s left his JGR organization in prime position to have three of their four cars battling for a title in the Phoenix Raceway finale in two weeks.
“Sure looking like a JGR year,” Bell said. “Gonna be a battle next week at Martinsville, for sure. All of us could win at Martinsville. I would expect a playoff winner, and I would expect Larson and I to be racing for that last spot.”
A big crash on lap 52 took out another playoff driver in Chase Elliott, who will have to win next weekend at Martinsville Speedway in order to keep his championship hopes alive. AJ Allmendinger, Erik Jones, Noah Gragson, Austin Cindric and Justin Haley were also involved.
Cody Ware finished 31st after his engine expired with 21 laps remaining, which set up the penultimate restart of the race.
With two laps to go in regulation, Chris Buescher was turned off the front of William Byron and slammed into the inside wall on the backstretch; he went on to finish 30th.
Byron spun from the top five on the final lap and finished 25th, while Larson slumped to 26th after his gas tank ran dry while leading on the backstretch.
“Obviously,” said Larson’s crew chief Cliff Daniels, “We thought we had a little more than we ended up having… gotta go back and see what we did wrong.”
Byron is now in a major points hole going into Martinsville.
“Just didn’t work out,” Byron told Frontstretch. “Not sure how we could do that differently. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t.”
The way the cautions flew also fouled up the strategy of Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney, whose Fords were well aligned with RFK Racing out front throughout much of the final stage. Instead, they finished 16th and 23rd, respectively after their inside line misfired and struggled to stay connected during the final laps.
“At this point, it’s all or nothing,” Logano said of Martinsville. “Stage points won’t matter, you (just) have to win.”
Their struggle near the end highlighted a wild race with plenty of comers and goers. A whopping 27 of 40 drivers led at least one lap in the race, combining for 77 lead changes, fourth-most in Talladega history. Only during the tandem drafting era of 2010-11 did the track produce more swapping out front.
YellaWood 500 Results
The penultimate race of the Cup Series season, the Xfinity 500, will take place at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday, Oct. 26. Television coverage will begin 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.