Who… should you be talking about after the checkered flag?
He might not have been on everyone’s list of favorites to win after qualifying 14th, but by the time the race was at the halfway point, Chase Elliott made it known that he was one to watch at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday (May 3). Elliott won the second stage and showed his hand in the final run, opening up a solid lead over Denny Hamlin.
Elliott’s team put in solid work on pit road, and he held point after the final round of green-flag stops. A late caution for a spinning Corey Heim, who had also led a large part of the stage on pit strategy before falling to midpack after his stop, forced a restart with four laps to go, closing the gap for Hamlin.
Hamlin had a strong restart but couldn’t hold off Elliott, who cleared him on the backstretch and held on to win by .407 seconds, with Hamlin finishing second.
It’s Elliott’s second win of 2026, and he becomes the second driver with multiple wins this year. It’s the 23rd win of Elliott’s Cup Series career and his seventh top 10 this year.
On the other hand…
Compared to his hot start a year ago, Christopher Bell has not made a lot of noise in 2026. He was looking to change that on Sunday, starting seventh and taking the lead 47 laps into the race. Bell led 22 laps and looked like he had the speed to contend for the win.
That lasted until lap 68, when Todd Gilliland spun in the back end of the field and clipped Bell as he caught lapped traffic. The damage was enough to send Bell to the garage for the day with a 38th-place finish.
It certainly wasn’t the finish Bell deserved had his day continued as it had started.
What… is the big question everyone should be asking after the race?
Kyle Busch had every right to be frustrated on Sunday. He’d had his best race of the season, qualifying sixth and running in the top 10 consistently for the first time this year. Then, the final caution for Heim’s spin with just 10 laps to go bunched the field up, and Busch had to fight his way forward on the restart.
Busch moved to pass John Hunter Nemechek, and he appeared to move up the track across Nemechek’s nose. Busch then slammed into Nemechek’s left rear as the field took the white flag, sending Nemechek into the wall and causing heavy damage to the No. 42.
The question isn’t who was at fault. Busch blamed Nemechek because he claimed Nemechek was running a couple of feet lower than he could have without hitting the wall, but Nemechek didn’t appear to waver from his line when Busch moved up before he had cleared the No. 42.
The driver on the outside doesn’t have to run inches from the wall, though he shouldn’t drift down if there’s a car on the inside, either. Busch simply wasn’t clear, and whether his spotter cleared him too soon or he tried to make the call himself, he got into Nemechek, who was understandably upset at the move.
But will NASCAR penalize Busch for intentionally crashing Nemechek in the aftermath?
Maybe. Busch didn’t hook Nemechek into the wall, which has been grounds for a one-race suspension in recent years, so he probably won’t sit out for it, but he could find himself lighter in the pocketbook and/or the points distribution. Given NASCAR’s stance on intentionally wrecking other drivers, a penalty would not be a surprise.
Busch had some positive momentum on Sunday, and it would be a shame to let a moment of frustration derail that, but maybe showing some of the fire that was once a common reaction from Busch was the fuel his team needs to turn this season around.
Where… did he come from?
There was a trio of drivers with top-10 finishes who flew well under the radar all day. One was Alex Bowman, who finished third, his second top-five in the last two weeks in an injury-shortened season. Bowman often seems to have terrible luck, but he’s also more than capable of having solid, consistent finishes week in and week out. He’s 34th in points after missing four races due to lingering vertigo, and in a contract year, that’s unfortunate.
Could Bowman make The Chase? Maybe. The points gap between him and 16th is 127 points, less than the gap between first and fourth places in the standings. The problem is, there are a lot more drivers to go through to get from 34th to 16th, and they’re going to have good days sometimes while Bowman isn’t going to have top fives every week. If he can close the gap, it would go a long way towards his future.
Also having a quietly strong finish was Bubba Wallace, who finished a very respectable ninth after starting at the rear of the field in a backup car. Wallace didn’t score any stage points or laps led, but his finish points towards a real shift for his team. They’re making the right calls, avoiding trouble and maximizing their position every week. They’ve built real consistency around a few instances of bad luck, and they are putting themselves in position to not only make The Chase but have a top-10 or better season.
Finally, Daniel Suarez has a history of running well at Texas, and Sunday was no exception, though there was some doubt mid-race. After starting on the front row, Suarez quickly faded to the back half of the top 20. But excellent pit work righted the ship, and Suarez finished sixth in the second stage. From there, he was a top-10 threat, and he made good on that, finishing sixth, his best finish since a fifth-place showing at EchoPark Speedway in February.
When… are we going to talk about the points?
Hamlin cut into Tyler Reddick’s lead this weekend … by one entire point. Reddick leads Hamlin by 109 after 11 races. Elliott moved into third, 117 behind. Ryan Blaney sits fourth with a 155-point deficit, while Chris Buescher moved up two spots to take over fifth.
Polesitter Carson Hocevar followed up his first win at Talladega Superspeedway with a seventh-place run this week, moving him up to sixth in the points. Ty Gibbs slipped two places to seventh after finishing 36th with an early exit. Kyle Larson also had an early exit Sunday and fell to eighth. Brad Keselowski took over ninth, and William Byron gained one spot to round out the top 10, 218 points behind Reddick.
With his stage one win, Erik Jones had the biggest position gain of the week, picking up four spots to sit in 22nd. Going the opposite way, Bell dropped four places and goes home in 13th after getting collected by Gilliland.
As the regular season nears the halfway point (already?!), business is picking up around the 16th-place Chase cutoff. The loser in that category this week was Joey Logano, whose snakebit 2026 season continued in Texas with a pit road collision that took him out of the race. Logano fell out of the top 16, while Chase Briscoe squeezed in on his 23rd-place result.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
In one of NASCAR’s stranger scheduling decisions, the Cup Series rolls north to upstate New York and Watkins Glen International, where the current forecast for next weekend is a chilly high of 62 degrees on Sunday with showers both Saturday and Sunday. Maybe there was a reason this race was run in August for decades?
Elliott, Larson and Busch lead all active Cup Series drivers with two wins apiece at WGI, but all eyes will be on Shane van Gisbergen, the defending race champion and winner of five of six road course races in 2025.
A few others to keep on the radar? Definitely watch for Bell, who would love a rebound after Texas and has a 6.8 average finish along with four top 10s in five races at The Glen. Hocevar has also been strong in his two starts, and of course, you can’t ever count out AJ Allmendinger when there are right-hand turns.
Finally, is this the week where Connor Zilisch gains a little foothold in his rookie season? He won at The Glen in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series last year and could really use the confidence boost of a strong run.
How… did this race stack up?
Texas wasn’t a Wild West show on Sunday … but it wasn’t a terrible race either.
Clean air mattered too much at the front, as it does just about everywhere these days, but there was some mid-pack action. Restarts provided the best racing, which is standard on this type of track.
Pit road was a much more treacherous place than it should be at this level. On the same round of stops that ended Logano’s day after he hit a stopped Cole Custer in the middle of pit road, several drivers had run-ins that resulted in significant damage, including Larson and Briscoe.
If you like beefs, Busch and Nemechek gave you one.
But none of those moments really made the race a super compelling one. Elliott is generally a popular winner, which will help with fan satisfaction, and overall, it wasn’t terrible either.
It was just a race. And in a long season, sometimes that happens.
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.
A solid assessment, Amy. Not a spectacular race by a long shot, but after the mass carnage at Talladega last week, I was okay with that. It was a solid day for RFK, with all three drivers finishing in the top 15. I’m not looking forward to WG, but mostly because Keselowski never excels on road courses. Speaking of Brad, just a reminder that he publically called Kyle Busch an ass way back when JHN was riding his tricycle. Let’s just Kyle Busch will always be Kyle Busch, and he will always race like Kyle Busch.
Week after week the lower series are putting on a better show than the Cup cars. Week after week the Cup races bring us “great action on the restarts”, but not much else. Evidently there’s some racing mid-pack, but somehow it’s not shown on TV.
Watkins Glen in early May is asinine ! So is early June at MIS. Not great camping weather generally but NASCAR and Fox don’t care ! We had glimpses of snow this weekend in southern Ontario !