Who… should you be talking about after the checkered flag?
When the caution flew with 39 laps to go in the 2026 Go Bowling at the Glen (May 10), most of the field dove onto pit road for their final stops of the day, but leader Shane van Gisbergen stayed on track.
The need for a pit stop when at least half the field would not need another one should have left van Gisbergen and his team wondering what might have been. When he finally surrendered the lead, even after building the largest cushion he could before his stop, van Gisbergen exited the pits in 26th place and nearly 30 seconds behind race leader Ty Gibbs with just 24 laps remaining.
Van Gisbergen would have to make up more than a second every lap just to catch Gibbs on the final lap, let alone pass the No. 54. He’d have to work his way through half of the field to get there. It seemed that after being the class of the field, van Gisbergen was going to have to settle for a top 10 if he could pull it off.
But van Gisbergen came out with fresh tires on a day when tire wear had played a large role in the racing. And SVG came out swinging.
He made up more than 29 seconds in 18 laps.
Van Gisbergen chewed his way through the field, sometimes shaving off over two seconds per lap, and he caught Gibbs with seven laps to go. He made the winning pass on lap 93, and by the time the checkered flag flew, van Gisbergen‘s margin of victory was 7.288 seconds over Michael McDowell, who used a similar pit strategy to pass Gibbs in the final laps.
Van Gisbergen’s performance is especially notable in the Next Gen era when the cars are more equal than ever in both horsepower and aerodynamics. Van Gisbergen, who celebrated his 37th birthday on Saturday by finishing eighth in the O’Reilly Series race to teammate Connor Zilisch, scored his seventh career Cup Series win in 62 starts. He’s also shown improvement on ovals in 2026 and sits 16th in points, in contention for a Chase berth.
On the other hand…
It’s now been five weeks since Christopher Bell has had a top-10 finish, and in that span, Bell has not finished better than 17th. Bell has been particularly strong at Watkins Glen in the past, with an average finish better than seventh through his first five starts.
Bell started eighth and finished seventh in the opening stage, but he never found his groove. He missed the chicane in stage two when the field bunched up and William Byron spun in front of him and had to stop before continuing. Bell used pit strategy to gain some spots back, but he never had the ability to move forward when he did lose spots for the penalty stop or for pit cycles.
Bell finished a disappointing 21st and has tumbled from sixth in points after scoring three straight top fives at Circuit of the Americas, Phoenix Raceway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway to 12th after last week’s event at Texas Motor Speedway. He did gain a spot in points this week thanks to Byron’s misfortune, but he needs to make nice with Lady Luck and find the consistency he’s capable of.
What… is the big question everyone should be asking after the race?
Though the results don’t show how well they ran, Sunday was a much-needed day for all of Trackhouse Racing. Van Gisbergen stole the show, but Ross Chastain’s stage one win and Zilisch’s best run of the year were also welcome signs of life for the team. Zilisch, in particular, was in need of a confidence boost, and while he finished 20th, he battled Gibbs for the lead late, and a cut tire was the only thing that stood between him and a top-10 or even a top-five finish.
Will Sunday’s race give the team enough of a boost to turn things around?
It will likely take more than a single race to reverse the team’s fortunes, but timing is everything. The next points-paying race is the Coca-Cola 600, where Chastain is the defending race winner. Zilisch has O’Reilly Series wins at both Pocono Raceway and Sonoma Raceway as well as at Dover Motor Speedway, so he could certainly add some steam to his momentum.
Given the success of Spire Motorsports this season, could fans see Trackhouse looking to change its alliance from Richard Childress Racing to Hendrick Motorsports, which provides Spire’s engines and technical support? ECR engines haven’t been lighting the world on fire, and a change might be something Trackhouse should consider.
Where… did he come from?
Despite both cars starting in the back half of the field on Sunday, Watkins Glen ended up being Richard Childress Racing’s best overall effort of the year, with both Austin Dillon (sixth) and Kyle Busch (eighth) finishing in the top 10 together for the first time this year. It’s Dillon’s first top 10 of the season period and third ever on a road course.
Despite Busch feeling ill in the car, the RCR duo used sound pit strategy to put themselves in great position in the second half, and both scored stage points in the second stage along with their strong finishes.
The organization still has a long way to go before a true turnaround can be declared, but turnarounds have to start somewhere, and if nothing else, Sunday gives the team a little morale boost heading to the All-Star Race.
When… are we going to talk about the points?
Tyler Reddick didn’t give fans much to talk about in the points department, extending his lead over Denny Hamlin by another 20 points with one race until the halfway point of the regular season. He leads his car owner by 129 points on the heels of a fifth-place finish at The Glen. Despite a lackluster day at the track where he got his first Cup win, Chase Elliott hits the All-Star break in third, 145 behind. There were no changes to the top five this week as Ryan Blaney and Chris Buescher remained in fourth and fifth, respectively.
Gibbs swapped places with Carson Hocevar, moving up one spot to displace Hocevar from sixth. Kyle Larson and Brad Keselowski remained eighth and ninth, and despite his 29th-place finish, Bubba Wallace edged past Byron to fill out the top 10. Byron dropped from 10th to 12th, also losing a spot to Bell.
Van Gisbergen had the biggest gain of the week inside the Chase contenders, moving up three positions to hold down the 16th spot, which will be the cutoff for The Chase in a few months.
The biggest overall move came from Austin Dillon, who had a net gain of five spots, climbing from 27th to 22nd after his first top 10 of 2026. His teammate Busch also found two spots on Sunday, moving up to 24th.
As the regular season reaches the halfway point, one organization has all of its teams inside the cut. It’s not 23XI Racing, despite Reddick’s success and Wallace’s improved consistency. It isn’t Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing, either, nor is it Team Penske.
Despite not having a win yet, thanks to consistency across the board, that team is RFK Racing. In addition to Buescher and Keselowski, Ryan Preece is 13th on the charts, even after a 25-point penalty for intentionally wrecking Gibbs at Texas Motor Speedway. Preece and Reddick are the only drivers to finish on the lead lap in all 12 races so far.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
The Cup Series rolls into its All-Star break this week. With no points on the line, only glory and a substantial paycheck, it’s a chance for teams to catch their collective breath. This year’s All-Star event is the Cup Series’ only visit to Dover Motor Speedway, so it isn’t a practice session for any other track on the circuit.
For teams like the No. 22 of Joey Logano and the No. 24 of Byron who have struggled to find consistency in 2025, it’s a chance to regroup. Byron is just 32 points ahead of 17th after Watkins Glen, and Logano is currently 18th in points.
Byron and Logano both have teammates higher in points, though neither Hendrick Motorsports or Team Penske as a whole have been burning up the track this year.
How… did this race stack up?
Looking at the margin of victory, it would be easy to write Sunday’s race off as a snoozefest, but that’s not what it was. Adding the extra laps was the right call as it forced teams into fuel strategy.
Tires mattered all day long. Lap times dropped significantly over a fuel run, as they should, but there was good balance between tire falloff and tire failures. Drivers had to take care of their tires, but flats generally came from contact with other cars.
NASCAR still needs to reconsider stage cautions, and that goes double for road courses, but teams flipping the stages didn’t make much of a difference at the end. Fuel strategy in the final two stages did play a role, as did fresh tires, but what makes this week’s race stand out was van Gisbergen’s late-race charge. With the cars so equal these days, his drive from the back half of the field to the lead in fewer than 20 laps was something you don’t see every day—it was a masterclass taught by a driver who’s one of the best in the world at what he does.
Fans don’t always get to see that kind of performance, but they saw it Sunday. The higher horsepower package has helped the racing on the road course so far this year as well. All in all, Sunday’s race was one of the more entertaining events of 2026.
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.
I’m not a road racing fan , but I quite enjoyed today’s event. It would have been a snore fest , had SVG not stayed out , and just pitted with the others. NASCAR got lucky with the weather ….who’s idea was it to race in early May , this far north ! MIS in early June , might not be much better !
Enjoyed this as well. Because I cancelled cable, I can get all NASCAR races but those on FS1. That said, I do have access to HBO Max, which means while I can’t see the full broadcast, I can watch via the in car cameras. So I watched those with the radio broadcast in the background.
I bounced between a few drivers for a bit (was interesting seeing how Zilisch figured out he could get under cars leaving the chicane), then when SVG pitted, I locked in on his car. At one point he said something to the effect of “I’m not sure if we’re on the right strategy yet, but this is a lot of fun!” Seeing him carve through the field was a blast. He told his team to stop giving him updates on where he was in the running order, and just update him with laps remaining and gap to the leader every lap.
Honestly, wound up glad I didn’t have the regular broadcast. Usually in car cams bore me pretty quickly, but when someone is mowing through the field like that, everything else seemed irrelevant.
Sounds about right because on the FOX broadcast everyone was irrelevant except SVG the last 25 laps or so.
I have to ask, when you were watching SVG’s in car cam, did you notice anyone even attempt to slow him down with a block or trying to take away his line? I’m not saying put him in the wall, but it irks me that the rest of the field lets this guy continue to dominate them without any pushback whatsoever.
SVG doesn’t “race” that way. He doesn’t rattle cages. They “race” him the same way.
Very little resistance. They were all running on fumes. SVG was catching them so quickly, putting a block on wasn’t really realistic. That said, most didn’t move over per se. They ran their line to keep momentum and save fuel, and left SVG to work around it. The closing speed was great enough SVG didn’t really have to worry about setting up passes. Just go around them, even if it meant taking the less preferred line. I do remember him catching one car in a turn, I think it was Briscoe. SVG tapped him just enough to move him, but not enough to annoy Briscoe and possibly cause a retaliation.
Fastest car, newer tires, and no fuel concerns meant the only thing which may have stopped SVG was a caution, so some ahead wouldn’t have to save as much gas, and possibly a restart shuffle would have held SVG up. Seemed it was the same for McDowell, though he couldn’t quite match SVG’s speed through the field.