Who… should you be talking about after the checkered flag?
Ty Gibbs started the race from the pole and put together a great race at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday (June 28), leading twice for a total of 31 laps. But after a plot twist last week at Naval Base Coronado, it was back to the usual story of what happens on a road course when Shane van Gisbergen is in the field and coming off a NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series win on Saturday.
Van Gisbergen started sixth and wasn’t really happy with the way the No. 97 handled throughout the race. Even with a race car he wasn’t fond of, he took the lead for the first time on lap 28 and didn’t really let anyone else have it for the rest of the day, except when he had to come to the pits for fuel and tires.
But it wasn’t a typical SVG routing of the field. As the tires wore late in the race, his handling problems allowed Chase Briscoe to close, and Briscoe got close to his bumper on the final lap, but in the end, van Gisbergen didn’t make even the slightest mistake to open the door for the Joe Gibbs Racing driver. He let Briscoe make the mistakes, and while he didn’t make many, Briscoe had one slide in one corner with a handful of laps to go that was just enough to keep him from getting to van Gisbergen in time. Had he not lost almost a second gathering his car back in, he’d have gotten to van Gisbergen’s rear sooner, and that might have changed the ending.
But van Gisbergen was letter-perfect even as his car faded, and that was the difference in the outcome. Van Gisbergen beat Briscoe by .357 seconds for his second win of 2026 and the eighth of his career, tying Tony Stewart for second all-time in career road course victories in the Cup Series. He’ll have to wait until 2027 to own that spot outright as he works on his oval skills for the next 18 weeks with no more road courses on the docket.
On the other hand…
It was not a good day for points leader Tyler Reddick, who had an advantage of over 100 points just weeks ago but entered Sunday with an eight-point gap. Power steering issues brought Reddick to pit road for an extended visit, and while he finished the race and even went on to set the fastest lap of the race, a lack of cautions meant Reddick was never able to get back onto the lead lap. He finished a disappointing 36th and handed over the points lead to his boss in the process.
But Denny Hamlin didn’t have a much better day. He was able to battle for a top five early, but a spin in traffic in the first stage sent him to the back of the pack with some splitter damage, and he never recovered. Hamlin finished 26th, good enough to take the points lead, but it was his worst finish since a 36th-place run in the Daytona 500.
What… is the big question everyone should be asking after the race?
Carson Hocevar has been getting a lot of Get Out of Jail Free cards recently. Hocevar is an aggressive driver, and his seeming lack of interest in tempering that has ruffled a lot of feathers among both the competition and the fans.
This week’s run-in was with Hamlin, when Hocevar got into him in turn 7 and sent him around, damaging Hamlin’s splitter and relegating him to a backmarker finish.
He also had an apparent spat with Christopher Bell on Sunday.
But the Hamlin spin asks a whole different question than the usual “when is someone going to teach this kid a lesson:” has everyone become too quick to blame Hocevar when something happens around him?
Look at that overhead again. Yes, Hocevar gets into the back of Hamlin, and Hamlin goes around, but Hocevar got hit from behind first by Brad Keselowski and sent into Hamlin in heavy traffic. As much fun as people have making him the villain if he’s anywhere near an incident, he wasn’t at fault in Hamlin’s spin. Sure, he was involved, and because of his driving style, he will get a little extra scrutiny. But give credit where its due, and this time it’s due to Keselowski, and it was likely unintentional. It certainly wasn’t intentional towards Hamlin. Sometimes, a racing incident is just that, and this was one of those times.
Where… did he come from?
On a weekend where the spotlight was pointed much more at teammate Kyle Larson, Alex Bowman quietly put together a strong day. After starting 22nd, Bowman worked his way through the field, finishing sixth in the first stage on fuel strategy before piecing together a solid second half, finishing 10th.
Not only did Bowman finish ahead of teammates William Byron and Chase Elliott, he put together his best race since finishing third at Texas Motor Speedway the first weekend in May. It’s Bowman’s first top 10 since then and third of the year after missing a month early in the season due to lingering vertigo issues.
He picked up three points positions and rolls into next week’s race at Chicagoland Speedway as the defending race winner, albeit with a nearly seven-year gap between races. With Silly Season rumors swirling about Bowman’s future, a string of a few solid finishes would go a long way towards building both his confidence and his future.
When… are we going to talk about the points?
Thanks to a power-steering issue, for the first time in 2026, the points leader isn’t Reddick. Despite issues of his own following a mid-race spin, Hamlin moved past Reddick to hold the lead by a single point with eight races remaining before the Chase. There were no other changes in the top seven with Ryan Blaney, Larson, Gibbs, Elliott and Chris Buescher all holding steady.
Hocevar ousted Daniel Suarez from eighth as Suarez fell to ninth. Bell picked up two to round out the top 10.
Erik Jones was the odd man out at the Chase bubble after his 23rd-place result, falling from 14th to 17th. Van Gisbergen is back in the top 16 in 14th, with Ryan Preece and Austin Cindric holding the last two Chase spots for the time being. Jones has a 12-point gap to Cindric and a 13-point advantage over 18th-place Keselowski.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
The Cup Series returns to Chicagoland Speedway next Sunday after a six-year absence from the 1.5-mile oval in Joliet, Ill. The track was off the schedule for long enough that several drivers in the current field have not raced there, at least in Cup Series competition, and the Next Gen car has not raced there at all.
The only active driver with more than one win at Chicagoland is Keselowski. The most recent Cup winner at the track is Bowman, who won in 2019 before the track shuttered. Hamlin is the only other active driver with a win.
Larson has the best average finish with a stellar 6.2 in six starts, and he does have an O’Reilly Series win there. Keselowski and Elliott have an 8.8 average, with Keselowski having the edge in 11 starts to Elliott’s four. Blaney also has a top-10 average at 9.8 in four races. Cup drivers with NOAPS wins at Chicagoland include Larson, Elliott, Joey Logano (2), Jones (2), Keselowski, Cole Custer (2) and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Austin Dillon and John Hunter Nemechek have Craftsman Truck Series victories there.
There are a lot of unknowns between the car and the drivers who have never run the track in a Cup car, if at all. That group includes several Chase hopefuls: Reddick, Bell, Gibbs, Hocevar, Preece and van Gisbergen among them.
That should make the drivers with experience the favorites, right? Well, yes, but it isn’t that clear-cut. Everything they know about the track is a different car, and at this point, not having anything to compare at the track level could be an advantage — drivers who haven’t raced a Cup car at Chicagoland don’t really have anything to relearn. It’s all new to everyone, but drivers who have had past success will have to forget a large part of what they thought they knew. Not only is the car different, but the pavement has had almost seven years to change.
Look for the Next Gen to put on a better show than the previous cars at Chicagoland, but beyond that? Both the veterans and the youth movement have a case for paying attention to them.
How… did this race stack up?
On one hand, it was a typical SVG road course kind of race. Van Gisbergen led the most laps, made few, if any, mistakes late, and simply let the competition burn up their tires trying to catch him, letting them make the mistakes.
On the other hand, the finish was much closer than that. Briscoe was able to run van Gisbergen down in lapped traffic with a better-handling car; he just ran out of time to pass him. Because of that, the last few laps were nail-biters and the finish wasn’t decided until the final turn.
The exciting finish meant it was a good race — not a great one— but it doesn’t erase the first half, where there wasn’t a lot of great racing towards the front. Sonoma is a tough course but has few real passing zones. It had a couple more when NASCAR ran the full course, but it doesn’t lend itself to a race with a lot of passing up front.
Sonoma is a track where strategy can make a difference, particularly in the fuel department, because it often sees a late caution or two. That just didn’t happen this time as it was fairly tame. It did play out organically, and NASCAR didn’t get trigger-happy with the yellow flag late in the game, to its credit.
It wasn’t a terrible race, but in the scheme of things, it was a largely forgettable one.
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 think I have figured out why NA$CAR refers to the lap a caution flag comes out on as a green flag lap…cars that pass cars involved in the caution get credit for green flag passes. Imagine the total during a Big One! I didn’t see too many green flag passes watching the pylon from Sonoma, but NA$CAR will have a ridiculous figure.