Sunday’s (Sept. 13) race was called the Enjoy Illinois 300; however, with the way it played out, it might as well have been sponsored by the color yellow.
Indeed, the NASCAR Cup Series’ fifth visit to World Wide Technology Raceway, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, turned into a slog fest, a battle of attrition that included nine DNFs, a quarter of the entire 36-car field, and greatly impacted The Chase.
We will examine the caution parade and much more on this week’s edition of Stat Sheet.
18 – Total Cautions
It is safe to say that the flagman’s arm got a workout on Sunday as the yellow flag came out not once…not twice…not thrice…but 18 times.
It is a total that broke multiple records. The 18 cautions is easily the most in a Cup race at WWTR, topping the previous high of 11 in the 2023 edition. This also doubled as the most caution-filled race of the 2026 season, well clear of the tie for second behind the race at Phoenix Raceway and the Coca-Cola 600.
Looking further back in time, the Enjoy Illinois 300 tied for the most yellow flags in the Next Gen era with the 2022 Coke 600. Last, but certainly not least, Sunday’s race was only four cautions removed from the all-time record of 22 in the 2005 Coke 600. Bear in mind that the Coke 600 is double the scheduled race distance of Sunday’s race, which makes the 18 yellows at WWTR arguably more staggering.
So, how did it come to this? Why was the yellow flag so prominent on Sunday?
To me, it came down to a confluence of three factors. One, there’s the pressure of The Chase. You’ve got 16 drivers racing for the championships, driving hard for any points they can get. Second, there’s the layout of the track. Gateway is a flat oval where it is difficult to pass. As a result, drivers are trying to get all they can get on the restarts, often leading to accidents. And as the old saying goes: cautions breed cautions.
Finally, you have the brake and brake rotor problems that WWTR has become known for at the Cup level. Those issues became further exacerbated by the new, higher horsepower package for the Next Gen car as several drivers got their race derailed by exploding brakes.
17.63 – Average Finish of Chase Drivers
The Chase is considered the point in the season where the cream rises to the top as the top drivers of the Cup Series vie for the championship.
However, the 16 drivers who comprise this year’s Chase field were not spared from the carnage that was Sunday’s race. Ryan Blaney and Chris Buescher both got sent to the garage due to the aforementioned brake issues, while Daniel Suarez, Chase Elliott and Chase Briscoe got caught up in accidents as five Chase drivers collected DNFs. Those mishaps contributed to a collective average finish of 17.625 for the Chase drivers, with only six of the 16 finishing in the top 10.
Compare that to the previous week’s Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. When the checkered flag waved on that race, nine of the top 10 were Chase drivers, only one of them registered a DNF (William Byron), and the group combined for a much lower average finish of 11.38. That speaks to how difficult a track Darlington is as victory lane there is typically reserved for the best of the best.
51 – Winless Drought Snapped by Kyle Larson
So far, The Chase has been the time and place to end long winless streaks.
Last week, Christopher Bell ended a 33-race drought by collecting his first win of 2026, his first Southern 500 victory, and the second crown jewel of his career to go along with the 2024 Coke 600. At WWTR, Kyle Larson made his long-anticipated return to Cup Series victory lane with a win, his first victory in 51 races. His last win before Sunday came in the 2025 spring race at Kansas Speedway, another track that we’ll see later in The Chase.
Now that Larson has the monkey off his back, let’s revisit the longest winless streaks chart for active Cup drivers from last week’s edition of Stat Sheet, but this time with a slight revision.
Who will be the next driver listed above to end their drought? Could it happen this Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway? A good candidate for that honor is the subject of our next section.
10,020 – Career Laps Led for Brad Keselowski
In the week leading up to the race at WWTR, Brad Keselowski was in the headlines for his feud with Carson Hocevar at Darlington. However, the 2012 Cup Series champion put that aside and drove one of the best races of his 2026 season on Sunday, adding another bullet point to his racing resume in the process.
Keselowski led 55 laps at Gateway, and the 35th of those was his 10,000th career lap led in the Cup Series. With that achievement, Keselowski has joined an exclusive club of just 24 drivers to reach that five-digit mark in laps led. As you can see below, it’s a who’s who of Cup Series greats:
Keselowski becomes the second driver to surpass 10,000 laps led this season, joining his former teammate Joey Logano. Of the 23 drivers in front of him, 18 are in the NASCAR Hall of Fame, including Kevin Harvick, who will be officially inducted next year. The five who aren’t have not been out of full-time racing long enough to be eligible for induction.
Keselowski had probably already guaranteed himself a future spot in downtown Charlotte before Sunday, but 10,000 career laps led is another excellent achievement in his incredible driving career.
2- Straight Weeks With a Confrontation Between Corey Day and William Sawalich
While the Keselowski and Hocevar rivalry took up the lion’s share of the headlines pre-Gateway, there was another feud going on the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series that also involved Chase driver Corey Day vs. a non-Chase driver in William Sawalich. Unlike Keselowski vs. Hocevar, that dispute added another chapter in Saturday’s (Sept. 12) NOAPS race at WWTR.
On lap 134 of the Nu Way 225, Day and Sawalich were racing hard for fifth place on the backstretch when Sawalich’s No. 18 Toyota went down the racetrack hard into the right side of Day’s No. 17 Chevrolet, sending the latter into the wall and causing significant damage to Justin Allgaier‘s No. 7 Chevrolet in the process. Consequently, Day did not finish and plummeted to 33rd while Sawalich settled for 16th on the evening.
As of the writing of this article, NASCAR has not imposed any penalties for Saturday’s incident, but it is still in the two drivers’ best interests to let cooler heads prevail, especially for Day, who is racing for a championship.
Andrew Stoddard joined Frontstretch in May of 2022 and is currently an editor and a weekly writer of Stat Sheet. He is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Richmond, and VCU. He works as an athletic communications specialist at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.
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