In a season that has been dominated by Toyota, so far, it was another Toyota kind of day Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway. In the closing laps of the NASCAR Cup Series eero 400 Chase Briscoe, the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry XSE, held the lead, but he had a pair of hard-charging teammates closing in from behind him.
Race Results: 2026 eero 400 at Chicagoland Speedway
Christopher Bell was Briscoe’s most looming threat, and after Hamlin made contact with the wall with a few laps to go, it was quite apparent the battle for the win would come down to Briscoe and Bell, who were each hungry for their first victory of the season.
While Bell closed the gap and applied pressure to Briscoe in the closing laps, Briscoe, who led the race three times for 51 laps, had just enough to close out the win. Briscoe said as he was struggling to hold Bell at bay behind him, he got a reprieve in the form of lapped traffic.
“I kind of got lucky with how the lapped cars, honestly, kind of worked out,” Briscoe explained. “I was struggling pretty bad, and Christopher was certainly coming. Out of all the people to race against, I knew Christopher was going to be clean with me.”
Briscoe’s No. 19 Toyota would cross the finish line ahead of Bell’s No. 20 Toyota by a margin of 0.276 seconds, which secured Briscoe’s first victory of the 2026 campaign.
Briscoe was overcome with elation after scoring the win on America’s 250th anniversary weekend.
“What an unbelievable weekend,” Briscoe said in his interview with TNT Sports. “I feel so American winning in the Bass Pro Shops Red, White, and Blue car. Fourth of July weekend, 250 years, and man, just what an unbelievable race car. [Crew Chief] James [Small] did a great job, team did a great job. Just honestly, I didn’t see this coming.”
The win marks Briscoe’s sixth career win in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Bell, who is continuing to recover from a fractured left wrist sustained at Michigan International Speedway a few weeks ago, was proud of the adjustments his team made to his car’s handling in the final Stage, which allowed him to contend for the win, but he wants to look back to see what caused him to be so far behind Briscoe going into the final run of the race.
“I just need to replay that last run, those last two runs, whatever it was,” Bell said. “Stage 3, whenever it went green. I was really struggling with the handling of my car early on in the race, and I still had a lot of pace. I keyed up the radio and said, ‘Hey, if we get this thing driving good, we’re going to have a shot at it,’ and yeah, they made a great adjustment, and got the car driving great the last run. But I was a straightaway plus behind it seemed like.”
Denny Hamlin would come home with a third-place finish despite the late encounter with the outside wall. With the third-place result, Hamlin was able to extend his series point lead, which was one point coming into Sunday, to 44 points over Tyler Reddick, who suffered a punctured radiator during the race, and spent 30 laps behind the wall getting repairs.
Reddick, who held the point lead in every race this season prior to losing the point lead to Hamlin last week at Sonoma Raceway, finished 36th on Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway.
William Byron, who was the dominant driver in the event, finished fourth, driving his No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
Byron swept winning Stages 1 and 2, and led a race-high 94 laps. However, Byron lost the lead to Briscoe on the final green flag pit cycle of the evening, and once that happened, he fell into the clutches of Bell and Hamlin, who had superior long-run speed in the closing laps.
Still, it was a good evening for Byron.
Alex Bowman, who missed four races earlier in the season following a bout with vertigo at Circuit of the Americas, was able to put together arguably his best race of the season, and he was rewarded with a fifth-place finish.
Bubba Wallace brought the Space Jam No. 23 machine to a sixth-place finish, while Ryan Blaney, Ty Gibbs, Corey Heim, and Riley Herbst rounded out the top-10 finishers in the race.
Erik Jones moved inside the top-16 of the NASCAR Cup Series Chase Grid with a 15th-place effort on Sunday evening. Thanks to Ryan Preece finding trouble on the opening lap of the event, Jones holds a four-point advantage over Preece for the final Chase berth position with seven races remaining until the Chase.
