While the late-race battle between Ty Gibbs and Carson Hocevar ultimately went to Joey Logano, as the two youngsters effectively opened up the door for the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion to collect a surprise third win of the 2026 season, what went largely ignored at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night was the fact that not only did Hocevar lose the lead, but he also lost second.
Hendrick Motorsports' Kyle Larson beat Hocevar to the line for second in a drag race that was decided by less than one hundredth of a second in a photo finish.
And as a result, NASCAR has its first new points leader since Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin unseated 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick at the top of the standings at Sonoma Raceway in late June.
Kyle Larson is the new NASCAR Cup Series points leader
Larson and Hamlin would have been tied with 2,205 points, and despite Hamlin having won four races this year (compared to Larson's one), Larson would have owned the tiebreaker anyway, since his one win came in the Chase at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. Hamlin ironically hasn't won a race since mid-June, two weeks before he took the points lead.
Instead, Larson's pass for second on Hocevar means he leads Hamlin by one point with seven races remaining on the 10-race postseason calendar.
Larson, who won the 2025 championship despite not winning a playoff race under the old "win and in" format, is only the third different points leader of 2026. Reddick led after each of the season's first 17 races, thanks to his historic three-race win streak to start the year. He added two more wins in his next six starts but hasn't won since.
After Hamlin took the lead in June, he did not look back over the final nine races of the regular season. His 89-point regular season advantage over Team Penske's Ryan Blaney was reduced to 25 points after the post-regular season reset. His lead dropped to 12 points over teammate Christopher Bell at Darlington Raceway, and he left Gateway with only a nine-point advantage over Larson.
The runner-up finish at Bristol means that Larson has scored more points than anybody through the first three races of the playoffs. He has scored 161 points, placing him six points higher than Logano. Hamlin quietly ranks fourth in that category with 105, despite having yet to finish a postseason race higher than eighth. Bell is third at 139.
And for all the talk about his lackluster regular season, which saw him finish 303 points behind Hamlin and added 26 races to a win drought that started the year at 24, Larson has proven that, even under the new playoff format, the postseason matters far more than the regular season, perhaps even more so than it did during the "win and in" era.
Race number four on the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series postseason calendar is the Hollywood Casino 400, which is set to be shown live on USA Network from Kansas Speedway starting at 3:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 27.
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