LAS VEGAS — It was deja vu for Hendrick Motorsports at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. For the second consecutive Cup Series race, it appeared to be boiling down to a fuel-mileage sprint to the finish.
When a caution flew on Lap 195 for a multicar pileup on the backstretch, Kyle Larson led a host of other frontrunners down pit road, including Hendrick teammates William Byron and Chase Elliott, along with Christopher Bell, Austin Cindric and Ross Chastain. Had the race stayed green to the finish after the restart, it would have been borderline whether the teams that stayed out could stretch their fuel tanks to the finish.
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“They were gambling that way unless they really thought they could make it and had way better mileage than we expected,” Rudy Fugle, crew chief of the No. 24 Chevrolet, told NASCAR.com. “We showed all of them not making it.”
Early in the run, both Chastain and Cindric jumped the Hendrick duo of Larson and Byron to seize track position. Meanwhile, Tyler Reddick and Denny Hamlin both pitted under green, handing the lead to Joey Logano. Noah Gragson had a tire go down with 25 laps remaining, allowing the field to reset after a long run on tires. Daniel Suárez and Josh Berry cycled to the front row.
This was a familiar sight for Larson’s No. 5 team. Joey Logano won in October of 2024 at Las Vegas by gambling on fuel mileage.
“It was the same thing as the fall, just in the fall your crystal ball would have told you we would have cautions and we didn’t and today we did,” Cliff Daniels, crew chief of the No. 5 car, said. “That is literally the difference.
“That was the fuel window for us. You pit, now you can make it on fuel and the others guaranteed can’t. In the fall, I stayed at that yellow, knew I couldn’t make it on fuel, so I had to pit under green and spent all winter long beating myself up knowing that if I would have stayed out, we were going to be with the guys that ended up making it on fuel. In the fall, we could have had a top-three finish, and today, it went the exact opposite.”
Berry and Suárez battled for the lead after the final restart. Byron was elated with his positioning for the reset, but he couldn’t clear Chastain and dropped to fifth. When the checkered flag flew, the No. 24 car was fourth. Larson dropped to ninth in the finishing order.
“It sucks, but I felt like our car was good,” Byron said. “If it was a normal race playing out, I think it was a race between us, the 5 and 45. We struggled to maneuver in traffic too much, and that’s what caught us out there once the strategy flipped.”
Neither crew chief would have done anything differently, believing their strategy was the right call. The late caution fell at an untimely period.
“You don’t know how to play it — and it’s tough,” Fugle said. “It’s the way it is. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. With a couple things going differently, I think we would have a shot at the win. We will take a fourth with a good car and a lot to learn on and a lot to improve on to be better.”
Even scarier for the competition come the playoffs is that Larson felt better about the No. 5 car during this race — leading a race-high 61 laps — than he has in recent races in Sin City. Larson had won two of the previous three Vegas races entering this weekend. This is the first spring Las Vegas race that Hendrick did not win since 2020.
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“What I take away from (today) is my car was good,” Larson said. “I think we were a little bit better than normal here, and we are pretty good here normally. I thought we had a stand-out car, especially out in the lead. The cautions and the flow of the race and the strategies changed and I wasn’t as good in traffic as I was earlier in the race. I also didn’t do as good of a job as I could on restarts, too. Proud of the race car. It’s just how it goes sometimes.”
All four Hendrick Motorsports cars sit inside the top six in the championship standings ahead of next Sunday’s Cup race at Homestead-Miami Speedway (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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