Although Kyle Larson dominated the NASCAR Cup race at Kansas, Chase Briscoe made him fight for the win in the final run of the race.
He passed Larson with 30 laps to go after the final set of pit stops, but Larson never truly went away. With seven laps to go, Larson snatched the lead back and Briscoe then hit the wall multiple times while trying to stay with Larson. Instead, he fell back to fourth and watched his title hopes slip further away.
“I thought I was really good there and was able to turn down on him before the green flag pit stop, and thought I was definitely better there,” Briscoe said in a post-race media scrum that included Motorsport.com. “He was just blocking so much, I couldn’t really get by there … We pitted and I ran him back down, and when I passed him as easily as I did, I thought I was gonna just run away with it. And then, I just started getting really, really, really free — was just hanging on for dear life and just too many laps there at the end. I needed it to be obviously a short race to kind of be able to hold on, so yeah, I just wish I had a little bit tighter balance at the end.”
After losing the lead, Briscoe started ripping the top and hit the wall multiple times as he tried to find some extra pace.
“I just started kind of letting loose and just running as hard as I could, and got into the wall and obviously went from second to fourth,” recalled Briscoe. “Just went into desperation mode, truthfully. I had to win to kind of stay in contention for the championship and came up short.”
Watch: Briscoe left frustrated finishing fourth at Kansas
Briscoe also believes he could have been more aggressive while defending before Larson retook the lead.
“Just frustrating,” he continued. “I feel like in a lot of these late-race situations, I’ve always been able to kind of hold on and clutch it out and and just wasn’t able to do that, so frustrated with myself. Playing it back in my mind, (I could have) been a little bit more aggressive just changing lanes and being unpredictable, kind of like what he was doing when he was in the lead. He did an amazing job.
“I was superior to him and I just couldn’t pass him, and I probably should have been way more aggressive with that, but my balance — I was so loose, I thought, honestly, I would spin out if I wasn’t on the wall. Just wish I was tighter ultimately.”
Briscoe again said that he was ‘frustrated’ with how this Chase has gone, as he lost another 36 points to the championship leader [Larson] despite a top-five finish at Kansas. He is 123 points out of the lead with six races left in the 2026 season.
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