NASCAR.com’s Pat DeCola ranks the 16 Cup Series drivers in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 after Kyle Larson’s win at Kansas Speedway and before Sunday’s race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway (5:30 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
RELATED: Cup Series Chase schedule | Cup Series standings
Analysis: Apparently the bill really was due. Larson followed his Bristol Motor Speedway runner-up by turning Kansas into a personal test session for most of the afternoon, sweeping both stages, leading 235 of 267 laps and becoming the first driver under the current points system to leave a race with the full 76 up for grabs. Chase Briscoe did make him very much earn it at the end — taking the lead with 30 laps remaining and keeping Larson behind him until Lap 261 — but the No. 5 eventually found its way back through and won for the second time in three races. More importantly, Kansas answered perhaps the biggest remaining question about Larson’s title bid: whether Hendrick had found enough intermediate-track speed to match the Toyotas when it mattered most, and that answer was fairly emphatic. Larson has now led at least 1,000 laps in four consecutive seasons, owns a 26-point Chase lead and suddenly the No. 5 team looks a lot more complete than merely hot. Las Vegas gives everybody else the first chance to prove Kansas was an outlier, but all signs indicate it was not.
Analysis: For most of 2026, everybody else was chasing Hamlin. Yet merely four Chase races later, he’s the one doing the chasing. Kansas finally produced his first top five of the postseason — third, with runner-up points in Stage 1 — and extended his Cup-record streak of lead-lap finishes to 29, so this is hardly a team coming apart. The issue is simply that Larson has taken the provisional championship from him for the moment, turning what had been a season-long advantage into a 26-point deficit. Conveniently enough, Las Vegas is about as useful a response track as Hamlin could ask for. He won there in March (in addition to last fall) after overcoming a pit-road speeding penalty, led 134 laps and controlled the final 49. If this really is becoming a Larson-Hamlin title fight, Sunday feels like Hamlin’s first chance to punch back.
Analysis: Another week, another Sunday where Bell is close enough to the title fight to matter without making much noise about it. He ran fifth in both stages at Kansas, finished sixth and left third in the standings, 50 points behind Larson. It feels like a two-man show at the top of the standings to a degree right now, but No. 20 may be about to enter the picture in a big way. NASCAR Insights had the No. 20 fifth in speed and third in pit-crew performance, which more or less describes his whole thing in 2026: rock solid everywhere, spectacular nowhere — yet still very much attached to the championship fight. He and this team are certainly capable of being spectacular, and Las Vegas has been relatively friendly to him despite zero national series wins there. Bell is a common front-of-the-field fixture at Vegas, finishing fourth there in March after winning Stage 1 to give him top-five finishes in five of his last seven Sin City starts. Eventually one of these very good Bell afternoons is going to become a great one.
Analysis: That’s more like it. After two straight box scores that dramatically undersold how well the No. 12 had actually been running, Blaney finally got to keep a finish that reflected the pace at Kansas. He climbed from 25th to fifth, rated third in passing and sixth in speed and — most importantly — made it to the checkered flag without the entire afternoon detonating around him. He remains 91 points behind Larson, so there is still plenty of damage from Gateway and Bristol to repair, but the pickup in the No. 12 Ford never really disappeared in the first place. Las Vegas was a fairly forgettable 16th in March, though that race included an ill-timed pit stop before a caution and a wave-around recovery. At this point, a normal afternoon might be all Blaney needs to keep climbing. All the pieces are there.
Analysis: And this bill nearly came due. After two straight weeks in which strong runs were erased late, Briscoe finally got Larson in his sights at Kansas and actually drove past him, taking the lead on Lap 238 and holding it for 23 laps. For a while, the No. 19 was one clean closing run away from dramatically changing The Chase with a Heartland heist. Instead, the handling went away, the wall kept getting closer and Larson got back underneath him with seven laps remaining; Cindric and Hamlin followed and snuck through before Briscoe salvaged fourth. That still marks four straight Kansas top fives and confirms the recent results had been deceptive on paper about this team, but it also makes Sunday sting quite a bit more. Briscoe left 123 behind Larson in the standings. At this stage, opportunities that big simply can’t keep getting away.
Analysis: Kansas managed to make 20th look considerably uglier than the race actually was, with Penske turning heads on Sunday. Logano scored points in both stages and was still running 12th with three laps remaining before a tire began going down, sending him tumbling to be the final car on the lead lap after an earlier jack mishap already cost him track position. That explains the finish, but it doesn’t erase the larger question now facing Team Penske. Intermediate tracks have been a weak spot for the organization much of this season, and Cindric’s Kansas speed offered the first real sign that something may be changing. The picture has solidified a bit above him, however, as Logano, still fourth in The Chase and 67 points behind Larson, gets the next test at Las Vegas. He finished 15th there in March. A repeat of that probably won’t be enough anymore, but he’s a past Vegas winner, so it’s in the cards.
Analysis: Kansas is exactly the kind of result that can look a bit worse a week later in the stats sheet if you forget how it actually happened. Gibbs scored stage points and was running around the top 10 when the Lap 123 restart turned into a six-car mess after Carson Hocevar moved up into the No. 54 Toyota. Gibbs kept going and even finished Stage 2 ninth, but he eventually faded to 17th. That isn’t enough to erase what came before it, though, as NASCAR Insights still has Gibbs second in season-long passing, third in defense and sixth in speed, and he finished fifth at Las Vegas in March to tie his best career result there.
Analysis: So much for “aggressively uneventful.” Cindric went from quietly stacking finishes to spending essentially the entire Kansas race near the front with one of the fastest cars, running third in Stage 1, second in Stage 2 and second at the finish. His 3.39 average running position was the best of his Cup career, and NASCAR Insights graded him first in passing and second in speed. More than just a career-best intermediate performance for Cindric, though, this might have been the first sign all year that Team Penske has found something on this style of track, which literally could not have come at a better time. Cindric finished 19th at Las Vegas in March, but if Kansas carries over, that suddenly feels like ancient history. (And matters for Charlotte right after, too.)
Analysis: Still plenty of question marks, but there was at least a little bit of fight in this one. Reddick dropped from 15th to roughly 30th almost immediately at Kansas and spent much of the afternoon working his way back through traffic, eventually climbing as high as eighth before the final green-flag stop. Then the jack dropped before the left front was secured, forcing the No. 45 to back up and turning the stop into an 18-second adventure. He still recovered to 11th, but the larger problem is becoming difficult to ignore — this team has just crumbled since the spring and a championship feels far out of reach at the moment. Toyota spent much of 2026 looking like the class of the intermediate tracks; yet Larson just walked into Kansas — where the No.45 has been lights out — and took 76 points while Reddick left 111 behind him in The Chase. The Daytona 500 winner’s season-long speed profile is still too good to dismiss, but Vegas needs to look a lot more like the Toyota we spent most of the year watching, and it doesn’t feel like it will.
Analysis: Wallace has quietly gotten The Chase back underneath him, but he still has plenty of work to do. Kansas included a messy first stop that dropped him five spots and then involvement in the restart pileup, yet he still came away ninth for a second straight top-10 finish after running seventh at Bristol. That’s not enough to erase a 140-point deficit, but it does make the last couple of weeks feel considerably more stable than the start of his postseason, which could set up a run. Las Vegas offers an interesting continuation because Wallace finished ninth there in March, too, as part of a season-opening stretch in which his worst finish through the first five races was 11th. The No. 23 doesn’t necessarily need another P9 as much as a win right now, but the steadiness has returned and is notable. The next step is remembering how to turn that into something bigger. 
Analysis: There’s still a ways to go, but Byron keeps making the comeback argument harder to ignore. A seventh-place result at Kansas gave him three consecutive top-10 finishes after the Darlington disaster, and there’s an even more useful trend underneath that: the No. 24 has finished in the top 10 in all six 1.5-mile races this season … and Vegas was one of his better ones. Byron won Stage 2 there in March and finished third, part of a race in which he spent long stretches among the handful of cars capable of challenging for the lead. He remains 158 points behind his teammate Larson, so the championship math is still doing him no favors, but this is starting to look less like damage control and more like an actual recovery that could lead to something. If the rankings eventually need to make a larger upward correction on Byron, Vegas feels like a logical place for him to force our hand. And he probably will. 
Analysis: A week after Bristol ended with Blaney in the wall and both of them throwing punches, Hocevar was right in the middle of another consequential incident at Kansas. He finished fourth in Stage 1 and was running 11th when contact with Gibbs helped set off a multicar crash that left the No. 77 with significant splitter damage. The eventual 33rd-place finish dropped Hocevar three spots in The Chase standings and five here as things solidify around him, putting some real distance between the recent results and the speed that carried him through the first three Chase races. Las Vegas wasn’t clean in the spring, either — a flat tire and pit-road speeding penalty contributed to a 22nd-place finish. The talent remains obvious. So, increasingly, does the need for a quieter Sunday and win No. 2.
Analysis: Kansas was better. Not transformative, and not enough to change the shape of Elliott’s Chase by itself, but better. The No. 9 finished eighth after running eighth at the end of Stage 1, and NASCAR Insights graded Elliott first in defense for the afternoon. That leaves him 161 points behind Larson, which still makes the championship picture rather unforgiving, but Vegas at least gives him something tangible to build on. Elliott finished second there in March, matching his career-best Vegas result, and spent the final run steadily closing on Hamlin before running out of laps. Hendrick currently has Larson setting the pace and Byron beginning to climb again. Elliott has already shown this year that Vegas suits him just fine. Now would be an especially useful time to prove it again, still in search of his second championship.
Analysis: Preece keeps finding ways to make this whole thing more respectable, even if a title looks increasingly unlikely. Kansas produced another 10th-place finish, giving him back-to-back top 10s and three in the first four Chase races. That still leaves him 173 points behind Larson, so nobody is confusing respectable with championship-changing, but the recent body of work has become difficult to wave away. Vegas fits the pattern almost perfectly: Preece finished 11th there in March and scored stage points in both segments, another afternoon spent hovering right around the edge of the top 10 without much to show for it. Earlier this season, a Preece result that truly altered the conversation felt like it would need to come from nowhere. At this point, though, the surprising part might be how unsurprising another one would feel.
Analysis: Kansas never really gave Buescher much of a foothold, which was mildly surprising. He was 14th at the end of Stage 1, 24th after Stage 2 and ultimately finished 23rd, one lap down, dropping him 186 points behind Larson with six races remaining. There wasn’t a dramatic late failure to explain this one away, either; the No. 17 simply spent most of Sunday outside the part of the field that mattered. That makes Las Vegas considerably more interesting than the standings suggest, but it’s a true wild card for him. Buescher finished sixth there in March, his best career Vegas result, and NASCAR Insights still rates his pit crew fifth for the season, so the pieces are there to work some magic; but was Kansas more indicative of where this team is at? There has been enough legitimate speed in the No. 17 all year to keep expecting more than 15th in these rankings, but at some point, though, expectation needs the company of results.
Analysis: Suárez has now finished 14th two weeks in a row, which technically represents some stability after The Chase began considerably rougher. Kansas was still mostly a survival exercise: He missed stage points, ranked 20th in speed and left 187 points behind Larson, last among the 16 Chase drivers. The one intriguing number was his fourth-place restart rating, but that’s not much comfort when the overall pace never put the No. 7 in serious contention. Las Vegas wasn’t especially kind to him in March, either, producing an 18th-place finish. Suárez has already authored enough strange turns this season that completely writing him off feels dangerous, but if there’s another plot twist coming, it probably needs to arrive by Sunday.