LAS VEGAS – After taking two tires on his final pitstop, Alex Bowman prevailed in a dramatic battle with Kyle Larson on an overtime restart, clearing his Hendrick Motorsports teammate in the final corner to win the Pennzoil 400 in unlikely fashion. Bowman’s win is the seventh of his Cup career.
In the final laps, Bowman had been racing Ross Chastain for fourth as Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. battled for the win at the front. But with three laps to go, a hard crash for Erik Jones set up an overtime restart, where Larson, Bowman, and William Byron all took two tires to set up the fight to the finish. Bowman’s margin over second-place Kyle Larson was .178 of a second
Race extended seven laps past its scheduled 267-lap distance due to a green-white-checkered finish. There were 12 caution periods for a total of 60 laps. Twenty-three of the 37 drivers in the race finished on the lead lap.
Larson leaves Las Vegas as the championship leader with a six-point advantage over second-place Martin Truex Jr.
Stage 1 winner was Alex Bowman of Hendrick Motorsports (Chevrolet). Stage 2 winner was Ross Chastain of Trackhouse Racing (Chevrolet)
Stewart Haas Racing
● Aric Almirola (Started 20th, Finished 6th / Running, completed 274 of 274 laps)
● Kevin Harvick (Started 25th, Finished 12th / Running, completed 274 of 274 laps)
● Cole Custer (Started 24th, Finished 33rd / Engine, completed 171 of 274 laps)
● Chase Briscoe (Started 4th, Finished 35th / Accident, completed 135 of 274 laps)
Almirola earned his third top-10 of the season and his fourth top-10 in 18 career NASCAR Cup Series starts at Las Vegas. This was Almirola’s third straight top-10. He finished fifth in the season-opening Daytona 500 and sixth last Sunday at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California.
“We fight. That’s the beauty of this race team. We’re still learning this car. There’s a lot to learn about it and we’re still trying to figure a lot of things out. Practice is great, but we’ve got to make adjustments throughout the race, and I feel like every race we’re learning more and more and more and we’re building a notebook. This team has so much fight in it and so much grit that it’s a lot of fun to race with these guys. We’ll keep digging and try and keep this streak alive of all these top-10 finishes. It’s a lot of fun when you run up front,” said Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 10 Mobil 1 Ford Mustang
● Almirola equaled his previous best result at Las Vegas – sixth, earned in September 2018.
● Harvick finished eighth in Stage 2 to earn three bonus points.
● Briscoe finished eighth in Stage 1 to earn three bonus points.
“We struggled with traffic on the restarts, but we worked through it and everyone on the crew did a good job,” said Kevin Harvick, driver of the No. 4 Rheem Ford Mustang
“Something happened under the hood. I’m not sure what it was. It was a very eventful day, for sure. We started in the back and then we started making progress but had to go to the back again. Then we spun and had to go to the back one more time, so it was just an eventful day and it didn’t end very well. We’ll just move on to the next one. I think we had a solid car. We finally got running well at the end and it was shaping up to be a solid day, but it didn’t work out,” said Cole Custer, driver of the No. 41 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang
“We were running really good and then the 34 (Michael McDowell) stayed out that one time on tires and kind of just messed us up. We lost a lot of track positions and then he got loose and I was so sideways. I came across and got the 99 (Daniel Suárez). I don’t know if that damaged it or what, but I would say the last 5-10 laps before I finally spun out the rear was bouncing really, really bad and I think it broke something, or the tire went down. I just went in the corner and the thing spun out. It’s just really unfortunate. I thought we were gonna be really, really good. We’ve had good speed all year long, so we’ll just try to dig out of a hole next week,” said Chase Briscoe, driver of the No. 14 Mahindra Tractors Ford Mustang
Next Up:
The next event on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule is the Ruoff Mortgage 500k on Sunday, March 13 at Phoenix Raceway. The race begins at 3:30 p.m. EDT with live coverage provided by FOX and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
