Chase Briscoe needed a three-wide move late in the 2024 Southern 500 to take the lead and win the crown jewel race.
He needed no such move in the 2025 Southern 500, leading 309 of 367 laps to win the first NASCAR Cup Series playoff race of the season on Aug. 31 at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina.
Briscoe did have to hold off Tyler Reddick and Erik Jones in the final laps to secure the win, including a dive into the final corner by Reddick that came up empty.
The driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota is locked into the round of 12 and can race for playoff points the next two weeks at Gateway and Bristol.
While Briscoe is a clear winner for the short- and long-term picture coming out of Darlington, here are the other winners and losers from the NASCAR Darlington race:
It’s rare to say that the best story of a race that featured the winner leading 309 laps is the driver who finished second, but the two biggest moments came on Tyler Reddick’s first and last corner of the night.
On Lap 1, Josh Berry spun coming out of Turn 2, with Reddick to his outside. Reddick brushed the wall and nearly spun himself but saved the car and didn’t require a trip to pit road under the early caution that would have ceded track position.
The No. 45 Toyota stayed inside the top five for the majority of the race, banked 18 points via second-place finishes in the first two stages and pushed Briscoe for the lead on every restart.
With 30 laps to go, Reddick cut Briscoe’s lead to 1 second, then to a half-second with 25 laps to go.
Reddick didn’t get alongside Briscoe until the final lap, where Reddick drove deep into Turns 3 and 4. But he never had the grip to get a nose ahead of Briscoe or to do a slide job to complete the pass, and he didn’t squeeze Briscoe into the wall in the center of the corner. (There are other drivers in the Cup field who would have put Briscoe into the wall in that situation.)
All in all, an eventful day resulted in a good points result for Reddick, now 35 points ahead of the cutline.
Several drivers had pit-road issues that either cost themselves track position or to fall a lap down. Denny Hamlin made out the best of that group by the end of the 501.3-mile race distance.
Hamlin had a bad stop on Lap 155 after running inside the top five for the first half of the race, and it took him a while to return to the top 10.
But there the No. 11 Toyota was on the final run, pushing up to a seventh-place finish.
Honorable mention: Erik Jones (third) and John Hunter Nemechek (fourth) of Legacy Motor Club, and AJ Allmendinger with a surprise top-5.
While Reddick saved his race on Lap 1, Josh Berry’s race ended on it.
Berry spun off of Turn 2 on the first lap, suffering damage that required lengthy repairs. By the time he returned to the track, he was 119 laps down and resigned to a 38th-place finish.
The driver of the No. 21 has been inconsistent all season, so maybe a bad result is not altogether surprising. But Berry goes to Gateway with a 19-point deficit to the cutline and needs two good races to advance.
Without carrying a chest of playoff points into the round of 16, Alex Bowman needed three races of good, clean performances.
He’s 0-for-1 after Darlington.
Bowman and the No. 48 team had a laundry list of errors this weekend. He qualified 29th, had a 40-second pit stop in Stage 1 to fall two laps down and never had the speed, tires or the caution-flag luck to make a move up the leaderboard.
Bowman finished 31st and has a 19-point deficit to make up to the playoff cutline the next two races. Gateway has not been a great track for the Hendrick Motorsports driver, who has posted finishes outside the top 25 in the past two races there.
Dishonorable mention: Christopher Bell (29th) and Shane van Gisbergen (31st), whose playoff-point buffers were erased with poor results at Darlington.
