Source: BroBible
Summary
Kyle Larson won the Enjoy Illinois 300 at World Wide Technology Raceway, moving to second in the NASCAR Cup Series standings. He led 80 laps and outdueled Joey Logano. Larson’s victory improved his position and challenged points leader Denny Hamlin. Other drivers, including Bubba Wallace and Chase Briscoe, had mixed results. Hamlin remained first despite a difficult race.
Our Reading
The routine arrives with confidence.
Larson’s win feels like a comeback, but it’s just another week of racing.
Hamlin’s lead is shrinking, but he’s still the favorite.
Chase Briscoe’s crash was bad luck, but it’s not the end of the season.
Everyone’s chasing the same points, just in different ways.
Author: Evan Null
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 28
Prior to the season, most drivers in the Cup Series felt that you needed to enter the Chase among the top six seeds to be a real threat to contend for a championship.
However, as we’ve seen throughout the season, one strong race, including high finishes in both stages and a victory, can lead to a massive points haul. We’ve seen that come to fruition in both of the first two races of the chase — first with Christopher Bell a week ago, and now with Larson.
While there are seemingly some restrictions on how far back you can be and still make a run, stumbles from Hamlin, who entered the Chase as the top seed, have brought a number of drivers into the fray, and that’s reflected in our newest set of power rankings.
Wallace, who started the Chase outside the top 10 in the standings, is apparently one of the exceptions to the rule regarding the expanded field of contenders.
Sure, he could have gone on a generational run and chased down the top spot. However, what looked like a great day a week ago at Darlington ended up just being a good day, and he backed that up by running in 14th at St. Louis.
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 28
Wallace, who started the Chase outside the top 10 in the standings, is apparently one of the exceptions to the rule regarding the expanded field of contenders.
Sure, he could have gone on a generational run and chased down the top spot. However, what looked like a great day a week ago at Darlington ended up just being a good day, and he backed that up by running in 14th at St. Louis.
Still, Wallace has done enough to move up a couple of spots both in the power rankings and the point standings, positioning himself well for a solid end to an up-and-down season.
Controversy? What controversy?
While Carson Hocevar entered this weekend’s event at World Wide Technology Raceway (which is technically just outside of St. Louis in Madison, Ill.) in the news for what many would call the wrong reasons, he didn’t let it distract him on the track.
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 28
Hocevar backed up his 11th-place finish at Darlington by coming out and qualifying sixth for Sunday’s race, running inside the top 10 for the majority of the day, and then bringing home a top-10 finish.
He climbed back into the top 10 of the point standings in the process, and somehow avoided a run-in with new rival Brad Keselowski despite the two running around each other for much of the day.
Chase Briscoe is seemingly the first driver on this list who still feels like he could win a championship over the course of the final eight races of the season, but Sunday proved to be a major setback for him, through no fault of his own.
Briscoe was in the wrong place at the wrong time on Sunday when fellow Chase contender Chase Elliott’s brake rotor exploded, sending him into Briscoe and the pair of them into the wall at high speed.
Thankfully, nobody was injured. But Briscoe’s championship push took a bit of a hit. He dropped from fifth to eighth in the point standings after a 32nd-place finish and now will have to make up significant ground in the coming weeks to put himself back on level terms with the top drivers in the standings.
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 28
On one hand, Ty Gibbs avoided completed disaster and finished the second-highest of the four Joe Gibbs Racing drivers in the field on Sunday.
On the other hand, he’s yet to show the speed needed to contend for a championship in the opening races of the Chase, and we saw glimpses of the old, less mature Ty Gibbs when he got into an early incident with Legacy Motorsports’ Erik Jones.
Gibbs is still within touching distance of the points lead, so we’re not writing him off yet, but it feels like he needs a big showing next week at Bristol to re-establish himself as a title contender.
Three-time series champion Joey Logano has to feel conflicted following Sunday’s race in St. Louis.
On one hand, he took a solid chunk out of Hamlin’s points lead and currently sits as high in the standings as he has all season.
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 28
Logano entered the weekend as a favorite to win the race, knowing he needed a big showing if he was going to contend for a championship. He just about did so, sitting on the pole and taking 19 of a possible 20 stage points before finishing in third.
However, he led the most laps and could well have won the race, which would have trimmed another 20 points off of Hamlin’s lead and made it abundantly clear that Logano was a genuine threat moving forward. At the moment, that status is up in the last.
Reddick was the beneficiary, to a degree, of a race full of chaos.
On one hand, he finished down in 25th after getting caught up in one of the plethora of late-race wrecks. On the other hand, he still sits within 50 points of Hamlin at the top and only dropped one position in the standings. So the damage was minimal, all things considered.
Reddick showed decent speed throughout the race, driving up into the back end of the top 10 despite an early incident with fellow Chase competitior Dnaiel Suarez. But with a more impressive day, he could’ve been starting down the top of the standings or, at least, a single-digit deficit.
