Cook Out Southern 500: Chase Briscoe wins Darlington stunner

Chase Briscoe got a win when he needed it the most as Stewart-Haas Racing has a chance to fight for a title in its swansong season. (Photo: Meg Oliphant | Getty Images)

DARLINGTON, S.C. — If Chase Briscoe wanted to make the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, he needed to win at Darlington Raceway and he did just that after taking the checkered flag in the Cook Out Southern 500.

Briscoe earned his second career Cup Series victory in a hard-fought battle at the “Lady in Black” to lock himself into the playoffs for the second time in his Cup career.

The Stewart-Haas Racing driver was emotional in his post-race interview, knowing that it could be the final time that his childhood idol Tony Stewart’s No. 14 will find Victory Lane under the Stewart name as the team is set to cease operations at the end of the 2024 season.

“Man, everybody knows I’m a diehard Tony Stewart fan and to get this 14 car back in Victory Lane and for all 320-something employees, to be able to race for a championship in their final year, it’s unbelievable,” Briscoe said. “God is just so good. It’s like deja vu again with Kyle [Busch] with the Xfinity race here in 2020.  Obviously, I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to do it, but I just can’t thank HighPoint.com enough, Mahindra Tractors, Rush Truck Centers, Renai, everybody that makes this deal go around. We’ll go to Atlanta and try to steal another one.”

Kyle Busch, who finished 16th in the regular-season standings, finished just one spot short at Darlington and will not make the Cup Series Playoffs this year. After one of the worst starts to a season in his career, Busch ended the regular season with two straight runner-up finishes and three straight top-five finishes.

“When I made it through a few of those guys right there on the start, I thought we had a start to get there,” Busch said. “I think I just needed him to have maybe three or four more laps, older tires for me to be able to break through the wake. Once I got within his air, I really didn’t have enough to power through that, to get closer.

“I was kind of sliding already. Hate it for our guys, everybody on our team, everybody at RCR. This Morgan & Morgan Chevrolet, they turned it around these last four, five weeks and we’ve run a lot better. That’s been much improved, beneficial to our team and the organization.”

The 2024 Cup Series regular season has come to a close as 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick took home the Regular Season Championship.

Reddick’s No. 45 Upper Deck Toyota fought adversity all day as he battled sickness during the race. Despite numerous water bottles full of medicine, and the feeling of throwing up and pooping, Reddick was still able to defeat Kyle Larson, who led 263 laps and won both stages, by one point to claim his first-ever regular-season title.

Tyler Reddick was the best of the first 26. (Photo: Meg Oliphant | Getty Images)

“Yeah [the Regular Season Championship], it’s just a testament to all the hard work that everyone at 23XI, here at the racetrack, week in and week out, back at Airspeed, puts into this,” Reddick said. “We’re on year four of their goals, right? It’s just been really, really fun the last two years to be a part of this process, building up to where we want to be. I mean, it takes a lot of hard work to be consistent as we’ve been through the summer stretch.

“Both years really feel like we had rocky starts to get going. It’s nice to be able to get to where we did in the middle of the year and start thinking about points. I think it really helped us just continue to be more consistent, get us in the right mindset for these playoffs, just managing risk versus reward. We’ll be doing it three races at a time here soon.”

The results from the 2024 Cook Out Southern 500 are listed below:

Other Race Facts

Chris Buescher and Bubba Wallace will not race for a championship in 2024. (Photo: Ethan Smith | For NASCAR Digital Media)

Multiple drivers that finished inside the top 16 in the regular-season standings failed to make the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs due to the “win-and-in” playoff system. Chris Buescher (11th), Bubba Wallace (12th), Ross Chastain (14th) and Kyle Busch (16th) will all be fighting for the “best of the rest” for the remainder of the year.

The battle that had everyone’s attention all night was seemingly between Buescher and Wallace. If there was not a new winner, one of those drivers was going to make the playoffs on points.

Both drivers finished with 32 points and Buescher would have gotten the last spot if Briscoe did not win.

“We just didn’t quite get it done again and we’re on the outside looking in,” Buescher said. “It’s just the system we’re all playing in. We had such a great year. Everyone at RFK has worked so hard.  We’ve been so fast. We’ve outrun so many of these cars that are gonna get to run for a championship, but that’s the system and we didn’t work it right.”

On the other hand, Wallace was also disappointed but offered a positive outlook on the whole situation.

“We just were back and forth on our U.S. Air Force Toyota Camry,” Wallace, said. “We were a little too loose, a little too tight, and the caution a couple laps on tires where we stayed out, I don’t know if that was the deciding factor or not. I was so tight there and got back there in traffic in a spot we hadn’t been all day and got caught up someone else’s mess. It’s unfortunate. I hate it for our guys.

“Hats off to the 14 (Chase Briscoe). I thought I did something yesterday, they one-upped us and showed up when it was game time so that’s pretty bad ass so congrats to them. Man, just wasn’t good enough for 16th this year. I hate that. It stinks saying that, but it wasn’t for a lack of effort for all of us on the 23 car. Best of luck to the 45 (Tyler Reddick) and hopefully a Toyota wins.”

Ty Gibbs will make his first playoff appearance in the Cup Series after his No. 54 Monster Energy Toyota made it into the postseason on points. Gibbs will join last week’s winner Harrison Burton as a first-time playoff contender.

Corey LaJoie’s ninth-place finish is the first time in his career that he finished inside the top 10 on a non-drafting track. This was LaJoie’s 262nd start in the premier series.

Denny Hamlin has now led a lap in the last 10 Darlington Cup races. With his seventh-place finish, Hamlin not only continues his streak of finishing all 25 career races at Darlington, but he also remains the driver with the lowest average finish in the track’s history.

Ryan Blaney and Martin Truex Jr. were involved in an incident on Lap 3 that took both drivers out of the race early on. Blaney, who also finished last in the Darlington spring race, is now the only Cup Series driver to finish in last place more than once this season. The previous 25 races had 25 different last-place finishers.

Kyle Larson led more laps today (263) than all of his Hendrick Motorsports teammates have during the 2024 season up to this point.

Chase Briscoe is the Cup Series’ eighth different driver to end a race-winless streak this season that lasted 40 races or more which is the most all-time, according to statistician Trey Ryan.

Briscoe joined Austin Dillon, Alex Bowman, Joey Logano, Austin Cindric, Brad Keselowski, Chase Elliott and Daniel Suárez on the list.