LEBANON — Denny Hamlin walked up to the media center stage at Nashville Superspeedway after interviews in victory lane, took the microphone and plopped into the Cracker Barrel rocking chair sitting in the middle of the room.
Hamlin blinked his eyes, then took a deep, audible breath.
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He finally had a moment to decompress about an hour after out-gunning Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe to win the Cracker Barrel 400, Nashville’s NASCAR Cup Series race on May 31.
The three Joe Gibbs Racing teammates were side-by-side-by-side in a three-wide battle going into the first turn on the last lap. Hamlin committed to running the bottom lane on the final lap to avoid initiating any possible contact with his teammates. Bell overdrove the corner, and Hamlin had his chance to clear for the lead.
“That’s why I said (to himself) on the last lap, ‘I’m just going to run the bottom,’ ” Hamlin said. “I’m not going to wipe us out. I’m not going to try to self-clear myself like I have done in these situations.”
It was a harder drive than expected for Hamlin, who sat on the pole but had a Lap 1 penalty for jumping the start.
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Here are the winners and losers from the NASCAR Nashville race:
GENTRY ESTES: As NASCAR mourns Kyle Busch, the show goes on at Nashville Superspeedway
NASCAR Nashville winners and losers as Toyota shines, SVG earns best career oval finish
Winner: Toyota (again)
What could be a better summation for the 2026 Cup Series season through 14 races than three Toyotas battling for the win at a track the manufacturer has never won at.
Hamlin, Briscoe and Bell all played nicely in their three-car duel over the final three laps.
All Toyota has to do for its next NASCAR-related marketing push is show the final-lap image of its three cars going three-wide into the first turn for the lead. It’s the kind of imagery companies want to dream up on a script or an AI program, but this happened in reality.
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The worst thing that happened to Toyota in the 300-lap race was Tyler Reddick’s crash at the finish line with a hard head-on hit with the outside wall. Reddick finished sixth for his troubles and still leads the points standings by 97 points over Hamlin.
Winner: Shane van Gisbergen
Shane van Gisbergen was frustrated by the finishing result last week in Charlotte (11th) but encouraged by running inside the top 10 for most of the day.
SVG got that result in the wild four-lap run to the finish, driving past Chase Elliott and Reddick on the frontstretch by inches to claim 5th, his first top-5 on an oval track of any type.
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The driver of the No. 97 is 12th in points coming out of the weekend, 44 points ahead of 17th.
Two road-course races (San Diego and Sonoma) loom back-to-back in two weeks, and those will be massive chances to pad his cushion to the cutline.
Loser: Ross Chastain’s 2026
Chastain’s no-good 2026 season continued at Nashville Superspeedway.
The No. 1 Chevrolet lost a brake rotor on Lap 82 in a carbon-copy manner to his teammate Connor Zilisch 11 laps earlier. Chastain smacked the wall and rode it for a while before slowly returning to the garage area.
Chastain was credited with a 37th-place finish. He leaves Nashville in 26th in points, unofficially 67 points off the Chase cutline.
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This is the difference in the dynamic between the Chase and the playoff format. Instead of being one good run and a race win away from the final 16, Chastain has a tall task to rescue a first-half of the season to forget.
Loser: RFK Racing’s chances to get three cars into the Chase
All three Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing drivers did not finish at Nashville.
Ryan Preece exited the race after water pressure issues after the first stage, and the team said it was a radiator issue via a piece of broken brake rotor from another car.
100 laps later, Brad Keselowski crashed via contact from Austin Dillon, backing into the outside wall on the frontstretch. Keselowski, who finished 34th, was critical of Dillon after seeing a replay, telling Amazon Prime Video that “turnabout is fair play.”
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And Chris Buescher suffered a brake failure with 14 laps to go, finishing in 29th.
Buescher is still more than a full race’s amount of points ahead of the cutline, but Keselowski is now 43 points ahead of 17th. That driver just below the cutline is now Preece, two points behind 16th-place Austin Cindric.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: NASCAR Nashville winners, losers: Shane van Gisbergen has milestone finish
