The thrilling finish of Sunday night’s Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte was as swift as it was stunning. With six laps to go, Cup veteran Ross Chastain drove his No. 1 Chevy to the inside of William Byron and swept past him to the front. Byron had led 283 laps to that point. Chastain had led just two. But there would be no more lead changes from there on out. The race was over.
“[It] just sucks,” Byron told Amazon Prime’s Trevor Bayne after the race.
His disappointment was understandable. Not only had Byron dominated the evening, winning each of the race’s first three stages, but he had also just put away Denny Hamlin, the man who’d been his top rival all night long. The two had dueled for the lead throughout most of race’s middle stages—they’d traded the top spot back and forth 15 times—but a fuel-can mishap on Hamlin’s penultimate pit stop had left him without enough gas to reach the finish of NASCAR’s longest race. As Hamlin fell farther and farther back, an ending that had been in doubt for so long suddenly seemed certain. The night would belong to Byron.
But it was then that Chastain mounted a furious charge. He’d been running just outside of the top 10 for most of the race but had come on strong in the final 100 laps, especially after everyone had cycled through pit road with about 50 to go. On his winning move, Chastain slid up the track in Turn 2 after getting past Byron’s 24 Chevy on the inside of Turn 1. Byron then made contact with the wall as he tried to keep close to Chastain’s rear bumper. The 24 wasn’t able to seriously challenge after that.
“Holy cow!” an ebullient Chastain said after the race. “We just won the 600!”
“He was catching me,” Byron said. “I was trying to just defend and was getting a little bit tight.”
Nothing could have seemed more improbable just four and a half hours earlier, when Chastain had started in 40th position—the very rear of the field—in a backup car he’d had to switch to a day earlier after crashing his primary car in practice. No winner of the Coke 600 had ever come from further back. Chastain’s Trackhouse Racing team had worked until 2:30 a.m. on Sunday morning to get the new car ready—and then returned to the shop three hours later to put the finishing touches on it.
“That’s the dedication it takes from Trackhouse,” Chastain told Prime’s Marty Snider after the race. “There were people that had Saturdays off, and they came in for this Chevy.”
“We probably had 30 people come in,” said crew chief Phil Surgen. “We had, obviously, all the road crew that was at the track.... We had shop guys that were at concerts and ballgames and everything that just dropped what they were doing and came to the shop.”
The win was sweet for Chastain. The 32-year-old driver was the runner-up in the Cup series in 2022, but he came into the Coca-Cola 600 with just five career victories and has never won more than two races in a season. His first victory of 2025 moved him up three spots to eighth in the points standings. Outside of his win at Talladega three years ago, the Coke 600 is the biggest triumph of Chastain’s career. He is the first driver to win a race after starting in last place (not due to a penalty) since the great Richard Petty did it in 1971 at Richmond.
Chastain’s triumphant night was a far cry from the thoroughly miserable day endured by Kyle Larson, Byron’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate, whose attempt to complete the Memorial Day Double—racing in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Coke 600—had ended with crumpled fenders in two different states. Rain had delayed the start of the 500 by 48 minutes, during which time a clearly agitated Larson was seen checking his watch. After the race started, he stalled his car on pit road and got shuffled to the back of the field. He never seriously challenged for the lead before spinning out and crashing on Lap 91. A discouraged Larson then jumped on a plane to get to Charlotte.
The Cup race went better for him, but only a bit. He started on the front row and then passed Byron for the lead on Lap 9. But while running in front on Lap 42, Larson hit the wall and then spun in Turn 4, sliding sideways to the bottom of the track. He later returned to the race, but crashed out for good on Lap 245. In all, he finished 595 of a combined 1,100 miles. Larson had entered the Coke 600 leading the Cup series in points. He ended it in second, trailing Byron.
“A bummer of a day all around,” an exhausted-looking Larson said. “Not the day that I wanted.”
Speaking later with NBC’s Dustin Long, Larson sounded like a man who wasn’t eager to try both races again. “The double is just a tough undertaking,” he said. “The window of time is too tight. Even if I didn’t wreck, I don’t think I would have made It [to Charlotte] on time, and probably would have had to end [the Indy 500] short anyways.... Just doing the double I think is just logistically too tough.”
Next Sunday, Larson will have a chance to make up for his bad day in Nashville, the next stop on the Cup series circuit. Only thing is: Chastain won at Nashville in 2023 and he has three top 10 finishes in four career starts at the track.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Ross Chastain Stuns William Byron in Final Laps to Win Coca-Cola 600.
