Toyota Led 222 of 267 Laps at Homestead and Lost on the Last One

Toyota’s Camrys led 222 of the 267 laps in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway and still left Florida without the race win or the championship.

Kyle Larson’s Chevrolet clinched the title before the race was a third of the way run, and Ryan Blaney’s Ford took the win away from Tyler Reddick on the last lap. Reddick crossed the line 0.314 seconds behind in second place, with Christopher Bell fourth, Bubba Wallace fifth and Denny Hamlin sixth, which put four Camry XSE race cars in the top six. Bell and Hamlin, the only two drivers who could still have beaten Larson, finished the year second and third in the standings, 49 and 56 points behind him, while Larson finished the race itself in 12th.

The title was decided at the end of the opening stage. According to NASCAR.com’s recap of the race, Larson’s fourth-place finish in Stage 1 was worth seven points, and with Bell third and Hamlin sixth in the same stage that was enough to put the championship out of reach. NASCAR confirmed it during the stage break, and Larson’s reaction on the radio, as relayed by Motorsport.com’s live coverage, was a two-word "That’s cool."

The stage ended under caution because of a Toyota. Chase Briscoe had started from the pole and led the first 34 laps, then lost the lead to a 16-second pit stop when the crew hung up on the left side of the car. He was running seventh with three laps left in the stage when his engine let go. Corey Heim had already rolled down pit road around lap 54 reporting no power in the No. 67 23XI Racing Toyota, moments after Reddick took the lead for the first time, and NASCAR’s results list both as out of the race, Heim after 57 laps and Briscoe after 77. Two TRD engines had failed inside about 20 laps of each other in the biggest race of the year.

With the championship gone, the Toyotas simply raced. Hamlin took the lead for the first time by pitting on lap 125, two laps before Bell and Reddick, and held off Bell to win Stage 2 with Reddick third. NASCAR’s official results credit Hamlin with 87 laps led, the most of anyone, followed by Reddick with 53, Bell with 46, Briscoe with 33, Heim with 2 and Wallace with 1. William Byron led 38 laps for Chevrolet and Blaney led 7 for Ford, which means Toyota drivers led everything else, 222 of the 267.

The last of those laps were the ones that mattered. Byron cycled to the lead after the final round of green-flag stops with about 40 laps to go, and a caution with 15 to go, when Noah Gragson spun Daniel Suarez, brought the field back to pit road. On3’s report says Byron beat Hamlin and Reddick off pit road, Reddick took the lead on the restart with eight laps left, and Hamlin scrubbed the wall and fell back to sixth. Blaney, who had restarted at the tail of the field at the start of Stage 2 after a second stop to check a loose wheel, passed Byron for second and then went around Reddick coming to the white flag. It was his fourth win of the season and the 21st of his career, a year after he also won the season finale at Phoenix.

The final standings have Larson on 2,501 points, Bell on 2,452 and Hamlin on 2,445, with Blaney fourth, Reddick fifth and Briscoe tied with Joey Logano for sixth. Ty Gibbs finished ninth in points. Larson’s third title follows his championships in 2021 and 2025, and The Tennessean noted that he is the first repeat champion since Jimmie Johnson in 2010. Chevrolet’s own release counted it as the brand’s 35th Cup drivers’ championship and Hendrick Motorsports’ 16th.

Toyota leaves Homestead with the trophy it already had. It clinched its fourth manufacturers’ championship at Phoenix on October 18 on the strength of 18 wins, and Toyota’s release called that its most in a season since 2019, spread across Reddick’s Daytona 500 and five more victories, four for Hamlin, two each for Heim and Ty Gibbs, Briscoe’s back-to-back playoff wins at Las Vegas and Charlotte, and Bell’s Darlington crown jewel. None of its drivers won in the last three races, so 18 is where the season total stands. On Friday Hamlin had called on Toyota and its teams to work out why so many wins keep producing so few drivers’ titles, and Sunday’s race laid the pattern out in miniature.

The Toyota Report Take

Nobody lost this championship at Homestead. Larson arrived 67 points clear and needed only a tidy first stage, and he got one. What Sunday did was show, in a single afternoon, exactly what Hamlin was talking about on Friday. Toyota brought the fastest cars, led 222 laps, won both stages and still went home without the race win or the title, undone by a slow pit stop, two engines and a brush with the wall inside the last 10 laps. Speed has not been Toyota’s problem for two years now. Finishing is.

The engines are the detail TRD will not enjoy reading about. Briscoe and Heim did not crash or get caught in someone else’s mess; their cars quit, and they quit in the one race where the whole garage was watching. Bell’s second place in the standings is a real result and Reddick’s second in the race was a fine drive, but a manufacturer that leads 83 percent of the finale should be the one lifting something at the end of it. Toyota has the winter Hamlin asked for. It should use it.

More on the Camry

• Toyota Camry Deals for November 2026: Leases From $279 a Month
• Japan’s Camry Comeback Is Now Weeks Away