AVONDALE, Ariz. — Kyle Larson denied Denny Hamlin his first career championship when a late caution at Phoenix Raceway sent the title-deciding finale into overtime.
Hamlin was three laps from shedding the label as the greatest NASCAR driver to never win a championship when fellow title contender William Byron got a flat tire and hit the wall to bring out the caution.
Hamlin led the field down pit road and got four new tires on his Toyota; Larson only took two tires on his Chevrolet. It meant Larson was fifth for the two-lap sprint to the finish, with Hamlin back in 10th.
With so little time to run down Larson, Hamlin came up short with a sixth-place finish as Larson finished third. Ryan Blaney, who was eliminated from title contention last week, won the race.
It is the second championship for Larson, who won his first title in 2021 when he joined Hendrick Motorsports.
As Larson celebrated, Hamlin sat in his car motionless for several seconds, then wiped his face with a white towel, never showing any emotion.
“I’m just numb,” Hamlin said after consoling his crying daughters on pit road. “We were 40 seconds away from a championship. This sport can drive you absolutely crazy because sometimes speed, talent, none of that matters.”
Larson, who has been in a slump since his disastrous Memorial Day attempt to race both the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on the same day, was also in shock.
“I really can’t believe it. We didn’t lead a lap and won the championship,” Larson said. “We had an average car at best and had the right front [tire] go down, lost a lap and got the wave around, saved by the caution with the wave around. It’s just unbelievable. What a year by this motorsports team.”
When Hamlin finally got out of his car he embraced his crew members but it was a scene of disbelief among the Joe Gibbs Racing crowd. Team members were crying, some sitting in shock on the pavement, Gibbs himself stood silent, one hand on his hip and a look of disbelief on his face.
It is the sixth shot at a title to slip away from Hamlin in his 20 years driving for Gibbs. He led 208 of the 319 laps and started from the pole.
“Nothing I could do different. I mean, prepared as good as I could coming into the weekend and my team gave me a fantastic car,” Hamlin said. “Just didn’t work out. I was just praying ‘no caution’ and we had one there. What can you do? It’s just not meant to be.”
He said crew chief Chris Gayle made the correct call with four tires, but too many others only took two, which created too big of a gap for Hamlin to close on Larson in so little time.
“Just numb. Feel like there’s still some racing left. I can’t believe it’s over but there’s nothing I can do but just suck it up,” Hamlin said. “I just needed 40 more seconds of green flag.”
Larson was OK during the race, but hasn’t won since early May, a slump that has now extended to 24 consecutive races.
Hamlin teammate Chase Briscoe finished 18th in his debut in the championship finale, while Larson teammate Byron was 33rd after his late issue. He felt awful for ruining Hamlin’s chance even though his Hendrick Motorsports teammate won the championship.
“I’m just super bummed that it was a caution obviously. I hate that. Hate it for Denny. I hate it for the 11 team,” Byron said. “I mean, Denny was on his way to it. I hate that. There’s a lot of respect there. I obviously do not want to cause a caution. If I had known what tire it was, known that a tire was going down before I got to the corner, I would have done something different.”
Frankie Muniz — the “Malcolm in the Middle” star turned NASCAR driver — is off the racetrack, for now at least.
The actor is recovering from a broken wrist he suffered after falling from a ladder at his home, he wrote on Instagram on Thursday.
“The phrase ‘FML’ (Frankie Muniz’s Life) takes on new meaning with moments like these,” he wrote.
The accident came right before a NASCAR event at Darlington Raceway in Darlington, S.C., over Labor Day weekend.
Muniz shared that the ladder mishap happened when he was trying to change batteries on a backyard security camera. While he joked about the situation, he said he’s heartbroken to miss the competition.
However, Muniz’s NASCAR career is far from over. He estimates he’ll be back behind the wheel within a few months.
Muniz began his professional driving career in 2006, after the end of “Malcolm in the Middle,” a move that stemmed from his lifelong admiration for the sport.
This isn’t the first time Muniz has found himself on the mend. In a previous interview, the 39-year-old told People that he’s simply “injury-prone,” and broke 38 bones between 2006 and 2017.
Muniz was involved in a crash at a 2024 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship at Phoenix Raceway in Arizona. According to reports from a journalist at the track, Muniz was seen limping into an ambulance after a hard hit from behind, but escaped major injury.
Neither that nor his latest fall are as harrowing as his major crash in 2009.
During a race, the then-21-year-old’s vehicle flipped and violently crashed into a wall. He described the crash as “gnarly” and said it resulted in him breaking his back, ankle, four ribs and a hand.
“My thumb was dangling by the skin,” Muniz told People.
In comparison, his recent fall from the ladder was a bump in the road. As the actor-turned-racer recovers, he plans to come back to racing full-force — and probably follow the instructions on his ladder a little more closely.
“Note to self: heed the ladder warning that says, ‘Do not sit or stand on top step,’” Muniz wrote on social media. “In hindsight, a taller ladder would’ve been smarter. While I’m gutted to miss the races, I’m grateful it wasn’t worse.”
Zilisch is widely considered to be a future star of the sport and is expected to secure a full-time drive in Nascar’s top tier, the Cup Series, in 2026.
He has dominated in his rookie year in Xfinity, and won at Watkins Glen, New York, after emerging unscathed from a dramatic 16-car crash in the closing stages.
Zilisch was forced to miss a race after injuring his back in a crash at Talladega in June but bounced back in style and his win on Saturday was his fifth victory in eight races.
No timeline has been put on his return by Zilisch or his JR Motorsports team, which is run by former driver Dale Earnhardt Jr, but the Xfinity Series championship play-offs begin at Portland on 31 August.
He was set to make his fourth top-tier Cup start of the season on Sunday at Watkins Glen but will miss that race as a result of the injury.
INDIANAPOLIS — Bubba Wallace became the first Black driver to win a major race on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2.5-mile oval, surviving a late rain delay, two overtimes, concerns over running out of fuel and a hard-charging Kyle Larson on Sunday in the Brickyard 400.
The third NASCAR Cup victory of Wallace’s career was also his most significant — his first win at one of the series’ four crown jewel races.
It snapped a 100-race winless streak that dated to 2022 at Kansas. He also won at Talladega in 2021, but this milestone victory also gave him a playoff spot. No Black driver has won the Indianapolis 500, and Formula 1 raced on the track’s road course.
“Unbelievable,” Wallace shouted on his radio after crossing the yard of bricks.
And while the final gap was 0.222 seconds, he didn’t reach victory lane without some consternation.
Larson trailed by 5.057 seconds with 14 laps to go but the gap was down to about three seconds with six remaining when the yellow flag came out because of rain. The cars rolled to a stop on pit lane with four to go, giving Wallace about 20 additional minutes to think and rethink his restart strategy.
But after beating Larson through the second turn, a crash behind the leaders forced a second overtime, extending the race even more laps as Wallace’s team thought he might run out of gas.
Bubba Wallace celebrates after winning the Brickyard 400 on Sunday.
(Darron Cummings / Associated Press)
Wallace risked everything by staying on the track then beat the defending race winner off the restart again to prevent Larson from becoming the fourth back-to-back winner of the Brickyard.
It also alleviated the frustration Wallace felt Saturday when he spent most of the qualifying session on the provisional pole only to see Chase Briscoe surpass with one of the last runs in the session.
He made sure there was no repeat Sunday, giving an added boost to the 23XI Racing co-owned by basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan and last week’s race winner, Denny Hamlin, as it continues to battle NASCAR in court over its charter status.
The race inside the race — the In-Season Challenge — went to Ty Gibbs, who had a better car than Ty Dillon in qualifying and on race day. Gibbs finished 21st to win the inaugural March Madness-like single-elimination tournament and collect the $1 million prize.
Dillon, a surprise championship round entrant after making the field as the 32nd and final driver, finished 28th.
Three-time series champ Joey Logano appeared to have the edge with 26 laps to go until his right rear tire went flat. Though he was able to drive it into pit lane for a tire change, he lost power and struggled to get back on the track, knocking him out of contention.
Ryan Blaney held off Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin to win the second stage, giving Blaney his fifth stage win of the year. Pole winner Chase Briscoe won the first stage, finishing ahead of Bubba Wallace and William Byron. It was Briscoe’s second stage win of the season, his first since Pocono.
Bubba Wallace kisses the Brickyard 400 trophy after winning Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Frankie Muniz may be the only actor who has been nominated for an Emmy award and driven in a NASCAR event at Daytona. But if Muniz had been old enough to get a driver’s license before he moved to Hollywood, there may never have been a “Malcolm in the Middle.”
“When I’m in that race car and I put my visor down and I drive out of that pit lane, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” he said. “That’s what I’m supposed to do and that’s what I’m doing.”
And acting?
“I don’t feel like I’m a good actor,” he said. “I know I can act. But when I look at good acting, I go ‘dang, I could never do that’.”
That’s not true, of course. Muniz, who started acting when he was 12, has been credited in 26 films and 37 TV shows, including the title role in “Malcolm in the Middle,” which earned him two Golden Globe nominations and one Emmy nod during its seven-year run on Fox.
But acting was a profession. Racing is a passion.
“Excitement and all the emotions. That’s what I love about racing,” he said. “The highs are so high and the lows are unbelievably low. It’s awesome.”
Muniz placed 28th in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Indianapolis Raceway Park on Friday. He is 23rd among the 64 drivers listed in the series points standings, with his one top-10 finish coming in the season opener at Daytona.
Muniz, 39, isn’t the first actor to try racing. Paul Newman was a four-time SCCA national champion who finished second in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979 while Patrick Dempsey (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”) has driven sports cars at Le Mans and in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, in addition to other series.
Frankie Muniz qualifies at Daytona International Speedway in February.
(Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press)
But driving isn’t a side hustle for Muniz, who last October signed with North Carolina-based Reaume Brothers Racing to be the full-time driver of the team’s No. 33 Ford in the truck series. Muniz also raced twice last year in the NASCAR Xfinity Series.
“When I originally started racing, I was kind of at the height of my [acting] career. I had tons of offers to do movies and shows and all that,” said Muniz, who made his stock-car debut in the fall of 2021 in Bakersfield, then accepted an offer to drive full time in the ARCA Menards Series in 2023. “Very easily could have stayed in that business. But I wanted to give racing a try. And to compete at the top level, you have to put in the time and effort that professional race car drivers are doing, right? You can’t do it halfway.”
Muniz was into racing before he even thought about acting. Growing up in North Carolina, he remembers waking early on the weekend to watch IndyCar and NASCAR races on TV. No one else in his family shared his interest in motorsports, so when his parents divorced shortly after Muniz was discovered acting in a talent show at age 8, his mother moved to Burbank, where he made his film debut alongside Louis Gossett Jr. in 1997’s “To Dance With Olivia.”
Two years later he was cast as the gifted middle child of a dysfunctional working-class family in the successful sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle.” Motorsports continued to tug at him so after running in a few celebrity events, Muniz twice put his acting career on hold to race, first in 2007 — shortly after “Malcolm” ended after seven seasons and 151 episodes — when he started a three-season run in the open-wheel Atlantic Championship series.
Still, Muniz, who lives with his wife Paige and 4-year-old son Mauz in Scottsdale, Ariz., is dogged by criticism he is little more than a weekend warrior who is using his substantial Hollywood reputation and earnings to live out his racing fantasies.
“I don’t spend any of my money going racing,” he said. “I made a promise to my wife that I would not do that. So I can kill that rumor right there.”
But those whispers persist partly because Muniz hasn’t completely cut ties with acting. Because the truck series doesn’t run every weekend, racing 25 times between Valentine’s Day and Halloween, Muniz had time to tape a “Malcolm in the Middle” reunion miniseries that is scheduled to air on Disney+ in December.
He has also appeared in two other TV projects and two films since turning to racing full time. But his focus, he insists, is on driving.
“If I wanted to go racing for fun,” he said, “I would not be racing in the truck series. I’d be racing at my local track or I’d be racing some SCCA club events. I want to be one of the top drivers there are. I want to make it as high up in NASCAR as I can. And I’m doing everything I can to do that.”
Fame outside of racing can be a double-edged sword in the high-cost world of NASCAR. It can open doors to a ride and sponsorships others can’t get, but it can also cause jealousy in the garage, with drivers crediting that fame and not talent for a rival’s success. And Muniz isn’t the only rookie driver who has had to deal with that.
Toni Breidinger, who finished 27th in Friday’s race and is one place and eight points ahead of Muniz in the season standings with nine races left, is a model who has posed for Victoria’s Secret and been featured in the pages of Glamour, GQ and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition. She’s also a good driver who has been going fast on a racetrack far longer than she’s been walking slowly down a catwalk.
Toni Breidinger prepares for NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series practice at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park on Friday.
(Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
“I was definitely a racer before anything. That was definitely my passion,” said Breidinger, who started driving go-karts in Northern California when she was 9. “I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do modeling to help support that passion. But at the end of the day, I definitely consider myself a racer. That’s what I grew up doing and that’s the career I’ve always wanted do to.”
Still, she sees the two pursuits as being complementary. When Breidinger appears on a red carpet, as she did before this month’s ESPY Awards in Los Angeles, it helps her modeling career while at the same time giving the sponsors of her racing team — which includes 818 Tequila, Dave & Buster’s and the fashion brand Coach — added value.
“It’s all part of the business. It all goes back into my racing,” said Breidinger, 26, who is of German and Lebanese descent. “The side hustles, I like to call them. I don’t think that takes away from me being a race car driver.”
Breidinger, who won the USAC western asphalt midget series title as a teenager, raced in the ARCA Menards Series for five years before stepping up to truck series in 2021, making NASCAR history in 2023 when she finished 15th in her first race, the best-ever debut by a female driver. That helped her land a full-time ride this season with Tricon Garage, Toyota’s flagship team in the truck series.
Like Muniz, Breidinger sees the truck series, the third tier of NASCAR’s national racing series, as a steppingstone to a seat in a Cup car.
“I want to climb the national ladder. That’s what I’m here to do,” she said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have long-term plans and long-term goals. I’m a very competitive person, especially with myself.”
Kyle Larson, who climbed to the top of that ladder, running his first NASCAR national series race in a truck in 2012, then winning the 2021 Cup championship nine years later, said the path he took — and the one Muniz and Breidinger are following — is a well-worn one.
“Anybody racing in any of the three series has talent and ability enough to be there,” he said.
Funding, Larson said, and not talent and ability, often determines how fast a driver can make that climb and that might be a problem for Muniz since Josh Reaume, the owner of the small three-truck team Muniz drives for, has complained about the price of racing. It can cost more than $3.5 million a year to field one competitive truck in the 25-race series — and that cost is rising, threatening to price many out of the sport.
But having drivers like Muniz and Breidinger in NASCAR will help everyone in the series, Larson said, because it will bring in fans and sponsors that might not have been attracted to the sport otherwise.
“I just hope that he can get into a situation someday where you can really see his talent from being in a car or a truck that is better equipped to go run towards the front,” Larson said of Muniz. “You want to see him succeed because if he does succeed, it’s only going to do good things for our sport.”
And if it works out the way Muniz hopes, perhaps he’ll someday be the answer to another trivia question: Name the NASCAR champion who once worked in Hollywood.
NASCAR is returning to Southern California, only its cars will be racing on the streets of Coronado and not on an oval in Fontana. The stock car racing circuit announced Wednesday it will be hosting a three-day series of races June 19-21, ending in a NASCAR Cup Series race on the U.S. Naval base in Coronado.
NASCAR did not race in Southern California last year for the first time since 1997, with the exception of 2021, when the schedule was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. For much of that time, the races were held at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, but that track was torn down in 2023 to make room for a giant warehouse complex. NASCAR preserved part of the grandstand and had hoped to built a half-mile oval track on the site, but that project has stalled and is unlikely to be revived.
NASCAR also raced on a temporary quarter-mile oval on the floor of the Coliseum, but that event has also been abandoned.
Next summer’s Coronado race, which came to fruition after years of careful negotiation, is the first NASCAR event to be run on an active military base. It is being timed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy and will feature a race weekend including an Xfinity Series race and a Craftsman Truck Series event.
NASCAR ran street course races in Chicago’s Grant Park from 2023-25 but that event will not return in 2026, making the Coronado race the only street race on the schedule next year.
“NASCAR embodies the very best of the American spirit through speed, precision and an unyielding pursuit of excellence,” Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan said in a statement. “Hosting a race aboard Naval Air Station North Island, the birthplace of naval aviation, it’s not just a historic first, it’s a powerful tribute to the values we share: grit, teamwork and love of country.
“We’re proud to open our gates to the American people, honor those who wear the uniform, and inspire the next generation to step forward and serve something greater than themselves.”
Naval Base Coronado, known as the West Coast Quarterdeck, is a consortium of nine Navy installations stretching from San Clemente Island, 50 miles off the coast of Long Beach, to the Mountain Warfare Training Facility 50 miles east of San Diego.
“Hosting one of America’s premier motorsports events on this historic base reflects our partnership with the local community and our shared pride in the nation’s heritage,” said captain Loren Jacobi, commanding officer of Naval Base Coronado. “We are privileged to showcase the dedication of our sailors alongside NASCAR’s finest as we celebrate our 250th anniversary.”
The NASCAR San Diego logo features an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which is recognized as only being flown by the U.S. Navy. The three stars in the logo signify land, sea, and air, which represents the Navy as the only branch of the military to operate in all three spaces. The arch represents the mission-style architecture found in San Diego. The stripes at the bottom of the logo represent the four largest United States Armed Force branches: Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Navy.
Tickets for the 2026 NASCAR San Diego Weekend will go on-sale this fall.
