Corey Day won the Focused Health 302 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday in exhilarating fashion over Carson Kvapil, who finished second. The win was Day’s third of the season, and with those 75 points, Day moved up to fifth in the standings, just 41 points off Creed in first.
Jesse Love finished third after starting 10th and was followed by Brent Crews, who finished fourth as the best running Toyota at Las Vegas. To round out the top five, Taylor Gray finished in fifth.
Sam Mayer, who won the second stage, finished in sixth while Jeremy Clements finished in seventh for his highest finish since Talladega earlier this season. Then to round out the top 10, William Sawalich, Austin Hill and Anthony Alfredo finished eighth, ninth and 10th respectively.
The championship leader, Sheldon Creed, finished 13th while not getting a single stage point. This dropped his lead down to just 19 points to Kvapil, who overtook Justin Allgaier for second.
The lowest finishing Chase driver was Brandon Jones, who was disqualified from the race despite not finishing due to having four or more lug nuts not safe or secure.
Day won the first stage followed by Mayer, Rajah Caruth, Brandon Jones, Love, Crews, Ryan Sieg, Gray, Hill and Justin Allgaier to make up the top 10.
Day and Mayer again finished 1-2 in stage two, but this time Mayer edged out Day. Following them were Caruth, Kvapil, Clements, Sawalich, Crews, Love, Gray and Sieg to make up the top 10.
The biggest turn of events during the race took place shortly after the restart to start stage two. Just 10 laps after the restart, Jones, who started second, lost power and started falling down the order. During his freefall, Jones got turned and hit Allgaier, sending both into the wall.
Because of the damage to both cars, neither would finish the race, and Allgaier would move down the standings from second to fourth. This incident marks another bad finish for Allgaier since the points reset entering Darlington.
Over the first four Chase races, Allgaier only has one top five finish, which happened at Bristol when he finished fourth and had the second most points. Other than that, he finished 17th at Darlington, 13th at Gateway and now 34th at Las Vegas.
Also, during these past four races, Allgaier has only gotten 129 points, which is his worst four-race stretch since June 20 to July 11 earlier this year when he got 124 points. During that stretch, Allgaier finished 32nd at Naval Base Coronado, 26th at Sonoma, sixth at Chicagoland and first at Atlanta.
The best moment of the race was in the closing laps when Day and Kvapil had an amazing battle for the win. For a good chunk of the last stage, Kvapil and Day were fighting for the lead, but it all came to a head with three laps to go when Kvapil overtook Day for the lead after trailing him for what seemed like ages.
Day wouldn’t give up though as he would ride the top line, taking the lead back coming up on two laps to go, but Kvapil would overtake him again before the line. Day would once again challenge Kvapil at the white flag and would be side by side after scraping the wall entering the backstretch.
In the final corner, Day would again scrape the wall before taking the checkered flag for the win by just .287 seconds. Kvapil didn’t lose out entirely, though, taking his first top 10 finish at Las Vegas in four starts.
The NASCAR O’Reilly Parts Series will be back this Saturday, Oct. 10 at 4 p.m. at Charlotte Motor Speedway. You can watch the race on the CW or listen on Sirius XM.