Ty Gibbs won a battle he probably shouldn’t have been in position to win at all.
A blown pit stop late in the first stage buried the No. 54 Toyota 25 spots deep in the field at Iowa Speedway on Sunday. By the closing laps, Gibbs was leading the Iowa Corn 350 — and staring at his own teammate, Christopher Bell, in the mirror.
The turning point came on Lap 290 of 350, when crew chief Tyler Allen sent Gibbs back onto the track on just two tires during a green-flag cycle, leapfrogging Bell, who took four. Once Ross Chastain cycled through his own stop on Lap 331, Gibbs had the lead outright — and held it the rest of the way, crossing the line 0.253 seconds ahead of Bell for his second win of the season and his career.
Bell spent the final laps trying everything: running high, running low, crowding Gibbs’ bumper looking for an opening. None of it worked. “This is what you call a bad second-place finish, for sure,” Bell said afterward. “Ty did a really good job. He did a great job managing the race.” It was Bell’s seventh runner-up finish of the year and his fourth in the last five races — a result that at least moved him from 10th to 6th in the points standings, even if it didn’t feel like much of a consolation.
Gibbs, 23, credited his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates for the recovery drive that got him back to the front after the pit-road mistake. “I wouldn’t be here without all my teammates as well, week in and week out,” he said, singling out Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe and Bell himself.
Pole-sitter Ryan Blaney led a race-high 129 laps and took the Stage 1 win before fading to third. Josh Berry picked up his first top-five of the season in fourth. Hamlin, nursing brake problems and starting from the rear, still managed fifth — enough to stretch his points lead over Gibbs, now second in the standings, to 103.
The race’s biggest wreck came early: on Lap 4, Tyler Reddick got loose in Turn 2 and collected teammate Erik Jones, ending both of their days and reshuffling the Chase picture. Reddick dropped to fourth in points, 120 behind Hamlin with three races left before the field is set. “It’s the type of stuff you don’t do to yourself, and you don’t do to a teammate,” Reddick said. Jones, who came into the weekend just 44 points outside the cutoff, left it 50 back — a steep hole with little time to climb out of it.
Kyle Larson’s rough history at Iowa continued as well. Running third late in Stage 1, he got collected in a Lap 149 accident after John Hunter Nemechek forced him up the track in a four-wide scramble, finishing two laps down in 33rd.
Rookie Connor Zilisch finished 11th, matching his best oval-track result of his career.
