Martinsville didn't decide the title but still had its moments

William Byron was still celebrating, and the rest of the field wasn’t even parked on pit road when one thought struck.

What do we do with that?

The thought came from a storytelling perspective. Martinsville Speedway, as some would say when there's nothing to say, was a race of all the races ever run.

That is not to understate the obvious. There were questions and stories to write about where things stand with the championship, but even that didn’t have much meat on the bone. Kyle Larson is in firm control of his third title, and his Hendrick Motorsports team did what they needed to do to keep it within reach.

Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin didn't want to win the championship, though. Both did everything but what they needed to in order to even have a shot in the finale. Both remain quite far back, and how much more can they possibly say? There's a reason you likely won’t see or hear from them at media day later this week because it’s, well, why? It’s all about Larson.

So, aside from that bigger picture, what do we do with Sunday’s race?

Well, how about we spend some time on non-championship matters?

William Byron didn't fall into the trap set by other regular season champions by going winless the following year. Meg Oliphant/Getty Images

Byron waxed the field, and boy, did the No. 24 team need that

The regular-season champion from 2025 was in dangerous territory with two races to go: a winless season. It would have been notable for two reasons. The first is a weird statistic that has emerged about regular-season champions (of the previous playoff format) going winless the next year. Four drivers have done so since 2020, and Byron would have been the fifth.

On another note, going winless would have ended Byron’s streak of winning at least one race a season at six. Instead, he has now won at least one race in seven consecutive seasons.

And it was a big win. Byron, Rudy Fugle, and the team have struggled for consistency this season and haven’t looked like the championship contenders they had been the last few years. Some of it can be chalked up to the hard work of adjusting to a new Chevy body, and, of course, racing is cyclical, and down years strike more drivers than they don’t.

Either way, it’s been a frustrating and challenging year. At times, that frustration has been heard on the team radio in ways never heard before.

“It’s been a lot of adversity,” Byron said. “I think we just continue to work hard. I think our work ethic has always been a thing that’s kept us moving forward and progressing, and always looking for the next thing. I’m just proud of that. I’m proud of the fact that no one quit. Just that we could continue to kind of put our heads together. Within the shop, too. It’s easy to say from the outside, ‘Oh, let’s just put all the effort into one car.’

“But I think for us it was never that way. We were just putting in all the effort we could and every little thing. Like is there something I need to do different? Do we need to change something so that we can maximize our day? We did all those little things.”

The way that Byron and Fugle returned to victory lane – dominating – also wasn't a surprise. Sunday was exactly what is expected of them, and stinking up the show by having a great, perhaps boring to some, day execution wise is what they have been very good at the last few years.

Shane van Gisbergen turned in another impressive oval performance. David Jensen/Getty Images

Shane van Gisbergen is for real on ovals, but you should already know that

Shane van Gisbergen is going to win an oval race in the Cup Series, and it might come sooner rather than later. And it also might come on a short track. Martinsville was not an anomaly. He averaged a top 15 running position all afternoon and kept improving on the leaderboard.

It also wasn’t an anomaly because shorter, flat tracks seem to be where van Gisbergen is gaining the most in his sophomore season. Van Gisbergen finished 11th in the spring Phoenix race, 11th in the spring Martinsville race, led the race before finishing fifth at North Wilkesboro, had a 14th-place finish at Richmond, and now has a top-five finish at Martinsville to cap the year on those types of tracks.

“I guess the Wendy’s car is good luck; we got another top-five with it,” van Gisbergen said. “I’m pretty stoked with that. Yeah, just awesome day. I’m pissed at myself for yesterday in qualifying. If we started up front, maybe we would have had a better shot. Thanks to the Trackhouse team all day, we just methodically worked forward and got in a couple of little incidents, fixed it up, and got a good result.”

It would be ignorant, however, to look at van Gisbergen’s results through a narrow lens. Although the short tracks have been a highlight for him, he has also run (but perhaps not always finished) among the top 10 in other oval races, showing he is adjusting to stock car racing at the highest level and what it takes to succeed.

Bold on the brakes? Josh Beryy was one of the drivers roughing up the competition. David Jensen/Getty Images

Hello, madness, my old friend

How much fun was it to see drivers be mad at a short track again? It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve had it to the level it was on display on Sunday.

TV might not have shown all of it, but from a press box view, you could see how much of a dogfight it was through the field, with drivers getting into corners too hot and sliding the tires, trying to knock people out of the way, and front bumpers that once again looked like they had finished a race at a short track.

Let’s start with the latter. The Next Gen car has been criticized for being too solid, and part of that is its lack of body crush. Think of how many times a driver would run into someone and not only barely get them out of shape, but the car looked like it hadn’t been touched. But by taking the foam out of the front bumpers this year, we finally got destroyed cars again, with the contact being made at Martinsville.

NASCAR might now need to look at the rear bumpers, because the flip side of the contact was brake-checking. Drivers who do that should face consequences, not just the driver whose hood they destroyed.

The brake-checking was fascinating in how much of it occurred.

There was teammate-on-teammate crime when Josh Berry seemingly brake-checked Ryan Blaney. In response, Blaney said Berry had “lost his mind.” Carson Hocevar once again pissed off most of the field – and those watching – with his problem with Austin Cindric.

Neither Berry nor Hocevar admitted anything, of course. But anyone with eyes feels they know what they saw on Sunday.

Overall, what we saw might have been one of the better Martinsville races in recent years. It wasn’t the great. It wasn’t the worst. And while it didn’t give us anything new in the championship, which is what everyone was watching, there were at least a few other talking points for this week before we race one more time this season.