Chase Elliott won Sunday’s (March 29) Cook Out 400 at Martinsville after an excellent strategy call from crew chief Alan Gustafson put him up front.
Elliott held off a dominant Denny Hamlin to score his first victory of 2026.
Elliot opted to pit with 139 laps to go, giving him the option to pit once more in the final stage if the race went green. However, a pair of quick cautions left him out front after he drove to the lead with his fresh rubber. He kept the top spot over the final green flag run after passing Ross Chastain on the final restart and holding off Hamlin.
“Definitely a team effort, that was awesome,” Elliot told the FS1 broadcast. “We took a gamble. That was awesome. Total team effort.”
Joey Logano matched his best 2026 finish in third, followed by Ty Gibbs and William Byron to round out the top five.
Ryan Blaney ended up sixth, ahead of Christopher Bell and Austin Cindric. Kyle Larson and Josh Berry rounded out the top 10.
“(Chase) did a good job to control the pace there,” Hamlin said. “Just not much, really, I could’ve done there.”
Logano scored a much-needed top five on Sunday.
“Solid rebound for everybody,” Logano said. “Nice to have a good rebound, solid car. The car, honestly, if we were able to get to the lead, I don’t know if the 9 was any better than us. Proud of the team.”
Gibbs continued his hot streak and ran inside the top five throughout Sunday’s race and scored a fifth consecutive top-six finish.
“Really good day for our No. 54 Monster Energy group,” Gibbs said. “Maybe next time we come back we’ll be even better than this. It was a blast.”
Byron’s fifth-place effort propelled him to fifth in the series standings.
“Just missing a little bit in one part of the corner,” Byron said. “I thought we were good all day. We needed some track position. I was really proud of that last run, we had to come from ninth to fifth.”
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Blaney made heavy contact with the outside wall while racing Hamlin inside the top five on the final run.
“Overall, a really good day,” Blaney said. “I thought we got a little better all day. What happened with the restart kind of put us back.”
The biggest incident of the day occurred in stage three, when Bubba Wallace spun Carson Hocevar on the exit of turn 4 and triggered a massive chain reaction involving several cars. Wallace’s No. 23 was the most severely damaged, while Hocevar’s team had to remove his left-rear fender.
Wallace said that he misjudged the corner before turning Hocevar, who had previously put Wallace three-wide on the restart two laps prior.
Zane Smith, Riley Herbst, Austin Hill and Chris Buescher, among others, were also involved.
Cook Out 400 Results
The NASCAR Cup Series will take one week off before returning at Bristol Motor Speedway on April 12. The Food City 500 will begin at 3 p.m. ET on FOX Sports 1.
