Josh Berry wins first NASCAR Cup race as Las Vegas flipped the scripts

As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “luck is when preparation meets opportunity” and no one embodies that better than Josh Berry.

Five years ago, Berry was a presumed short track lifer racing Late Model Stock Cars for JR Motorsports without the funding otherwise needed to race at the highest levels.

In fact, Dale Earnhardt Jr. teed up how he personally evaluated Berry after his driver won the pole for the Snowball Derby for Rackley WAR racing back in 2022:

“Josh Berry is a Cup champion waiting for a cup owner who wants to be a Cup champion owner.”

Since then, Stewart-Haas Racing took a chance on Berry as that caliber of driver in 2024 and now he has taken the Wood Brothers to Victory Lane in just their fifth start together in 2025. Berry becomes a NASCAR Cup Series winner in just his 53rd appearance at the highest level but it comes as a 34 year old who was overlooked by the industry for over a decade.

“Five years ago, I felt like I was going to be a career short track racer,” said Berry during his post-race winner’s press conference. “I wanted to be Bubba Pollard. I wanted to be one of the greats on the short tracks. JR Motorsports gave me a chance to drive an Xfinity race. I won a race, won another race. I get an opportunity in the Cup car. That goes well. Here I am now.”

Berry, who won the NASCAR Weekly Series National Championship in 2020, is the only such title earner to have won a Cup Series race in the 45 year history of the program. He is also the 2017 CARS Late Model Stock Tour champion, the winningest driver in the decade long history of that series, and the only one to have won a Cup Series race.

“Those grassroots are important to NASCAR. There’s a lot of amazing drivers at that level. I’m just thankful. I wouldn’t change anything about how I got here. I look back now and I miss those days tremendously with driving with my buddies to all these racetracks, working on my own car. Those people made me who I am, the way I think, the way I approach racing. I wouldn’t change anything about it.”

Berry was still primed to be just a short track driver in 2021 when he had just enough funding to run the first half of the Xfinity Series season for JR Motorsports. Sure, he won at Martinsville Speedway early in that campaign but that was somewhat expected out of just a short track guy.  

He was supposed to be good at a track where he had won in a Late Model Stock Car.

But then Michael Annett broke his leg later than summer and Berry got to finish out the second half of the season that he didn’t have the funding for. Those races were paid for by the Annetts, even though he was sidelined, and Berry won what is now his first of three national touring races at Las Vegas.

This isn’t a short track, by the way, obviously.

Berry got more opportunities to substitute in the Cup Series for Chase Elliott in 2023 during his injury recovery. That first start in the No. 9 car did not go well — running outside the top-25 all race. He flew home that night reading social media commentary about all the other drivers that were better equipped to be in that car instead.

“I flew home that night thinking that my Cup career was over because of how I ran that day,” Berry said. “It was a last second throw-in the car. I had no preparation. Even thinking back to that day, they believed in me and they gave me another week. We went and finished in the top 10.

“It’s amazing the things that have to happen to get to this point.”

Preparation met opportunity.

But again, Berry finally got a full-time Cup Series opportunity driving for Tony Stewart and Gene Haas, just to have that team announce they were shutting down four months into his tenure.

But the Wood Brothers had seen enough in 2024 and felt Berry could be this guy. More so, the driver felt like he could and should be this guy, experience be damned, right out of the gate.

“You see a lot of statistics about guys in the Cup Series, kind of the hundred-race mark being the mark of when the performance kind of turns on and once they build experience and I don’t know.

“At the same time I don’t consider myself the same as a lot of younger guys, right? I’m older. I’m more experienced in racing as a whole. Not Cup racing or Xfinity racing. Still relatively inexperienced in that side of things.

“As a racer and a person, I’m 34 years old and have been racing for years and years and years. Even though it’s at a different level, I’ve seen a lot of different things. I feel like that proved in the Xfinity Series that I was maybe a little bit more prepared than really I thought I was.

“Now to be here today, it’s really cool.”

Roll of the dice

Again, ‘luck is when preparation meets opportunity’ but the fortune and misfortune came with 25 laps to go when Noah Gragson drilled the wall and brought out the final caution of the race.

The figurative die had been cast, no Las Vegas pun intended, as a series of divergent strategies had been called before a restart with 73 laps to go. A dominant Kyle Larson came back down pit road to top off on fuel so that he could make it to the end and were joined be fellow race-long contenders William Byron and Austin Cindric.

They needed the race to stay green but it didn’t.

Prior to that caution, crew chief Miles Stanley had just started to tell Berry that ‘I need earlier lifts’ because the No. 21 Ford Mustang Dark Horse was not going to make it to the end otherwise.

By all likelihood, they were not on the race winning strategy but were just hoping to ride an empty tank to a top-5.

“At that point in the race we still don’t know what cautions are going to fall, right,” Stanley said. “I felt like the best strategy for us at that time was to put ourselves in the best track position that we could. That was by staying out.

“It all played out to where we didn’t have to run it dry or save fuel but we were getting close there to where we were going to have to start deciding on how we were going to save or how we were going to make it.

“At that point in the race I felt like the best thing was to put ourselves as far forward as we could.”

And Berry was comfortable with the gambit too after a loose wheel had derailed their first-half track position.

“After we had to come down pit road and tighten up the wheel, I told him don’t be afraid to do something different here because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to get back up front,” Berry said. “That’s what he did. I mean, dude’s pretty good.”

What played out for Berry played against Larson and the fastest car of the day.

“The cautions and the strategy didn’t play out in our favor,” Larson said. “And I didn’t get good restarts the last couple of times. Then my balance wasn’t as good as I was earlier in the race in traffic. Earlier in the race, I was good in traffic, drove up to fifth without a problem. I was hoping for more of that in the last run. I was just kind of tight.

“I wonder if the track changed a little bit there. Bummer but super happy with the race car because we’re usually good at Vegas but I thought we were even better than normal. … the race didn’t play out to our strategy.”

Bell rung

Meanwhile, the effort for Christopher Bell to win four consecutive Cup Series races and four out of the first five was stricken by a litany of issues.

Bell rallied from a 13th place qualifying effort and was running 10th by the end of the first stage. He was second by Lap 108. But then came a pit stop under caution where his left side tires were not totally fastened.

Interestingly, crew chief Adam Stevens made the real-time call to have Bell stop in teammate Chase Briscoe’s pit stall and had the No. 19 team secure the tires instead. Bell had to restart at the back of the field for pitting outside of his pit box but Stevens said he knew it would be legal beyond the penalty they served.

“It’s something we’ve talked about before,” Stevens said in a media scrum after the race. “It’s something that has come up in the past and it’s been discussed with NASCAR. It could prevent a wheel coming across the track or a more dangerous situation. As soon as we realized what happened, we jumped on it.”

More pressing for the No. 20 team is that they just didn’t have the same speed or performance from the first month of races.

“I mean, just – I don’t know. It’s fine,” Bell said. “I was a grind today for sure. I don’t really know how I feel yet, but we certainly didn’t do what we did the last couple of weeks and that was just have a nice clean race.”

But Bell pushed back on the maximum potential of the car.

“I think the Interstate Camry was definitely capable of competing for the win when we were at our best but just going to the back and to the front and to the back and to the front, we just didn’t get a handle on the balance, because it changes so much from being back there,” Bell said. “I felt like we were in position in stage two to contend for another win, but it got away from us.” 

Blaney and Murphy’s Law

Las Vegas historically is a good place for Ryan Blaney as it is all of Team Penske but his weekend was rocked from the start due to a crash in practice and it didn’t get much better when he was involved in a multi-car crash on Lap 196.

Blaney found himself in a four-wide scenario and eventually bounced off of Noah Gragson, Bubba Wallace and Erik Jones. It was tight racing but Blaney was willing to take a degree of responsibility for what happened.

“Yeah, we were four-wide there, and honestly, I thought I had two (cars) inside and one outside of me,” Blaney said. “And I watched one little replay, and I had two outside, one inside, so I have to go back and see if I heard it wrong or if there was some miscommunication. I feel like I probably pitched those guys to the fence along the two, so it was probably my fault.”

Blaney still showed a lot of speed having to come from the rear and finished fifth in the first stage. Those stage points were also valuable given when he ultimately finished.

But that is when everything began to unravel.

First there was a slow stop on the first green flag cycle that trapped the Penske No. 12 two laps down. They were able to battle back to the lead lap and began moving forward again when the big crash happened.

It was the second consecutive DNF for Blaney after a blown engine last week at Phoenix Raceway.

“You try to take the best you can out of it, even though it just ended poorly,” Blaney said. “Fought from the beginning in the race, get to 15th, 16th. Have a terrible pit stop, 30-second pit stop. Got two laps down. Takes a while to get back on the lead lap. Finally get going. Finally get to the top five, it’s like, all right, I think our car is really good. And then wrecked.

“Just one of those weekends it seems like nothing could really go right. But you stick with it, stay in the game and the sun will come up tomorrow and we’ll be at the race track next week. That’s all you can do. But it is frustrating. It’s easy to get down. I just want to go home honestly and hang out with my wife tonight and just not think about racing for the evening and be ready to go Monday morning.”

Rowdy Rowdied

It was an objectively awful day for Kyle Busch, who entered this weekend with a run of momentum, but immediately had that halted with an early speeding penalty that his team struggled to explain based on all available data.

Busch also crashed due to a loose wheel and suffered from brake line issues and finished 33rd. As a result, the two-time series champion also fell out of the provisional playoff grid.

Results

1. Josh Berry
2. Daniel Suarez
3. Ryan Preece
4. William Byron
5. Ross Chastain
6. Austin Cindric
7. Alex Bowman
8. AJ Allmendinger
9. Kyle Larson
10. Chase Elliott
11. Brad Keselowski
12. Christopher Bell
13. Chris Buescher
14. Justin Haley
15. Joey Logano
16. Michael McDowell
17. Chase Briscoe
18. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
19. Riley Herbst
20. John Hunter Nemechek
21. Ty Dillon
22. Ty Gibbs
23. Zane Smith
24. Tyler Reddick
25. Denny Hamlin
26. Cole Custer
27. Erik Jones
28. Bubba Wallace
29. Todd Gilliland
30. Carson Hocevar
31. Noah Gragson
32. Austin Dillon
33. Kyle Busch
34. Shane Van Gisbergen
35. Ryan Blaney
36. Cody Ware

Playoff grid

Christopher Bell WWW
William Byron W
Josh Berry W
Tyler Reddick +45
Chase Elliott +45
Alex Bowman +42
Kyle Larson +38
Ryan Blaney +29
Joey Logano +22
Chris Buescher +19
Ross Chastain +14
Bubba Wallace +11
Denny Hamlin +8
Michael McDowell +3
John Hunter Nemechek +2
Ricky Stenhouse +2
—
Kyle Busch -2
Ryan Preece -14
Daniel Suárez -22
Chase Briscoe -22
Austin Cindric -23
Carson Hocevar -24
AJ Allmendinger -24
Todd Gilliland -25
Erik Jones -30
Ty Dillon -30
Riley Herbst -36
Justin Haley -37
Zane Smith -38
Brad Keselowski -42
Shane Van Gisbergen -43
Austin Dillon -44
Noah Gragson -56
Ty Gibbs -59
Cole Custer -68

Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.