Almirola’s third win of the year locks no. 19 team into owners championship fight in Phoenix
LAS VEGAS (October 11, 2025) – Aric Almirola swept the stages and made the final pass for the win with less than 10 laps remaining to score his third victory of the season at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday evening. With the win, Almirola has clinched the no. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team a spot in the Owners Championship 4 in Phoenix.
Brandon Jones, Toyota’s remaining Playoff driver, suffered a tire losing air throughout the first stage, and was forced to climb his way back through the field. He finished 13th and is just eight points out of the Championship 4 heading into Talladega.
Toyota GAZOO Racing Post-Race Recap
NASCAR Xfinity Series (NXS)
Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Race 30 of 33 – 301.5 miles, 201 laps
TOYOTA FINISHING POSITIONS
1st, ARIC ALMIROLA
2nd, Connor Zilisch*
3rd, Justin Allgaier*
4th, Corey Day*
5th, Nick Sanchez*
8th, TAYLOR GRAY
12th, WILLIAM SAWALICH
13th, BRANDON JONES
22nd, TREVOR BAYNE
28th, DEAN THOMPSON
*non-Toyota driver
TOYOTA QUOTES
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 19 Young Life Toyota GR Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing
Finishing Position: 1st
How did you go about those last few laps in order to win your third race this season?
“First, thank you God. This is such an unbelievable opportunity to do this with the Signatry and Young Life. They have watch parties all over the globe with these Young Life kids, and it is so much fun to be a part of this. Thank you, Coach (Joe Gibbs, owner and founder, Joe Gibbs Racing). Such an awesome honor to go race for an owner’s championship with JD Gibbs’ name on the car – the whole Gibbs family. I’m having so much fun. This is the time of my life, man. Our car was really good, but the longer I ran, the tighter I got. I was just struggling on the long run in the beginning of stage three and finally that restart there. I just took off incredibly tight, and I couldn’t get going. The 48 (Nick Sanchez) slowed my momentum down. Finally, I got clear of him and was able to go and chase the 88 (Connor Zilisch) down. He looked pretty loose, and I was able to capitalize on it.”
BRANDON JONES, No. 20 Menards/Nibco Toyota GR Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing
Finishing Position: 13th
Not the result you were looking for tonight. Can you talk about the struggles you faced tonight at Las Vegas?
“Probably as we go through the Playoffs – and today was one of those days – one little thing goes wrong, and not mentally, but physically it is game over. We are all so competitive across the top-12 cars right now that you have to get track position from qualifying really well, and you’ve got to hold on to the track position. We ended up having a right rear tire, I don’t know – ran something over or something, but it was losing a bunch of air in that first stage and that was kind of the decline, and we fought our car. I think we got behind on adjustments, not because of not surely knowing which way to go with it, and now you’ve got all of this terrible air on our Menards, Nibco Toyota. So just kind of a struggle ever since that happened, but we rallied really well. I was so proud and happy of our pit crew for wanting to get us some really good stops, and they did their part in gaining us a bunch of positions. We got back to fifth at one point, but not quite what we needed on the short run to be good. We were decent on the long run, but missed it on the short run some. ‘Dega, anybody can win it, and if anyone can go into Martinsville and clinch it, it is going to be me. I’ve got a lot of confidence going into these next couple. This place is getting a lot rougher – Las Vegas – just the bumps continue to get worse and worse, so I think we missed that a little bit. We have some offseason things to work on for sure.”
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