What Really Happened in Seattle 2026?

It finally happened. The race we have been begging for all season. Levi Kitchen. Haiden Deegan. 15 minutes straight. No breathing room. And it delivered.

They played cat and mouse all night, but the interesting part is how different their strengths really were. Seattle’s soft dirt, mixed with rain the day before, created a track where no two laps looked the same. Ruts changed. Lines disappeared. And in the end, Kitchen lost this race in one sector.

The broadcast did a great job pointing out the obvious stuff; Deegan tripling onto the tabletop; Kitchen’s nasty line out of the sand into the S7 rhythm. But when I dug into the live timing, where they actually gained and lost time, it was not what I expected.

The first graphic shows absolute fastest sector times. The second shows median times. I prefer median because it filters out the chaos of lappers and one-off hot laps from when the track is still prime. Negative numbers mean Kitchen was faster. Positive numbers mean Deegan was faster.

Deegan vs. Kitchen Sector Times

Let’s start with the facts.

Kitchen had the fastest lap of the night by 0.7 seconds. Unreal speed. But it was not repeatable. When you look at the fastest sector times, Kitchen’s biggest edge came in the sand and through S7. On TV, S7 looked like a cheat code. In reality, the raw time gain from Kitchen S7 line was smaller than it appeared, just over a tenth. Deegan had a clear edge in the 180 corner after the rhythm too.

And neither guy could hold onto those peak laps. Lap times fell off hard late in the race, by as much as five seconds.

Now the median times. This is where the race was decided.

They traded blows in the opening sectors. Deegan would pull away. Kitchen would answer back. But once Kitchen stopped tripling onto the table in S5, the math changed. From that point on, he was giving up roughly 0.6s per lap in that sector alone. You could see it live. Deegan was committed. Kitchen wasn’t.

Yes, Kitchen continued to light up the sand. That never changed. But S7 tells the rest of the story. Kitchen could not hit that money line every lap. And even when he did, it was only about a tenth faster. When you average it out, Deegan was actually faster in S7 over the course of the main by sticking to the consistent line. RC even called it out in the 450 race, consistency in these conditions matter.

Seattle 2026 Sector Map

Look at the lap rank chart and it backs it up. Kitchen stopped doing the triple in S5 on lap 12. After that, he never set another fastest lap. The edge was gone, and the race too.

Deegan vs. Kitchen Lap Time Ranks

We can debate whether Deegan was genuinely slower in the first half, or simply wanting to play games while Kitchen closed in. We can wonder if Kitchen could have forced the issue had he hit S5 again. What we do know is this: the race was won in S5.

These two are clearly top of the class in the West. Now we wait three rounds while the East takes center stage. The next time we see Deegan and Kitchen line up together is Rd. 10 in Birmingham for the first East/West Showdown.