RELATED: Cup Series schedule | Cup Series standings

Analysis: Well, that escalated quickly. One week after seeing his championship lead shrink to five points at Phoenix Raceway, Larson somehow turned Talladega — historically one of his least cooperative tracks — into the afternoon that might just deliver his third Cup title. He finished fourth and second in the stages, led 23 laps and was running first, then 11th, then first again on a final lap that hardly seemed possible even by Talladega standards. The result was his first drafting-track victory in 59 attempts, 71 points and a championship lead that ballooned to 73 with just two races remaining. Oh, and the rest of the contenders essentially had their Sundays ruined in various — and creative — ways. The No. 5 finished ninth at Martinsville this spring and fifth there last fall, and Larson now has a chance to settle the championship before Homestead even arrives. After the Phoenix meltdown, the title race looked wide open. Apparently that lasted about seven days, but will anybody stop him?

Analysis: Imagine climbing two spots in the championship standings and somehow leaving the weekend feeling considerably worse about your title hopes — that‘s Hamlin‘s Talladega experience in a nutshell. He escaped the Lap 132 wreck with damage, battled his way back into contention and was running second late before ultimately finishing eighth. On most Talladega Sundays, that‘s the kind of survival story a championship contender gladly accepts. Unfortunately, Larson won, and Hamlin is now 73 points behind with two races remaining after entering just 31 back. Here‘s the particularly interesting part, though: Martinsville is next. If he‘s going to make it happen anywhere, it‘s here — the Virginia native has six victories there and led a ridiculous 292 of 400 laps this spring before Chase Elliott beat him to the finish. The No. 11 also remains second in season-long speed according to NASCAR Insights, so if anybody is equipped to take a big chunk out of Larson‘s lead, it‘s Hamlin. He just needs Larson to cooperate for once.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Analysis: Bell could count the number of points he was behind Larson entering Talladega on just one hand. Now it‘s 74, and unlike many of the other Chase contenders, Bell‘s problems weren‘t entirely somebody else‘s doing. He was leading when he spun entering pit road under green on Lap 56, hitting the inside wall and damaging the No. 20 badly enough that a cut right-front tire forced another stop just five laps later. The afternoon never recovered, ending 35th, 12 laps down, and squandering a golden opportunity to tighten the championship race. That‘s an especially bitter outcome after the speed Bell showed at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Phoenix, where he looked every bit capable of beating the drivers currently ahead of him. Martinsville produced a seventh-place finish in March, another perfectly useful result in a season full of them. Unfortunately, perfectly useful isn‘t going to erase 74 points in two races without some considerable help, or even another runner-up, for that matter. The championship is still technically within reach. The margin for error, however, is effectively gone.

Analysis: For a while, it looked like Briscoe might be about to survive Talladega with another genuinely useful Chase afternoon. He started from the pole, scored points in both stages and was running eighth when the Lap 183 accident that sent Joey Logano upside down swallowed the No. 19 along with a sizable portion of the field. Thirty-third was the eventual result, and a championship deficit that had been shrinking rapidly is back up to 79 points. That‘s a pretty rude interruption to the hottest stretch of Briscoe‘s career, including consecutive victories at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte, but the organization behind him remains exceptionally strong. His pit crew still ranks first in the series, and the No. 19 obviously hasn‘t forgotten how to run up front. Martinsville wasn‘t especially kind in March, when Briscoe finished 14th, but the team has proved it can win. Now it needs Larson to provide an opening.

Analysis: Four consecutive top-five finishes had Blaney looking more and more like the championship contender we kept insisting the No. 12 really was. Then Talladega happened because of course it did. Blaney was running second when contact from Bubba Wallace sent him spinning on Lap 132, triggering a massive multicar crash that ended his afternoon in 38th and effectively torpedoed what had been a remarkable Chase recovery. NASCAR Insights still rates Blaney first in both passing and speed for the season, and Martinsville should be right in his wheelhouse. He led 177 laps and finished second there last fall after winning the previous two fall races, then returned this spring and finished sixth. There‘s still the small matter of being 107 points behind Larson with two races left, of course. Blaney‘s speed is worthy of a much better championship position. The calendar just might be running out before he gets one.

Analysis: There aren‘t many ways to make a championship afternoon go more dramatically sideways — literally — than Logano managed at Talladega. He won Stage 2, spent much of the closing stretch looking capable of stealing another victory and was running fourth when contact from Carson Hocevar triggered the massive Lap 183 wreck that sent the No. 22 upside down. Thirty-fourth was the eventual result, and Logano now sits 100 points behind Larson with just Martinsville and Homestead-Miami Speedway remaining. That‘s a particularly brutal turn after his stage sweep at Phoenix suggested the three-time champion was finding his usual late-season form. The encouraging part? Logano finished third at Martinsville this spring and eighth there last fall, but if there‘s another Logano postseason plot twist coming, it needs to be a big one.

Analysis: Well, the comeback was fun while it lasted. Reddick had finally begun looking like the five-time winner from the first half of 2026 again, finishing third at Vegas, eighth at Charlotte and then winning at Phoenix to rekindle a championship push that seemed all but finished. He even climbed from 33rd to 10th at Talladega before getting swept into the Lap 132 crash, eventually limping home 37th and surrendering most of the ground he had worked so hard to regain. That‘s a pretty crushing way to follow your sixth victory of the season, especially with Larson simultaneously extending his championship lead to 73 points. Reddick remains eligible for the title at 126 back, but the hill is awfully steep and likely insurmountable now. The resurgence was real. Whether there‘s enough time for it to mean anything more is a different conversation.

Analysis: There‘s some particularly cruel timing here. He was running eighth when the Lap 132 Talladega crash ended his afternoon, dropping him to 36th and formally eliminating him from championship contention. Now the series heads to Martinsville, where Elliott delivered one of his two victories this season after outmaneuvering Hamlin‘s dominant No. 11 with a crucial pit strategy call in March. He led 84 laps that afternoon and beat Hamlin, who led 292, to the checkered flag. Elliott also finished third at Martinsville last fall, so he‘s hardly arriving without legitimate expectations of another strong run. He could sweep “The Paperclip” this weekend. Unfortunately, the championship conversation now belongs almost entirely to his teammate Larson, while Elliott finds himself 218 points back and watching the title fight from the outside, so Martinsville can‘t be his signature, “Chase in The Chase” moment. It can at least give the No. 9 something considerably better to carry into the offseason, however. There‘s plenty of value to that.

Analysis: The last few weeks have been a pretty strange way for Cindric‘s Chase to unravel. Kansas Speedway and Las Vegas suggested Team Penske had finally found something on intermediate tracks, and even Talladega offered encouragement with a fourth-place finish in Stage 2 before the No. 2 got collected in the late multicar crash while running 11th. Twenty-seventh was the final result, and Cindric is now eliminated from the championship, 183 points behind Larson. That‘s obviously not how this stretch was supposed to go after the career-best momentum he had built earlier in the postseason, but a strong indication he‘ll be a player again in 2027. Martinsville was a P8 in March, another respectable showing, and the No. 2 has produced enough legitimate speed lately that the progress shouldn‘t be dismissed entirely. The title opportunity is gone, but at least the broader gains Penske has made offer something useful to take forward.

Analysis: Even on an afternoon where NASCAR Insights rated him second in passing, Gibbs lost far more ground than he gained. He was running seventh when a stalled engine leaving pit road cost him his drafting partners and eventually a lap. Then came the Lap 132 wreck, followed by another penalty for too many crew members over the wall. Somehow, 17th almost qualifies as a decent recovery, but it officially ended his title hopes at 183 points behind Larson, continuing a Chase that has looked considerably less impressive lately than the two-win regular season that preceded it. Martinsville might offer something of a reset; Gibbs finished fourth there in March, his strongest result in a stretch where the No. 54 was running exceptionally well, and short tracks have been his strong suit. The clean afternoons have become a lot harder to find, but it feels like he could have one more in store on Sunday.

Analysis: Four consecutive top-six finishes at Talladega, including a victory in April. That‘s a pretty ridiculous stretch for Hocevar, and somehow Sunday‘s sixth-place finish still managed to come with enough drama for several races. He served a pit-road speeding penalty early, fought his way back into contention and ran fifth when contact with Logano triggered the multicar crash that flipped the No. 22. Hocevar was involved in the wreck himself, yet survived to finish near the front, another reminder that there‘s simply no such thing as a conventional Carson Hocevar afternoon. The No. 77 has demonstrated genuine winning ability this season, but Talladega also reinforced the other side of that equation: Mistakes and contact continue to complicate the results. He leaves ‘Dega eliminated from the championship, 198 points behind Larson, and all eyes will be on him in 2027.

Analysis: A Hendrick Motorsports 1-2 at Talladega certainly wasn‘t the outcome most people expected, but Byron finally got one of the better results he‘s been chasing for much of the season. He finished fifth in both stages, avoided the accidents that collected virtually every other Chase driver and was just 0.041 seconds behind Larson at the stripe for his best finish of 2026. That‘s the good news. The bad news is that Byron‘s championship hopes are officially over anyway, with the No. 24 now 214 points behind the very teammate he nearly beat. Here‘s where things get interesting, though: Byron won at Martinsville last fall after leading 304 of 500 laps, then finished fifth there this spring. His title pursuit might be finished, but he‘s returning to one of the few places where he could realistically steal some of the spotlight from Larson … and may still find a path to not finishing 2026 winless. There are worse ways to close an otherwise frustrating Chase.

Analysis: Much like his season at large, Wallace‘s last three races have become a collection of increasingly frustrating what-ifs. He was running fifth at Charlotte when he got collected in another driver‘s accident, led 52 laps at Phoenix before a pit-road speeding penalty ruined his opportunity, then was running sixth at Talladega when contact involving Blaney triggered the massive Lap 132 wreck. That one left the No. 23 damaged, eventually finishing 22nd, four laps down, and officially out of the championship picture. Not every bit of the misfortune has been beyond Wallace‘s control, but the car has certainly looked capable of considerably better than the results suggest. Martinsville wasn‘t exactly a friendly stop in March, either, when Wallace finished 36th. There have been enough encouraging runs lately to believe the No. 23 is improving. The payoff, though, may have to wait until next year.

Analysis: There‘s more to Preece‘s Talladega afternoon than 13th place, which is probably a good description of much of his 2026 at this point. He finished second in Stage 1 after helping RFK Racing execute an unusual early breakaway, then was running seventh when the Lap 132 wreck collected him. Preece still recovered to 13th, a respectable enough result considering the damage and an improvement on where things had been trending during The Chase. His championship hopes are officially finished, but Martinsville might offer another opportunity to produce something worthwhile: Preece finished sixth there last fall and 12th this spring. He‘s already authored one major surprise this season with his Daytona victory, and the stakes are different now, but that doesn‘t mean there isn‘t something left to prove.

Analysis: For a while, Talladega looked like an RFK Racing private test session. Buescher, Preece and Brad Keselowski broke away from the pack in a three-car draft during Stage 1, eventually building an advantage of more than 40 seconds as the rest of the field conserved fuel. Buescher led a race-high 53 laps, won the opening stage and looked like he might finally have an afternoon worthy of the speed the No. 17 has shown at various points this season. Then came the Lap 183 wreck, collecting Buescher while running 22nd and leaving him 32nd at the finish. So much for that. It was one of the most interesting performances of his Chase, yet it ultimately left Buescher last in the championship standings, 255 points behind Larson, and eliminated with two races remaining. The talent and equipment have been capable of more than 15th in these rankings for much of the season. The results, unfortunately, keep declining to cooperate.

Analysis: Suárez somehow survived two major Talladega wrecks and still wound up with an afternoon that did almost nothing to change his Chase trajectory. An early pit-road speeding penalty knocked him backward, then he was involved in both the Lap 132 and Lap 183 multicar incidents before eventually finishing 18th. No stage points, no real momentum and another week in which the No. 7 spent most of the afternoon outside the part of the field that mattered. It‘s a frustrating continuation of a postseason that‘s offered only occasional flashes of the driver who won the Coca-Cola 600 in May; even the encouraging seventh-place result at Phoenix now feels somewhat isolated. With his championship hopes officially over and two races remaining, Suárez could certainly use one more significant afternoon before the year ends. The magic that produced one of the season‘s strangest victories has spent most of The Chase in hiding. The clock‘s about run out, and 2027 is calling.

Here‘s where we stand in The Chase after the YellaWood 500 at Talladega and before the Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

RELATED: Talladega results | Cup Series standings

Chase Changer

The single-lap comeback by Kyle Larson completely altered how The Chase looks heading into Martinsville. But the two multicar wrecks of Sunday‘s race played a significant role in the gap Larson‘s win created in the points standings.

Team Penske‘s Ryan Blaney was jammed up behind teammate Joey Logano ahead of the outside lane at Lap 132 when the line became disjointed, leading Bubba Wallace into Blaney‘s back bumper and triggering a 12-car pileup that eliminated both Blaney and Tyler Reddick from the race — and likely from championship contention. Blaney entered Talladega just 40 points behind Larson but left 107 points out; Reddick was 56 points out of first place following his Phoenix win but is now the last car mathematically still in contention for the title, 126 points behind Larson, seventh in the standings.

Then there was the “Big One” at Lap 183, when a similar situation for the outside line bottlenecked entering the tri-oval, resulting in a 15-car melee that sent Logano up and over with heavy nose damage to Chase Briscoe‘s Toyota. Briscoe and Logano started Sunday‘s race third and sixth, respectively, in the points standings and lost critical ground in their title fights. Briscoe slipped to fourth place but lost 55 points to Larson, trailing by 79 points entering Martinsville; Logano passed Blaney for fifth in the standings but still stands a towering 100 points behind Larson.

The Chase Board

Seven drivers were separated by just 56 points after Phoenix, setting up what looked like a wide-open championship fight. Instead, Larson‘s stunning 71-point performance at Talladega turned his five-point advantage into a commanding 73-point lead over Denny Hamlin with two races remaining.

Hamlin did gain two positions in The Chase standings with a solid eighth-place finish, but the mountain in front of him to claim his first NASCAR Cup Series championship became much taller, losing 42 points to Larson in the process. Larson‘s Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron gained the most ground in the standings, jumping three spots with a season-best second-place finish, but that still leaves him 11th in points, one of nine drivers officially eliminated from championship contention following Sunday‘s race — joining Austin Cindric, Ty Gibbs, Carson Hocevar, Chase Elliott, Bubba Wallace, Daniel Suárez, Ryan Preece and Chris Buescher.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Source: Racing Insights

Next Up

What stands between Larson and clinching the NASCAR Cup Series championship one week early is Martinsville Speedway. Thankfully for the No. 5 team, the statistics seem to favor them.

Larson has finished sixth or better in seven of the last eight Martinsville starts, the one blemish coming this spring when he finished ninth instead. Still, Larson — currently a two-time champion — has just one Martinsville victory to his credit, which came in the spring of 2023. Larson would clinch the championship with 59 points earned on Sunday, which means he needs to win in order to control his own destiny.

Behind him is a swarm of talented Martinsville racers though, including Hamlin (six Martinsville wins), Byron (three wins), Blaney (two wins) and Elliott (two wins). The path to a third NASCAR Cup Series title for Larson has clearly been laid; the question is whether he‘ll reach his destination early.

It was an afternoon when nearly everything went according to plan, when the fates of so many other would-be championship contenders went sideways, wrong-ways or upside-down. And it seemed like that plan was about to unravel almost as spectacularly with a little more than a mile left. Somehow, some way, Larson summoned the ability to press ahead, emerging from the 11th-place ashes in the final two turns to flash across the finish line in first, just 0.041 seconds clear of teammate William Byron.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

Larson had just blown the NASCAR Cup Series Chase wide open. In the immediate aftermath, he chalked it up to good fortune.

“I [expletive] choked it away so bad, though,” Larson said on the cool-down lap. “I got lucky.”

“It‘s all right. All right,” said No. 5 spotter Tyler Monn. “Better to be lucky than good.”

Larson was more good than he let on in Sunday‘s YellaWood 500, capitalizing and maximizing while the rest of the Cup Series championship hopefuls endured a day of stepping on rakes. Larson‘s title defense now has a staggering 73-point advantage with two races left in the season, both at favorable tracks coming up at Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway.

A Phoenix collapse by Larson & Co. had tightened The Chase presented by Mobil 1, shrinking his lead to just five points and making the postseason pursuit a seven-horse race. Now The Chase has Larson as a front-running outlier versus the more-distant field, with a chance to close it out at Martinsville in Sunday‘s Xfinity 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

“Only took us six years together,” Monn said on the cool-down lap, after Larson finally filled a 58-race void on drafting tracks and shook the long-running knock on his otherwise peerless portfolio. On a weekend when the 20th anniversary of “Talladega Nights” was celebrated around the namesake venue, the two-time Cup champ borrowed a quotable line from the film and truthfully had slingshot engaged.

“I felt like Dale Jr. out there with half the field kind of helping me,” Larson said post-race, noting the daylong show of Chevrolet solidarity and getting an Earnhardt-style rise out of the grandstand crowd.

That Chevrolet kinship only lasted so long, though, and after the white flag unfurled, each driver‘s agendas turned more to me-first. Austin Hill‘s No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevy had faithfully pushed Larson‘s No. 5 out front, but dove to the low side exiting Turn 2, shucking the points leader into the middle lane and starting his last-lap decline.

Larson plummeted outside of the top 10 before suddenly regaining his groove. He finally found drafting support from Ross Chastain‘s No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Camaro and steadily advanced in the low lane while the front of the pack duked it out with blocks and swerves.

“It was just full of surprise,” Larson said. “Like, there wasn‘t anything special that I did. I didn‘t really think on the last lap. It was honestly, like, more mistakes than anything that got me in that scenario. I don‘t know. Maybe it was just meant to be and the mistake opened up the opportunity for me. Who knows how the race would have played out if I been leading my lane, not being put in the middle? Who knows? I might not have won, I might have crashed. It worked out how it was supposed to work out.”

“To be honest with you, off of Turn 2, I really thought that we were done,” Monn told NASCAR.com from Victory Lane, noting how Hill‘s low-side parry broke Larson‘s momentum. “… We just kept plugging middle, then got down to the bottom, just had a big run, and guys were all over the place. I think it just slowed the run up, and yeah, it was crazy just how big of a run we had down the front, and being able to get down to the bottom.

“Man, I‘d have to watch the replay back, but just re-living through my head right now, I mean, it was unreal. Yeah, it was a great day overall. … To have a shot at it at the end was pretty phenomenal. And hey, it changed our luck.”

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Luck, you say? Larson had stayed in contention virtually all day, benefiting from timely help in the aerodynamic draft from both his Hendrick Motorsports teammates and his fellow Chevrolet cohorts. He easily gathered the most stage points (16) of any Chase driver, placing fourth behind RFK Racing‘s top-three sweep after a rogue Stage 1 strategy and coming home as the runner-up to Joey Logano in Stage 2.

Remarkably, the other 15 drivers in the 16-driver Chase field each had some sort of trouble — most of it bordering on disastrous. More Sundays than not at Talladega, that was Larson‘s lot. This time, his No. 5 Chevrolet came out of the 500-mile maelstrom nearly showroom-fresh.

“All the carnage, it happens at ‘Dega. Kyle over the years has usually gotten caught up in that,” said Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon, a six-time Talladega winner in his Hall of Fame driving days. “We‘ve had conversation over the year about how he feels about speedway races. We‘ve seen the momentum shift a bit, the results get better recently. His confidence of OK, we can put good, solid results together in Talladega. Boom, today was one of those days where it all just went their way. They did their job. Now they come out of here with a win. Not only a win, we see where the points are at unofficially. I‘m still in shock as to what took place today, the win and the points.”

The rest of The Chase field could say the same in a negative light, but that shoe fit Larson‘s foot last weekend. The No. 5 team‘s hopes had dimmed significantly at Phoenix Raceway, where atrocious handling eventually gave way to a downed tire and a late-race wall crunch. While Tyler Reddick cheered a win in Victory Lane and the rest of Larson‘s challengers counted their gains, the No. 5 Chevrolet sat on jack stands in the Cup Series garage.

No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels took ownership last weekend, dutifully answering every question about what had gone wrong. Seven days later, the team captain was marveling over a whale of a final lap, having given his crew no time to dwell on the previous week‘s mishaps.

“Once we kind of got through the disappointment we had on a Monday, we spent more time probably laughing and having fun preparing for Talladega this week than we‘ve had in a long time,” Daniels said. “The spirit of the team was up. Everybody was positive. I‘ve said this quote a couple times after the race already, but a smooth sea does not make for a skilled sailor. Even when you have those times of difficulty and the sea is rough, that‘s when you have a good group of people that are willing to dig in and work together and believe in each other and the process that we built, and the team exercise that we continue to build on every week, there‘s a lot of power in that. When you can unite and identify with that, I‘m proud of the 5 team doing that this week and showing up prepared for this weekend.”

The prospects for Larson closing out the championship race early in the first year of the revised Chase postseason format are now on the doorstep, at a Martinsville track where Hendrick Motorsports has won a record 31 times.

Larson had joked with the motoring press before Saturday‘s preliminaries about the collective rush to crown a championship favorite at various points as the 10-race Chase has unfolded. And though the Hendrick brass talked in terms of “plenty of racing left” and dodging the notion that the title is nearly a shoo-in, only a modest gain would clinch it — luck not required.

“A lot of momentum,” Monn said. “I mean, tomorrow we‘ll be right back to work. We‘ll talk a little bit about today, go over our post-race stuff, and then we‘ll start working towards Martinsville and Homestead. … So we‘ve just got to stay consistent. The job‘s not done yet, and we‘ve just got to keep doing the work. What this 5 team does week in and week out, even when we got knocked down after Phoenix last week, we stayed in it. You know, we had a 49-point lead going to Phoenix, left there with five, and then leave with 73 today. So we‘ve just got to keep going, and the 5 team will never quit. That‘s the attitude of this whole crew.”

During a Lap 56 green-flag pit stop in the YellaWood 500, Bell, driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, lost control, making contact with the inside wall and suffering significant right-front damage.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

Bell limped his No. 20 Toyota to pit road for service, and after initially re-entering the race, had to return to the pits after a tire went down, resulting in Bell going multiple laps behind the race leaders. A penalty for too many crew members over the wall immediately followed the tire stop.

A second right-front tire went down on Lap 67, forcing another pit-road visit for Bell.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

The sequence of events brings major implications for The Chase presented by Mobil 1. Bell entered Talladega second in the championship table, just five markers behind Chase leader Kyle Larson after a 46-point gain over him at Phoenix Raceway the prior weekend. Bell finished Talladega in 35th, 12 laps down.

Just two Chase races remain following Talladega: Martinsville Speedway on Nov. 1 and Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 8. With Larson‘s Talladega victory, Bell sits third in The Chase standings, 74 points behind the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver and one point behind Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin.

On Lap 183 of the eighth race in The Chase presented by Mobil 1, Logano was racing in the high lane, with Ross Chastain ahead and Carson Hocevar behind the No. 22. The trio accordioned together, with the contact sending Logano loose. An ensuing clip with Chase Briscoe‘s No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota sent his Ford airborne and upside down.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

Logano exited his vehicle under his own power once his No. 22 Ford was uprighted.

“It looks like I just got a little push in the wrong spot there,” Logano said. “It was very much a ‘Talladega Nights‘ moment, like, ‘Oh, no. I‘m upside down. This is not a good moment.‘ But I can‘t thank the safety crew enough. They did an amazing job flipping that thing over. The car did a great job. The last time I flipped, it was crushed on my head. This time, I don‘t think anything really caved or crushed at all. I appreciate what NASCAR has done. Thank you and the safety team for getting me out of there. There were some vicious hits in that one. I‘m just happy to be alive.”

After initially being quiet on the radio following the wreck, Logano said he was OK following the incident.

“I‘m fine,” Logano said. “The radios got disconnected, and I kept trying to. I was thinking about my wife. She was probably wigging out on me, but I tried talking to whoever I could, but when I flipped, everything came off out of the pockets there. It was a hell of a ride. I don‘t know if I should be mad that I wrecked or happy to be alive. I think I‘m more happy to be alive. Screw the rest of the stuff, but it was a wild ride there. We were in position to do something pretty good there, and it‘s just the end-of-the-race scenario. You feel it coming. You know it. I‘ve seen the cars that are around me, and I was like, ‘This is not how I dreamed it up,‘ but it is what it is.”

WATCH: Logano reflects on huge wreck | Breaking down the final wreck

In addition to Logano, five Chase drivers were involved in the incident: Austin Cindric, Daniel Suárez, Chris Buescher, Chase Briscoe and Carson Hocevar.

Non-Chase drivers involved in the wreck included: Brad Keselowski, AJ Allmendinger, Josh Berry, Riley Herbst, Erik Jones, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Alex Bowman, Connor Zilisch and Shane van Gisbergen. Herbst received heavy damage, with his No. 35 23XI Racing Toyota slamming into the SAFER barrier. All drivers unable to continue exited under their own power.

MORE: Herbst says he‘s ‘OK‘ after wreck | Watch NASCAR video highlights

The crash was the second multicar wreck of the day. A Lap 132 incident involving 12 total cars occurred during Stage 2.

Logano finished 34th, one of seven Chase drivers to finish 32nd or worse. With Kyle Larson‘s Talladega victory, the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet holds a 73-point lead in The Chase standings. Logano sits 100 points behind Larson, fifth in the championship table. Cindric, Suárez, Buescher and Hocevar were four of nine total Chase drivers eliminated from title contention.

Most stunned, perhaps, was Denny Hamlin. He opened the afternoon within striking distance of The Chase presented by Mobil 1 lead, escaped from a big wreck to challenge for the win late only to end the day in eighth place and significantly worse in points.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

Hamlin‘s disappointment mirrored that of virtually everyone in the running for the championship except Chase leader Larson.

In an odd movement of numbers, Hamlin jumped from fourth to second in the playoff standings but lost 42 points to Larson and is 73 behind. Hamlin potentially can make gains next week at Martinsville Speedway, one of his best tracks, but twilight is falling on the season with only two races remaining.

Is Hamlin realistically out of the running for what would be his first championship?

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Hamlin said. After climbing from his car, he took a few minutes to recover from what had been a stress-filled day.

“The 5 (Larson) is on a massive run at the right time of the year,” he said. “If you asked me at the start of the day if I would take an eighth, I mean, probably. So, it‘s just what we‘ve got. It‘s disappointing, but also like our day could have been a (expletive) ton worse.

“We didn‘t get stage points. We tried. But it‘s just a lot of games going on. It‘s really, really hard, tough to do it.”

Hamlin‘s car was banged up in the multi-car wreck on Lap 132, but he was strong enough to run in the top five late in the day.

“I got clipped,” he said. “It knocked out some of the front-end toe, and obviously hit the body. It was a handful, but it was at least serviceable. It wasn‘t undriveable.”

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Hamlin said NASCAR “did the best it could” with length changes to the Talladega stages. “Obviously, it worked in the last two (shorter) stages to where you didn‘t have to worry about the fuel mileage. Unfortunately for us, they designed a car that‘s just got so much drag in it that it‘s not — the racing was just definitely different.”

In the mad mix near the finish, Hamlin was running second to Ricky Stenhouse Jr. but couldn‘t hold onto a top five.

“I went with Ricky,” Hamlin said. “I was committed to stay with Ricky because I knew he was going to do what was best for him and not what he was told to do. Then I got clipped on the inside.”

Stenhouse said he had a rearview mirror filled with Hamlin. “I know Denny wanted to move forward,” he said. “I had him behind me and I felt like I was in great position. It just kept breaking up there down the backstretch after I took the lead. The lines were breaking loose. They kept running into each other, but then I was kind of a sitting duck.”

Larson charged to the inside and won the race.

On a day when Chase challenger Joey Logano flew through the air, others slammed hard into the outside wall and big wrecks either eliminated or damaged Chase contenders, the post-race computers churned out numbers that resulted in grim calculations for everybody except Larson.

Following Hamlin in third place in the standings is Christopher Bell, 74 points back. Bell spun trying to enter pit road early in the race, hit the inside wall and damaged his car. He finished 35th. Joining him in the lower regions of the finish order were Ryan Blaney (38th), Tyler Reddick (37th), Logano (34th) and Chase Briscoe (33rd). Blaney, Logano and Briscoe left the race after accidents, and Reddick limped home with significant damage.

In the end, Larson, who had raced 58 times on drafting tracks without success, was the only one of the leading championship contenders to leave Talladega with a strengthened title position.

Larson maneuvered his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet low and passed seven cars in just the final quarter-mile of Talladega‘s famed 2.66-mile high banks to claim his first ever win in 59 races on a big drafting-style track.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

He celebrated the “statement win” with his three children who climbed into the car for the Victory Lap celebration — daughter Audrey, 8, waving to the crowd out of the passenger side window, his youngest son Cooper, 3, sitting inside too and 11-year old son Owen perched from the roof hatch waving the checkered flag to a thrilled crowd who clearly appreciated one of Larson‘s most amazing — and overdue — Victory Laps.

The reigning series champion fell from the lead to 11th place with a lap to go and then negotiated his way forward once again, dropping to the bottom lane and roaring to the win by a photo-finish 0.041 seconds over his Hendrick teammate William Byron, Hyak Motorsports Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Trackhouse Racing‘s Ross Chastain who crossed the line door-to-door-to-door directly behind.

Haas Factory Team‘s Cole Custer and Spire Motorsports‘ Carson Hocevar helped Chevrolet to a top-six sweep on the afternoon.

“I don‘t know, I got really lucky with kinda how everything worked out there,” the 34-year old Californian Larson said with a smile, trying to describe the phenomenal winning move.

“I was so edgy in Turns 1 and 2 with the 33 [Richard Childress Racing driver Austin Hill] pushing me, he was helping me.”

Now with only two races remaining, Larson has exponentially expanded his championship lead over his closest challengers: three Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota teammates. He now holds a 73-point advantage on regular season champ Denny Hamlin, is 74 points up on Christopher Bell and 77 points up on Chase Briscoe.

“Really gotta thank all my Chevy GM partners for working with me all day,” Larson continued. “I really felt it and definitely the best speedway race I‘ve ever had because of it, so thanks to all them.

“I was pissed at myself off of [Turn] 2, my hands off the wheel, just mad. And then all of a sudden everything just opened up and I was able to keep my momentum up,” he said of the last lap. “Unbelievable way to get my first superspeedway win.”

SHOP: Race winner gear

The ending was an exclamation point for a race that had all the typical Talladega trademarks — a photo finish, close-quarter sparring all afternoon, a 13-minute red flag and a pair of massive multicar accidents that have greatly impacted The Chase presented by Mobil 1 with only a pair of races left to settle the 2026 championship.

“I felt like the energy got broken up off [Turn] 2 and I was like, ‘man, I‘ve got a shot here,‘ ” two-time Daytona 500 winner Byron said of the last-lap dramatics. “Once I got clear going into [Turn] 3 it was a good job keeping the momentum going. … Man, second sucks but it‘s good that Kyle won. We worked really well together all day and if I couldn‘t win, I wanted him to win.

“Just proud of the fight.”

It was just that. All day throughout the field.

The 98-lap opening stage of the 189-lap race set the stage for the drama. The three Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing Ford Mustangs seemed to stun the competition — lining up bumper-to-bumper-bumper as they roared off to a lead of more than 30 seconds on the entire fuel-saving field en route to RFK‘s Chris Buescher‘s easy Stage 1 win. He led a race high 53 laps on the day, but was collected in the late-race accident.

The second massive crash — with only five laps remaining in regulation — brought out the red flag and eliminated many strong cars. As with an earlier multicar accident, it happened toward the front of the field. This one — involving 15 cars — appeared to be triggered by spring Talladega winner Hocevar, who hit the rear bumper of three-time series champion Joey Logano in tight-quarter drafting.

Logano‘s No. 22 Team Penske Ford led 23 laps on the day and was battling for the top position when Hocevar‘s Chevy made contact. It spun Logano‘s car into traffic behind and flipped it upside down, his Ford sliding down the track and coming to rest that way at the exit of the tri-oval. After safety crews flipped the car back on its tires, Logano climbed out on his own.

“Just got a little push in the wrong spot there,” Logano said. “It was a very much a ‘Talladega Nights‘ moment like, ‘Oh, no. I‘m upside down. This is not good moment.‘

“But I can‘t thank the safety crew enough. They did an amazing job flipping that thing over. The car did a great job. The last time I flipped, it was crushed on my head. This time, I don‘t think anything really caved or crushed at all. I appreciate what NASCAR has done. Thank you and the safety team for getting me out of there.”

An earlier multicar incident on the backstretch — involving 12 cars — eliminated another Penske championship contender, 2023 series champion Ryan Blaney, among others. The two Penske drivers are mathematically still in the title hunt but they lost significant ground after looking so strong.

Logano is now fifth in the standings, 100 points off Larson‘s total and Blaney is sixth, 107 points back. 23XI Racing‘s Tyler Reddick, is the only other driver still technically in the title chase, but he trails Larson by 126 points.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Bell, who went into the race ranked second, only five points behind Larson, spun and hit the wall coming to pit road on the opening pit stop of the race — his No. 20 JGR Toyota suffering significant damage and finishing 35th in the 40-car field. Briscoe, whose Toyota Camry started from pole position, was eliminated in the late race accident and finished 33rd.

Hendrick Motorsports executive and NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon said after the race that although things certainly look in the team‘s favor toward Larson‘s title, “There‘s no points lead big enough at this point.”

The NASCAR Cup Series leaves the biggest track on the schedule and returns to action next Sunday at one of the smallest, the half-mile Martinsville Speedway for the Xfinity 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Byron is the defending race winner. His Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott won there this spring.

Stage 2 recap

Joey Logano beat Kyle Larson for the Stage 2 victory in Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega by just 0.012 seconds in the YellaWood 500.

Larson was followed by Chase Briscoe, Austin Cindric, William Byron and Chris Buescher as the top six spots were swept by drivers competing in The Chase. Connor Zilisch, Shane van Gisbergen, Erik Jones and Austin Hill completed the top 10.

MORE: Stage 2 results | Close finish between Logano, Larson

The first multicar accident of the afternoon occurred at Lap 132 of Sunday‘s race, wiping out numerous contenders.

Team Penske teammates Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney were leading the outside lane when the two became disjointed, shucking Blaney right toward the outside SAFER barrier. His No. 12 Ford lost momentum just in front of Bubba Wallace, who was getting shoved in the outside lane and could not slow to avoid Blaney, triggering a 12-car pileup down the backstretch during the second stage of the YellaWood 500.

Among those 12 were eight competitors in the championship hunt in The Chase: Blaney, Wallace, Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Ty Gibbs, Ryan Preece, Chase Elliott and Daniel Suárez.

Blaney was unable to continue, taking a significant hit to his championship hopes; Blaney entered Sunday‘s race fifth in the standings, 40 points behind series leader Kyle Larson. Reddick, last week‘s winner at Phoenix Raceway, entered seventh in points, 56 points out from the lead. Blaney, Reddick and Elliott were among those whose vehicles were taken to the garage. Also collected in the crash were Ross Chastain, Noah Gragson, John Hunter Nemechek and Gray Gaulding.

Larson was scored as the race leader at the time of caution.

Stage 1 recap

RFK Racing took the opening stage of Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway into its own hands as Chris Buescher, Ryan Preece and Brad Keselowski swept the top three spots in Stage 1 of the YellaWood 500.

MORE: Stage 1 results | Watch RFK Racing clinch Stage 1 dub

Points leader Kyle Larson placed fourth in the stage ahead of William Byron, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Austin Cindric in the first stage of the eighth race of The Chase.

Heavy fuel saving early slowed the field‘s pace to 58-second lap times, down 11 seconds from the fastest lap of the stage set by Chase Elliott on Lap 73 of 47.546 seconds. The RFK Racing trio of Preece, Keselowski and Buescher decided it was time to catch the field sleeping and stood on the throttle, creating a three-car draft of their own to open up a 22-second lead over the rest of the field by Lap 38, running lap times three seconds per lap faster than the rest of the field. Once pit stops cycled through, the trio led by as many as 40 seconds over the fourth-place car.

Christopher Bell‘s day quickly turned disastrous when attempting to pit on Lap 56. Bell was leading a pack of Toyotas to pit road when his No. 20 Toyota broke out of control and spun toward the inside wall. Bell slammed the wall with his right-front and right-rear corners and incurred significant damage. Bell‘s team changed four tires on the initial stop, but Bell cut a right-front tire due to a fender rub after returning to action. Pitting to repair some damage and get two new right-side tires, the team was then issued a pass-through penalty for too many crewmen over the wall. Insult was added to injury when the car punctured another right-front tire, trapping Bell in 40th place, nine laps down by the end of the stage.

Front Row Motorsports‘ Zane Smith also suffered a flat right-rear tire on Lap 72, but the field avoided the No. 38 Ford, which made it back to pit road.

NOTE: Post-race technical inspection concluded without issue, confirming Larson as the race winner.

Contributing: Staff report

The 31-year-old driver of the No. 19 JGR Toyota earned the pole position for Sunday‘s YellaWood 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) with a fast lap of 186.065 mph around the famed 2.66-mile high banks during Saturday time trials. The mark is the fastest NASCAR Cup Series pole speed at the track — by a significant 3 mph — since 2021.

MORE: Starting lineup | At-track photos: Talladega

It is Briscoe‘s first pole of 2026 and comes at a crucial point in the season for the Indiana native, who sits third in the championship standings, only 24 points behind leader Kyle Larson, with three races remaining in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 to decide the season trophy.

Briscoe was next-to-last to take the track among the 10 second-round qualifiers — and he ultimately bested Richard Childress Racing‘s Austin Hill‘s No. 33 Chevrolet by a slight 0.032 seconds.

“Obviously have a great starting spot tomorrow for our Toyota, but who knows what to expect with the handling and obviously that first run is all about fuel saving, so we‘ll probably have our blinker on pretty early to not have the lead, but we‘ll see how it plays out,” said Briscoe, who has three victories this season, including two of the last three races coming to Talladega (at Las Vegas and Charlotte).

It‘s Briscoe‘s fourth straight top-four starting position, and claiming pole position this weekend is particularly important for his team‘s morale.

“Definitely from a pride standpoint there‘s a lot that goes into just all the little tiny details that add up,” said Briscoe, who earned seven poles last year and now has 10 in his career. “Stack enough of those together and just the pride that comes from that from the guys goes a long way, the confidence.”

Trackhouse Racing teammates Connor Zilisch and Shane Van Gisbergen will share the second row — third and fourth fastest in time trials. Championship-eligible drivers Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing‘s Chris Buescher and JGR‘s Christopher Bell will start sixth and seventh.

Hendrick‘s Alex Bowman and Chase drivers JGR teammates Ty Gibbs and Denny Hamlin and Hendrick‘s Larson rounded out the top 10.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Ten of the 16 Chase drivers will start outside the top 10, with some faring fine and others slated for an uphill climb. The best of those was Spire Motorsports‘ Daniel Suárez, wo will start 13th. Three-time Cup champion and three-time Talladega winner Joey Logano will start 16th, ahead of fellow Chase competitors William Byron (17th), Chase Elliott (18th) and Ryan Preece (19th).

Bubba Wallace will start 25th ahead of Carson Hocevar (26th), Ryan Blaney (27th) and Austin Cindric (28th).

Tyler Reddick, winner of last week‘s race at Phoenix Raceway, was the slowest qualifier of those in The Chase and will start 33rd in the 40-car field on Sunday.

Larson enters with a five-point lead in The Chase over Bell. Briscoe (minus-24), Hamlin (minus-31), Blaney (minus-40), Logano (minus-44) and Reddick (minus-56) each enter in the thick of the championship hunt with three races remaining.

There have been 12 different race winners in the last 12 Talladega races. Hamlin is the last polesitter to win the race — doing so in October 2020.  Since 2008, the pole winner has gone on to win in the NASCAR Cup Series at the track only twice.

Contributing: Staff report

And he did just that.

The 22-year-old JR Motorsports driver snapped a 53-race winless streak in the NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series Saturday afternoon with a dramatic last-lap pass in his No. 8 JR Motorsports Chevrolet to claim a 0.084-second win over the day‘s most dominant driver, his teammate Carson Kvapil in The Progress Group 250, which served as the seventh race of The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

The checkered flag lap was the only one Smith led all day as he became the first driver to win multiple series races at the famous 2.66-mile high banks since his team owner NASCAR Hall of Famer Dale Earnhardt Jr. did it back in April 2003.

And Smith becomes the first non-NASCAR Cup Series driver to sweep both the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and O‘Reilly Series races at the same track since the late Greg Biffle at Phoenix Raceway in 2001.

“Man, that was mentally draining, just thank you to everybody,”  Smith said. “It was a great executed race by JRM and we did a good job sticking to our plan with getting those guys [Kvapil‘s team] stage points. I‘m sure they wanted them to win, but I had a good run there to take it and [spotter] Tyler Green did a great job up top to help me get backed up. Thanks to Jesse [Love] for pushing me.

“Really, I‘m just happy for everyone on this No. 8 Chevrolet, it‘s been a tough year this year and I‘m looking forward to Martinsville next week,” said Smith, who announced this weekend he will be moving to the Truck Series full time in 2027 with Tricon Garage.

Kvapil, whose No. 1 JRM Chevy led a race-best 67 of the 94 laps — including 31 of the last 32 laps — was obviously disappointed in the outcome after such a strong day at the front of the field. He remains fifth in the championship run, however, and cut 20 points out of his deficit to Love, but still trails by 59 points.

“First things first, [crew chief] Rodney [Childers] and all the guys on this entire No. 1 team brought a fast race car and we‘ve been if not the best car, one of the best cars at all the speedways this year,” Kvapil said. “So I knew this weekend would be a big opportunity for us to have a big points day and really eat away at that gap. We did our jobs in Stage 1 and 2 and got 19 stage points and put ourselves in position at the end, leading the race.

“You can always sit back, and hindsight is 20-20, but I don‘t know. It‘s hard to tell who‘s going to have the momentum. … I thought overall our organization did a great job of working together better this year.”

Significant to the championship standings, Kvapil outpaced Richard Childress Racing‘s Love, who started from pole position for a record fifth consecutive Talladega O‘Reilly Series race and rallied to a third-place showing after a challenging afternoon that cut his lead atop the standings. With only a pair of races now remaining in the championship battle, Love‘s gap to second-place Justin Allgaier closed from 36 points before the green flag to only 19 points after the checkered flag.

“I was the ‘help,‘ which is fine. I realize I was a little stubborn in Stage 1 and 2,” Love said. “… Hats off to JRM and all the Hendrick engine shop cars, they knew what they were doing and executed it very well the whole race. I had zero chance really to do anything.

“You still try, still give it the ole‘ college try, but I just realized there probably wasn‘t one car out there that was going to push the 2, so I was like, all right, I‘ll just play ball and push whoever‘s in front of me and see where that puts us at the end. It was definitely a little bit frustrating for sure, but in the middle part of that race if you had told me I was going to finish third, I‘d have been jumping up and down in joy.

“Happy to leave here with the [points] lead.”

Allgaier finished fourth on the day, won Stage 2 and cut his deficit to Love heading to next Saturday‘s race at Martinsville Speedway — a victory of sorts for the weekend.

“I feel like this is the pace we‘ve had all year,” Allgaier said. “We‘ve run out front. We‘ve just had things out of our control happen and honestly, that‘s what makes it weird. I love this [new championship] format even though it‘s kinda going against us at the moment. We just haven‘t — not by our own accord — had the races go the way we wanted to. We‘ve been behind, but days like today are what we need. And we‘ve got to go do that next week at Martinsville and the next week at Homestead [season finale]. I‘m pumped.”

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Haas Factory Team driver Sheldon Creed rounded out the top five with Hendrick Motorsports rookie Corey Day finishing sixth — the top-six drivers among the 12-driver championship field.

Blaine Perkins, Dean Thompson, Chase-eligible Brandon Jones and Anthony Alfredo rounded out the top 10.

The first caution flag for an incident waved on Lap 57 for trouble at the front of the field. Harrison Burton was leading the inside lane when his No. 24 Toyota drifted high on exit. Kvapil dove to his left while Taylor Gray moved down to side draft, leading to contact between Burton and Gray. Gray spun and collected fellow Chase drivers Austin Hill and Jones, but all three remained on track and continued.

Chase contender Parker Retzlaff worked his way well inside the top 10 during Stage 1 after starting 26th. However, his No. 99 Viking Motorsports Chevrolet spun through the Turn 3 grass with five laps remaining in Stage 1, dropping Retzlaff to last place at the stage end, two laps down, as the caution flag was not displayed, his car remaining beneath the racing surface. Retzlaff did earn the free pass to recover one of his laps under the first stage break, then rejoined the lead lap at the conclusion of Stage 2 before ultimately finishing 31st.

Five Chase drivers were eliminated from championship contention on Saturday: Gray, Hill, Jones, Retzlaff and Rajah Caruth. Each of those drivers trail Love by 155 points or more following Saturday‘s race, a margin too tall to erase with just two races remaining.

The NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series returns to action next week in the National Debt Relief 250 at Martinsville Speedway on Oct. 31 (4 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Taylor Gray is the defending fall race winner.

Contributing: Staff report

The rest of the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series contenders were satisfied to ride in a long single line behind Kvapil, whose assignment evidently included breaking through the air for everyone on the track. No one presented a challenge to the No. 1 JR Motorsports Chevrolet.

Then, on the last lap, as on so many last laps at Talladega, chaos took over.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

The straight line of cars broke into branches. Sam Mayer began the march, dropping low in Turn 1 in an attempt to pass Kvapil. That move fizzled, and Mayer eventually finished 13th, a lesson in last-lap strategy — or the lack of it — at Talladega.

From there, the run to the finish was a mixture of surges and blocks. On the backstretch, Sammy Smith got a push from Justin Allgaier and moved side by side with Kvapil into the homestretch. At the line, Smith edged Kvapil, who had led 67 of 94 laps, by 0.084 seconds for the win.

Kvapil was left in second place, losing an excellent chance to make a major gain in the race for the series championship. Kvapil remained fifth in the standings, picking up 20 points on leader Jesse Love, but Kvapil still trails by 59 markers with only two races remaining in The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

Disappointment was written across Kvapil‘s face in the immediate aftermath of the race.

“I think I might have left the bottom open, but I don‘t know if it really would have made any difference,” Kvapil said. “I felt like there were more (JR Motorsports) teammates and more momentum up top and that the bottom would really get pinned down. I chose to go to the top there, and I guess it was the wrong move.

“I feel like we (JRM drivers) were super-organized all day and stayed with each other and raced it out right to the end. So, I‘m just disappointed for this team.”

WATCH: Allgaier talks about Talladega result | Watch NASCAR video highlights

Kvapil, in the front all day, had a good look at the drivers who might challenge him at the end.

“I knew the run was going to come,” Kvapil said. “I saw the 41 (Mayer) peek down there into [Turn 1], and I blocked it, and it pushed me out. Then the guys behind me got side by side. Then I was just kind of out there on my own. I had to make a decision in Turn 3 on what lane I was going to stick with to the end. Hindsight‘s 20-20, but I picked the wrong one.”

JR Motorsports‘ Allgaier was involved in the chess-like finish as he and his teammates battled for positioning and drafting help.

“I think we all had a different kind of vision of what the last few laps were going to look like,” Allgaier said. “They definitely were different than all of us had drawn up on the playbook. I think we did a really good job today of managing the day as a whole as a company.”

Kvapil, who led 31 straight laps before the final one, wound up being a target of too many challengers after leading for so long.

MORE: O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series standings | O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series schedule

“I would have told you seven days a week and twice on Sundays that you would want to be leading coming to the white flag,” Allgaier said. “Obviously, that‘s not how it worked out. I thought Sammy and I were probably sitting ducks and that Carson was probably going to be in the catbird‘s seat.”

Instead, that seat belonged to Smith, who led only the final lap.

Sunday‘s starting lineup | Pit stall assignments

Chase footing gets shakier at Talladega

TALLADEGA, Ala. — The event that‘s loomed on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule as one of the most peril-packed, treacherous and calendar-circled races of the season is finally here. A truckload of uncertainty was bound to hitch its weight to Sunday‘s showdown at Talladega Superspeedway, but an even tighter Chase postseason field has made the margin for error that much closer.

Sunday‘s YellaWood 500 stands as the last track on this year‘s schedule where the effect of the aerodynamic draft plays such an omnipresent role, and where the tendency for field-thinning pileups is at its highest. Against the backdrop of The Chase presented by Mobil 1 and a top seven that‘s now separated by just 56 points, the championship battle remains as up for grabs as ever in the eighth of 10 postseason races.

RELATED: Weekend schedule | At-track photos: Talladega

Hall of Fame broadcaster Ken Squier often talked alliteratively about “Calamity Corner,” noting the reputation of Daytona International Speedway‘s Turn 4 as a notorious crippler of cars. In recent years at Talladega, those trouble spots seem to lurk at every inch of the 2.66-mile layout, grabbing contenders and underdogs alike at nearly every corner, chute and straight. Trying to establish the best late-season footing presents a potential split in strategies: Try to survive and advance with a more defensive safe-bet approach, or go on offense in a riskier bid for as many points as possible.

“Well, I would say it‘s ‘let‘s not screw it up‘ if we were 40 points ahead. Instead, we‘re 44 points behind, and you‘ve got to attack at that point,” said three-time Cup champion Joey Logano, who sits sixth in the standings. “We‘ve got to get points at every stage, and we‘ve got to go out there and be in contention to win this thing. That‘s just the facts of where we are. Three races left, 44 back, and you‘re sixth. It‘s one thing if we were second, 44 back, which we have a lot of cars in front of us we‘ve got to pass to do that, too, and it‘s close, and it‘s very achievable. We definitely can do it, but you can‘t afford to be much further back than where we are right now and realistically think we can pull this off.”

Logano ranks among a half-dozen drivers all striving to make more gains on points leader Kyle Larson, whose red-hot Chase start cooled significantly after a problem-plagued race for his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet team last weekend at Phoenix Raceway. Tyler Reddick jumped back into the title fray with his sixth victory of the season, and Larson‘s 34th-place finish in the desert loosened his grip on The Chase‘s top spot. What was a 49-point advantage now stands as just five, with Christopher Bell on his heels.

Larson‘s Talladega history may not inspire confidence, with just three top-five outings in 23 career starts here. The two-time Cup champ, however, has the belief that a turnaround could be due.

“I mean, as bad as my results are here, I still look at it as opportunity, for sure, to get out here and have a shot to win,” Larson said. “I feel like we all, every single car in the field, maybe aside from a couple, have a shot to win if things go a certain way. … So, yeah, I mean, I look at it as an opportunity, but also opportunity the other way, if you do get caught up in things and get caught up in a crash. You can really lose a lot of ground here. But yeah, I‘m more confident here than I am at Phoenix.”

MORE: Saturday qualifying recap | Watch NASCAR video highlights

Working with teammates and manufacturer-allied drivers has long been a name of the game at Talladega, with drafting partnerships and pit-stop plans often paralleling those lines. Though Larson drives the only Chevrolet among the top nine and stands to gain the most factory support, he‘s followed by four Toyotas (Bell, Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin and Reddick) and two Fords (Logano and Ryan Blaney) — all of whom have their own individual goals on top of the collective automaker-aligned push.

“It‘s a difficult balance, but yeah, I‘d say if we can populate a lot of the stage points, then we‘re still gaining ground on those that aren‘t a Toyota,” said 23XI Racing‘s Reddick. “So, yeah, I mean, in the moment, it‘ll be hard to figure out how that goes. But I think we understand working together is more important than against each other, and we all stand to gain more from that.”

Whether it‘s gains or losses, expect the complexion of The Chase to get a major shake-up before heading to Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway the next two weeks to close it out.

“I mean, I definitely think we‘ve got to be within striking distance when we leave here, and striking distance is a relative term,” Hamlin says. “But you know, you don‘t have to count on competition, the outcome of them. As long as you can continue to control your own destiny by winning out, then it‘s still in your hands.”

Saving best for last

The unpredictable nature of the drafting style of racing — here, at Daytona International Speedway and EchoPark Speedway — typically yields a late-race exchange for the lead. Oftentimes, it goes as late as it can go, after the white flag unfurls.

Carson Hocevar was the most recent last-lap passer at Talladega, sidestepping white-flag leader Chris Buescher and a host of other challengers. Here‘s the who‘s who of other late-clinching winners at drafting tracks the last two years.

Speed reads

Race-day essentials:

• Talladega hub: Weekend information, pit stalls, additional results | Read more
• Sunday Setup: Alliances, new spoiler in play for Cup Series crew chiefs | Read more
• Paint Scheme Preview: Fresh designs hitting the Alabama high banks | View gallery
• Neil Paine: Bell, others close in as Larson‘s title-favorite edge slips | Read more
• NASCAR Classics: Rewind with full-race replays from the Talladega vault | Watch now
• Power Rankings: Reddick stages a late run with Phoenix triumph | This week‘s ranks

Elliott first won the Most Popular Driver Award in 2018, the year following Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s retirement. Earnhardt Jr. won the award 15 consecutive years until stepping away from full-time competition. Elliott‘s father, NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott, won the award a record 16 times.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Busch, along with the 34 other Cup Series drivers who declared for points in that series and were eligible for championship contention in 2026, is on the ballot and eligible to win. Fans can also cast votes to select Most Popular Driver Award recipients in the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series and the Craftsman Truck Series.

VOTE NOW: Cup | O‘Reilly | Trucks

To vote, visit the Most Popular Driver landing page. Fans can vote for one driver per ballot submission with voting being limited to five submissions per day, per email at NASCAR.com/mostpopulardriver or on the NASCAR Mobile App. The five votes per day aren‘t limited to a single driver.

Fan Rewards members will earn 25 points on their first vote from the Rewards dashboard.

The polls are open from 9 a.m. ET on Friday, Oct. 23 until Noon ET on Monday, Nov. 9 — the day after the Cup Series season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The winner will be revealed on Nov. 10 at the NASCAR Awards banquet in Miami after Championship Weekend.

Updates for the top 10 and top five drivers in each series will be posted before the winners are announced.

MORE: See all Cup Series Most Popular Driver winners

Justin Allgaier has won in the O‘Reilly Series three years in a row and six of the last seven times. Rajah Caruth took Truck Series honors the last two seasons.

On Lap 17, Stewart Friesen wiggled in Turns 1 and 2, receiving contact from behind from Andrés Pérez and veering left into Kris Wright, who shot across the track and hard into the outside SAFER barrier. Stewart, a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion who made his second start of the season, was in the middle of the melee and had nowhere to go, receiving heavy damage in an incident that also included Cole Butcher, Daniel Hemric and Corey LaJoie.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

“It‘s just a racing deal. It‘s part of it at restrictor plate races,” Stewart told FS1 after being evaluated and released from the infield care center. “Stewart (Friesen) couldn‘t go anywhere, I mean he had an issue, he said, and he‘s stuck in the middle — he can‘t go anywhere, so he‘s doing the best he can to hang onto it and just everyone around him got caught up in it.”

McFarland, making his third career Truck Series start, was behind the wreck as it developed and darted low to avoid it as he neared the backstretch. But contact from another truck sent him sideways and into the inside wall, suffering heavy damage to this No. 4 Niece Motorsports Chevrolet.

Speaking to reporters after being evaluated and released from the infield care center, McFarland — a YouTube personality turned part-time NASCAR driver — believed he was at fault for the DNF.

WATCH: Hear from McFarland

“It was great, feeling it out, and then massive wreck in front of me,” McFarland said. “There‘s trucks going everywhere, and I got slowed down. I was woed up, I thought I was good, and then I got tapped in the back left as I was coming down the track. Probably my fault, and I just went over and crunched the nose on my truck, ended my day short.

“I thought for a second I was gonna save it, but then it just had a little too much yaw, and it circled around. I jammed on the brakes to try and get the truck to slide straight, but I was too late. I already screwed myself.”

McFarland‘s national series debut ended in similar fashion, crashing on Lap 5 of the season-opening Truck Series race at Daytona International Speedway in a single-car incident. Since then, though, he tallied an additional Truck start at Michigan International Speedway, as well as a pair of O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series races and a lengthy springtime test at Rockingham Speedway.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

In his most recent visit to Talladega in the spring, McFarland paced 19 laps in April‘s ARCA Menards Series race, ultimately finishing second after leading into the tri-oval on the final lap.

Those reps gave him increased confidence for his Alabama return, with sights set on an increased NASCAR schedule in 2027.

“I feel like I was totally in control, and I knew I was tight, so I made the right decisions to put myself on the outside with my spotter,” McFarland said. “Things really did feel good today. I felt like I was finishing, for sure, outside of some crazy thing, and to just end on such a stupid situation, it blows.

“I‘m really frustrated because this time, it‘s not like I just did a bonehead move in the middle of the race and slammed into the wall like I did in Daytona. I feel like I had so much leeway ahead of me.”

MORE: Chase drivers have pit-road issues

Hemric was the only driver collected who is competing in The Chase presented by Mobil 1, but two postseason competitors had issues before the wreck. Justin Haley suffered a flat tire on Lap 13, forcing most of the field to check up, including Chase driver Chandler Smith, who dropped toward the rear of the field. Christian Eckes, runner-up in each of the last three races, suffered a flat tire on Lap 15 and made an unplanned visit to pit road. He entered Friday‘s race fourth in points.

Smith’s No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet crossed the finish line a mere 0.091 seconds ahead of a four-wide battle for second place, which ultimately went to McAnally-Hilgemann Racing’s Tyler Ankrum, a scant 0.002 seconds ahead of Smith’s teammate Austin Green, who turned in a tremendous day in his only start of the year. ThorSport’s Ty Majeski and championship leader Kaden Honeycutt joined the dramatic door-to-door rush to the checkered flag.

MORE: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega

It marks Smith’s first career win in the series in his 11th start and sends a strong message to the competition that the 22-year-old Iowa native will be a force for the title when he moves from his current full-time job competing in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series for JR Motorsports.

“Just a great team, [crew chief] Brian Pattie and this whole Spire crew,” Smith said, congratulating his team after leading the most laps (21 of 86) and hoisting his first Truck trophy.

“The truck was fast, and I feel like we did a good job putting ourselves in a good spot. Obviously, lost track position (earlier), but thanks to everyone for this opportunity. I’m looking forward to racing trucks next year, I just want to win races. Thank you to everybody.”

Asked what message the victory sends to his competition next year, Smith smiled and replied, “That I am a winner, and I know I can win, and I got another shot tomorrow [in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series] with my [No. 8] boys.”

It was a fittingly dramatic ending to a race that included five caution periods and a pair of the Talladega “Big Ones” that have so often characterized racing on this track.

The two Truck Series championship leaders, Tricon Garage’s Honeycutt and Front Row Motorsports’ Layne Riggs, both survived the predictably unpredictable action. Riggs, who lined up alongside Smith on the front row for the overtime restart, finished eighth and now trails Honeycutt by 43 points with two races remaining to settle the 2026 championship. It’s likely a two-man race to the title now, with third-place Ty Majeski now 141 points behind Honeycutt.

“I don’t know if I really can [be satisfied] to be honest with you,” said Honeycutt, who steers the No. 11 Tricon Garage Toyota and led eight laps. “Just didn’t make the right move [on the final restart].

“I thought the bottom was formed up better than it was. … I wanted to finish the race and get there where we needed to. Had a great run on the 34 [Riggs] and was able to shuffle him out. Felt like he left the gap open pretty far when he was trying to get outside of Ty [Majeski]. Just second plate race in a row I’ve been in a great position to win the race and just didn’t capitalize on it.”

As for the points?

“Never say ‘over’ till it’s over, until after [season finale at] Homestead. I’ve seen it in O’Reilly and in Cup, people can make up 90 points in two races. I’m sure it will be the same guys racing for the clock next week [at Martinsville], so winning means a lot, and if we can go and win a clock, it makes it a lot easier for Homestead for sure.”

RELATED: Honeycutt, Majeski lament late decisions

While the championship leaders were able to keep the title run suspenseful, many of the other eight title contenders suffered various problems throughout the day — from 2025 Talladega winner Gio Ruggiero’s truck getting stuck in reverse on pit road immediately after he won Stage 1 to another former Talladega winner Grant Enfinger having a tire go down early and then being collected in a crash later.

McAnally-Hilgemann’s Christian Eckes, who came into the race ranked third in the points, was the first to suffer an issue and leaves Alabama now fifth, 144 points off the championship pace. His teammate, Daniel Hemric, another Chase driver, was eliminated in a crash.

Landen Lewis, Brenden Queen, Riggs, Spencer Boyd, and 2025 series champion Corey Heim rounded out the top 10. It marks Boyd’s first top 10 in two years.

The first large multitruck crash was early and intense – and it involved two of the race’s biggest names — NASCAR Hall of Famer and former multi-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Tony Stewart, as well as media personality and NASCAR newcomer Cleetus McFarland, who was hoping to collect laps in only his third series start.

Both were collected in the melee that started mid-pack on Lap 17 when Stewart Friesen’s Toyota wiggled in Turns 1 and 2 and received contact from Andrés Pérez, triggering a chain-reaction wreck. Eight trucks were involved, including championship-eligible driver Hemric.

Stewart, who was making his second start of the season in the No. 25 Ram truck, was understandably frustrated to only get 16 laps of racing in.

“Definitely wanted to make it a lot further in the race today than that,” Stewart said. “Everyone started wrecking and they came across the track and got me. That’s just hard restrictor plate racing at Talladega.

“I wanted to get a chance to race, because I really enjoy working with Kaulig Racing and Ram. Kaulig is making progress and Ram is doing a good job marketing this sport.”

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

McFarland, making his third truck start of the season (and his career), was equally as frustrated. He said earlier Friday he was trying to get some track time in hopes of NASCAR granting him permission for more races in other series. His No. 4 Niece Motorsports Chevy was officially scored last in the 36-truck field.

“It just sucks,” McFarland said. “I just honestly saw the wreck and started slowing down heavily and was getting called down, was trying to get down out of the way, and I don’t know how or where, but I just lightly got tapped in the back left and it sent me on a trajectory that bent up the front of my hot rod, and I was just so pissed. It sucked.

“I felt like my truck was really tight, so I got out of the way, and I was riding, having a great race. I was learning. It was phenomenal. Saw the wreck and got on the brakes and was totally good, and then I just got spun and wrecked. It sucks.”

Chandler Smith entered Friday’s race fourth in the Chase standings but wound up with multiple issues, including a flat right-rear tire, a speeding penalty and getting collected in a Lap 57 crash with Jake Garcia and Conner Jones. Smith ultimately rebounded to finish 14th. Majeski overtook Smith and Eckes for third in points, sitting 141 points behind Honeycutt while Smith remains fourth, 142 points out.

MORE: Truck Series standings | Truck Series schedule

Sitting sixth in points and trailing Honeycutt by 177 points, Ruggiero is officially eliminated from championship contention, as are Hemric (minus-194), two-time champion Ben Rhodes (minus-203), Ankrum (minus-214) and Enfinger (minus-219).

Two races remain in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship run. Next up is Friday’s Black’s Tire 200 at Martinsville Speedway at 6 p.m. ET (FS1, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Tricon Garage‘s Kaden Honeycutt and Front Row Motorsports‘ Layne Riggs take a considerable advantage over the field when the green flag falls for Friday afternoon‘s Love‘s RV Stop 225 (4 p.m. ET, FS1, NASCAR Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Heading into the always-thrilling Talladega race, the season‘s four-time winner and driver of the No. 11 Toyota, Honeycutt holds his largest advantage of The Chase presented by Mobil 1, a 39-point edge over seven-race winner Riggs — both drivers well in front of third place, McAnally-Hilgemann Racing‘s Christian Eckes at 112 points back. None of these drivers have won on the sport‘s biggest track, however.

In last year‘s postseason race at Talladega, Riggs, driver of the No. 34 FRM Ford, finished fifth, Honeycutt was 10th, and it was actually Honeycutt‘s Tricon teammate Gio Ruggiero scoring his first career win — from pole position — leading a race-best 37 of the 90 laps including the final seven in a thrilling overtime triumph.

RELATED: Talladega schedule | Truck Series standings

CR7 Motorsports driver Grant Enfinger is the only Chase-eligible driver with trophies at all the remaining tracks (Talladega, Martinsville, and Homestead-Miami). Neither Honeycutt nor Riggs has won at any of those venues.

Any driver more than 152 points behind the leader following the Talladega race will be mathematically eliminated from championship contention. Three drivers enter the weekend already beyond that margin — Enfinger (-184), two-time series champ Ben Rhodes (-188) and Tyler Ankrum (-201) — while Ruggiero (-151) sits just inside it. All four need strong runs Friday to stay in the hunt.

Of note, Honeycutt boasts the best average finish (3.3) in the opening four Chase races with McAnally-Hilgemann‘s Daniel Hemric second best with a 7.3 average finish and his teammate Eckes third best with a 9.0 average. Riggs, who opened the chase with finishes of 32nd (Bristol) and 19th (Kansas), is only seventh best in the Chase with a 13.8 average finish so far.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

There have been nine different winners in the last nine Talladega races, including five hoisting their first career trophies. Talladega boasts the series record for most last-lap winning passes (11) — including six of the last eight races.

Kennametal Pole Qualifying is slated for 12:30 p.m. ET on Friday (FS2).

He never earned a Busch Light Pole Award, scored a stage point or made The Chase. You won‘t find his name on the Harley J. Earl Trophy as a Daytona 500 winner, nor are there any barroom arguments about his Hall of Fame credentials, or even a page for him on Racing Reference to pull up some numbers to help sway your opponent.

He might as well have.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Twenty years after “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” introduced him, Ricky Bobby feels as real as ever, somehow a stock-car racing institution and NASCAR legend in his own right, embodying everything about this sport that makes it the spectacle that it is, and also so personal to so many of us.

Deep down? We all just wanna go fast.

His Wonder Bread colors have competed in actual Cup Series races. His movie car has been on display at the NASCAR Hall. The sport has made room for him in places that usually require far more than a screenplay and a few hours of laughs.

It‘s hard to believe it‘s been two decades, but it‘s easy to see why the ballad is still being sung.

Some of the cast who helped bring Ricky Bobby‘s world to life are returning to Talladega Superspeedway for Dega-Con this weekend, an anniversary celebration during the Chase weekend tripleheader that will culminate with Sunday‘s crucial YellaWood 500 NASCAR Cup Series race (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). The festivities include a film screening, a cast reunion Q&A and an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of Ricky Bobbys.

Yes, you read that right.

Ricky Bobby has no official statistics. His fans are trying to get him into the history books anyway.

It‘s a remarkable second act for a character whose entire racing career, in theory, should‘ve just unfolded on a movie screen and that was that. Plenty of comedies remain quotable decades later. Far fewer become so thoroughly embedded in the culture they portray that the line between fiction and reality starts to look like a minor technicality.

Yet that‘s where Ricky Bobby finds himself in 2026: still deeply woven into NASCAR‘s colloquialisms, imagery and sense of humor, with fans dressed as him in the stands every Sunday while remaining a familiar entry point for people who might otherwise know little about the sport.

And somewhat fittingly, some of the people who brought his world to life needed an introduction to it themselves.

DEGA-CON: Full info | Shop ‘Talladega Nights‘ gear

David Koechner, for one, had to learn how to work the jack. He then quickly learned it, uh, wasn‘t for him.

Koechner arrived in Alabama for filming in October 2005 to play Hershell, one of Bobby‘s pit crew members, with a racing background largely consisting of seeing some sprint cars at the Missouri State Fair and the occasional demolition derby. Football was his sport. The immediate draw of “Talladega Nights” was mostly another chance to work with his buddies Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay, whom he‘d just collaborated with on “Anchorman.” NASCAR? Hell, why not?

Then came the education.

“The fascinating thing for me was getting into the science of NASCAR because, you know, the perception is just a bunch of good old boys getting out there and getting a good time and racing, racking up with each other,” Koechner, who once portrayed NASCAR‘s founder, told NASCAR.com. “No, it‘s a science. It‘s a science.”

He remembers being taken through the precision of pit stops, the specialized responsibilities assigned to each crew member and the athletic backgrounds teams sought when filling those roles. Teams recruited former college football players and other athletes for positions that required particular combinations of speed, strength and coordination. And they weren‘t all alike.

“Each member of the pit crew is recruited from specific sports positions, from college athletes,” Koechner recalled. “I‘m like, ‘Are you kidding me?‘ A shortstop does one thing, a linebacker does another thing, a defensive end or tight end does another thing. And that‘s what was fascinating to me and makes complete sense.”

His surprise wasn‘t that NASCAR required talented people. It was how thoroughly each person‘s talents had been matched to a particular task.

“Oh, good Lord, just like anything that gets to this level, this is a high-precision sport, and there‘s not a detail that is left to chance,” he said.

What looked from the outside like a group of people changing tires in a hurry was, he discovered, an operation with little room for improvisation or failure. The actors trained for their respective assignments, and Koechner recalls initially being designated the jackman because of his height.

This proved an insufficient qualification.

“So the jackman is going to be a defensive end, right? Because he‘s long, lean, got strength. So originally I was supposed to be a jackman. So we‘re rehearsing, I guess, basically, or we‘re training to play our parts.

“So, you know, I‘m taller, so that‘s why they gave me jackman. Now that is a very hard job. And at the time, I probably weighed 195. Jackman‘s got to be 225. He‘s got to be 23 years old and pop that thing. So I tried a couple times. I said, ‘Nope.‘ I grabbed a clipboard and said, ‘This is what I‘m gonna do.‘ ”

Koechner‘s introduction to Talladega itself was hardly less memorable.

He recalls the cast and crew flying to Alabama aboard a chartered Hooters Air plane — an entirely appropriate mode of transportation for a movie that would eventually feature a cougar-sponsored race car. Getting into the speedway proved considerably less efficient. Koechner remembers spending roughly three and a half hours in a vehicle with fellow actors Jack McBrayer and Ian Roberts before finally reaching the track. A helicopter ride out with Ferrell, McKay, John C. Reilly and others was substantially quicker.

But what happened between those two very different commutes is what made the deeper impression.

The production needed an actual pit stall to film its crew scenes during a real race. Koechner expected a lengthy wait before one became available. Instead, he remembers the opportunity arriving almost immediately.

“Because I‘m thinking we‘re gonna wait here for a couple hours,” he recalled. But then a car pulled off, and it was time to go. “It‘s immediate. There‘s a pit open, we take over.”

Suddenly, the sport the cast had been studying was unfolding all around them in real time, with Koechner experiencing the fury of a NASCAR field at speed from pit road.

“And just the raw horsepower, the feel of raw horsepower. That was the most awesome. I tell you, that moment was the most awesome. Like, my dear God. It‘s a bit harrowing, but also thrilling. And then the adrenaline pumping. But now we‘ve got to do dialogue. Like, are you kidding me?”

The noise presented a problem that doesn‘t typically arise on a comedy set: nobody could reasonably expect to hear the actors, with 40-something machines roaring by at pace.

Koechner recalls McKay instructing them to carefully articulate their words — to “chew” the dialogue — so their performances could be matched with replacement audio later.

“We know that we‘re gonna match this in post,” Koechner said. “Because there‘s no way they‘re gonna be able to hear us.”

That commitment to authenticity was central to the production. NASCAR cooperated with Ferrell and McKay, helping provide access to real tracks, crowds, teams and racing environments. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jamie McMurray appeared as themselves, while familiar broadcast voices helped make the fictional races sound like the real thing.

“In life, you get to have experiences for whatever reason, and because you‘re an actor, you have probably so many wonderful, unexpected experiences, and that was certainly one of them.”

As Ferrell explained in a 2016 ESPN oral history, the filmmakers wanted to have fun with NASCAR rather than simply make fun of it. That meant finding the sport‘s actual peculiarities, then stretching them until they became ridiculous.

Greg Germann, who played fictional team owner Larry Dennit Jr., discovered a similarly unfamiliar world.

Germann‘s childhood racing experience included witnessing a figure-eight race and demolition derby in Colorado. The scale of NASCAR, its enormous following and the intensity of the action at track level came as something of a revelation.

“When we did the movie, you know, 20 years ago, that was one thing that really surprised me. I was shocked at how many people. I mean, we‘re all in our own bubbles. But how big the fan base is, you know, relative to, I don‘t know, the NFL, NBA, even like the World Cup?” Germann told NASCAR.com. “That was eye-opening for, I think, a lot of us, to see how big the fan base is and how exciting it is and stuff. And, you know, we‘re not exposed to it.

” … Talladega, it‘s like, to be down there on the track when they‘re going. It‘s insane. It was eye-opening, really.”

Two decades later, he remains interested enough to ask questions and catch back up after his NASCAR absence. During an interview about the film‘s anniversary, Germann wanted to know how the current championship format worked, where Talladega fit into the schedule and which drivers were still in contention.

A participant in this weekend‘s Dega-Con festivities, it‘s the film that brought him to NASCAR in the first place — and back to it.

That might be as useful an illustration of the movie‘s broader appeal as any box-office statistic.

“Talladega Nights” opened at No. 1 in August 2006, eventually earning more than $148 million domestically. Its audience was vast, reaching well beyond NASCAR‘s existing fan base and introducing millions of moviegoers to a world they might never have explored otherwise.

For some, Ricky Bobby may have been the first NASCAR driver — real or fictional — they came to know. Through him, the sport became something more than cars circling some track down south. The movie offered recognizable teams, rivalries, sponsorships, personalities and an entire ecosystem of people whose lives revolved around what happened on Sundays.

Ricky and Cal Naughton Jr.‘s “Shake and Bake” partnership turned the complicated relationship between NASCAR teammates into something immediately understandable, and the sponsors were practically supporting characters themselves. Bobby‘s Wonder Bread, Naughton Jr.‘s Old Spice and the green Perrier car of Jean Girard (portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen) gave each driver an instantly identifiable, distinct personality.

And Ricky‘s responsibilities, like every other NASCAR driver, hardly ended when he climbed out of the car. There were commercials to shoot, sponsors to satisfy, reporters to entertain, crêpes to refuse to eat and an entire public identity to maintain.

None of this was intended as a documentary, obviously. But beneath the absurdity was a surprisingly functional introduction to the sport‘s relationships, business and spectacle.

The movie didn‘t teach NASCAR‘s rule book; it taught the shape and culture of the sport.

Still, the authentic racing environment alone doesn‘t explain why Ricky Bobby has endured. Plenty of fictional worlds look convincing, and far fewer produce characters that people keep bringing along into their own lives.

Ask Koechner to explain the movie‘s cultural staying power, though, and he initially wants no part of an elaborate analysis.

Trying to explain why a comedy connects with an audience, he suggests, is a fine way for an actor to wander into territory where he doesn‘t belong.

“If it made you laugh, then it‘s good,” he said. “That‘s as far as I could go.”

Fair enough.

But ask why people still connect with Ricky Bobby himself, and there‘s considerably more thread to pull on.

“Well, for me, if you‘re asking me, it‘s because he has a dream.”

“So Ricky Bobby‘s dad takes off. We‘ve got abandonment and neglect right there, so he‘s got to overcome those things. You know, it‘s all back to Joseph Campbell‘s hero‘s journey. And as Plato says, the cave … you‘ve got to go through the cave to get to the light, and do you remain in the darkness or do you come out in the light?

“When you talk about why people respond to it, they might not be intellectually aware of what they‘re necessarily doing. … I‘ve had hardship, I‘ve had disappointment. I felt that I wasn‘t good enough. … So then we all have to thrust ourselves out there to be seen in the way we want to be seen. So that‘s really the story of this whole thing.”

Germann finds the character‘s humanity in the man playing him.

“That‘s Will,” he said when asked why Ricky remains so recognizable. “You know, like with ‘Anchorman,‘ with Ron Burgundy, or the other characters that Will has created. You know, he‘s iconic. All this stuff on ‘Saturday Night Live‘ … and then you add to that, but he‘s genuinely one of, like, the nicest guys around. I think that has … what kind of comes out of his work when you see him is he‘s a genuinely good guy. So his comedy really connects with people.

“He has a kind of a magic ability to do that. And I think that‘s why Ricky Bobby really radiates in that way.”

The jokes may be enormously quotable, but the feelings underneath them are ubiquitously relatable. And once audiences made those characters their own, they didn‘t seem especially interested in giving them back.

Koechner sees that evidence whenever he travels for his stand-up career.

He has appeared in “Anchorman,” “The Office” and a long list of other recognizable projects, but which credit follows him most closely depends on where he happens to be performing. In some places, it‘s “Anchorman” or “The Office.” Back home in Missouri, and particularly across the South, “Talladega Nights” tends to move up the billing.

“The fun for me, because I tour and do stand-up in different parts of the country, I‘ll be known for different things,” Koechner said. “It‘s interesting to kind of clock the regional thing you‘re known for.”

But it‘s the interaction with fans — sometimes people who have carried a favorite movie with them for two decades — that provides the occasional reminder of how far that shared experience has traveled.

“In your day-to-day life, you don‘t think about yourself in (the movie),” he said. “You think about yourself and your family in the world. But then when you‘re out in the world, you go, ‘Oh, that‘s right. I did something that a lot of people have shared.‘ And so be aware of that, which is just joyful. But you don‘t look for it, but when it happens, you go, ‘Oh, that‘s right. Yeah, look how fortunate I‘ve been. Look how, you know, blessed I have been, or am.‘ So, you know, to think about 20 years, you‘re like, well, that was such a fun thing. And it worked, because in movies you don‘t know it‘s going to work. But it worked, and you were in it.”

At NASCAR tracks, that shared experience has long since extended beyond repeating favorite lines.

NASCAR Hall of Famer Kurt Busch brought Ricky‘s cougar-emblazoned “ME” design into actual Cup Series competition at Talladega in 2012, then returned the following year with Wonder Bread colors on Furniture Row Racing‘s No. 78 Chevrolet.

In 2023, Chase Briscoe and Ryan Preece brought the movie‘s most famous partnership back to the track, with Briscoe‘s No. 14 Ford carrying Cal‘s Old Spice colors — and his face carrying a sweet-ass handlebar mustache — and Preece‘s No. 41 sporting Ricky‘s Wonder Bread scheme.

And the connection has hardly remained confined to what happens on the race track. In 2023, Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick literally purchased the Lake Norman mansion used as Ricky Bobby‘s home in the film.

The staying power isn‘t simply a matter of nostalgia or clever marketing. NASCAR fans recognized enough truth beneath the exaggeration to claim the film as their own, while people who knew little about the sport found the characters and their world accessible without needing to understand everything happening under the hood.

This weekend‘s Dega-Con celebration takes the relationship to its logical extreme, turning a 20-year-old comedy into a gathering built around the characters, jokes and images fans have kept alive themselves. All during a pivotal postseason weekend for each national series.

And as Hollywood prepares another trip into NASCAR with Tom Cruise‘s return as Cole Trickle in a “Days of Thunder” sequel scheduled for 2028, the sport has another opportunity to introduce itself to audiences through the shared stories, community and personalities that surround the competition.

“Talladega Nights” demonstrated how effective that invitation could be, even when delivered by a man who believed in himself first and foremost, because if you ain‘t first, you‘re last.

In this space over the past few weeks, we‘d been tracking as Kyle Larson‘s march toward a second consecutive Cup Series championship intensified with each passing race of The Chase presented by Mobil 1. Destiny seemed so clearly on Larson‘s side that, even when Chase Briscoe rattled off two consecutive wins, it actually helped Larson‘s title odds by ensuring valuable victories didn‘t go to his primary rivals in the standings. Life was good for Larson.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

But that all came to a screeching halt this weekend in Phoenix. Larson had a rough qualifying, starting 22nd on the grid, and his team never achieved a satisfactory setup with the No. 5 car. He scored zero stage points, his average running position in the race itself ended up being just 21.98 — his seventh-worst run of the season — and that was even before a Lap 293 wreck ended his day prematurely with a 34th-place finish.

Add it up, and Larson‘s Driver Rating on the day was a miserable 49.3 — the 11th-worst drive of his career, and his worst of 2026 to date.

“You guys thought I was lying to you all week when I said we weren‘t good here,” Larson said afterward — though, in fairness, he‘d previously finished top four four straight times at Phoenix. “I didn‘t expect to be good, but I didn‘t expect to be that bad, either. … We were just trying to kind of fight as much as we could and just scratch them off or whatever finish we‘re gonna get.”

While he still came away with a slim points lead, it was the kind of day Larson couldn‘t really afford if so many of his top competitors were also going to do well simultaneously. (Aside from Denny Hamlin — who finished 28th but did score 12 stage points — each of the other top seven Chase drivers through Charlotte also finished eighth or better at Phoenix.) Before Sunday, only two drivers sat within 60 points of Larson; now, six do:

As a result, Larson‘s odds in my Cup Series championship forecast model took a massive tumble, from a commanding 72.5% (versus 10.6% for next-best Christopher Bell) coming out of Charlotte to 32.6% after Phoenix — which actually trails Bell at 35.2%! (Though Larson still sits ahead of Briscoe at 14.6%.) Suddenly, it‘s the wide-open title fight we thought Larson might just pull away from only a few weeks ago.

Bell, though, presents the greatest challenge to Larson‘s tenuous perch atop the current standings.

For one thing, as much conversation as we‘ve had about Larson‘s dominant start to The Chase, Bell has been better than Larson by average Driver Rating over the seven races of The Chase to date — 111.4 to 109.2 — and he‘s had the superior rating head-to-head in four of seven outings. (And that sample includes the literally perfect 150.0 rating Larson produced at Kansas.) He‘s also been better on each remaining track type — superspeedway for Talladega, short-track or flat-track for Martinsville, mile-and-a-half for Homestead-Miami — this season, all of which help explain why my forecast model has Bell slightly favored to outperform Larson at all three season-ending stops.

Of course, Larson does have the superior record on drafting tracks and especially mile-and-a-half tracks if we zoom out to the whole of the Next Gen era (since 2022), so some of this varies based on sample size. (My model gives more weight to more recent results, for what it‘s worth.) And track-fit isn‘t everything — just ask Hamlin, who looked like a perfect fit for this year‘s Chase races on paper, but now needs some luck in order to win his first championship. But Bell is in a sweet spot for superior track-fit and closeness in the points to Larson, and that makes him the biggest immediate threat to take control of the championship race.

Bell‘s not alone in terms of having opportunities to capitalize on the remaining schedule, either. Ryan Blaney (40 points back) actually has the highest average projected Driver Rating across the final three tracks, while Logano (44 behind) is the only leading contender whose remaining schedule projects better than the Cup Series‘ full-season track mix. Briscoe is just 24 points back and owns the highest projected Driver Rating at Homestead-Miami, giving him a potentially powerful closing argument if he can stick within striking distance.

Meanwhile, Larson faces the biggest projected drop from his own baseline — leaving him with plenty of rivals positioned to erase his slim margin over the field.

What does this all mean for Talladega this weekend? It just makes NASCAR‘s most feared track the highest-pressure race left on the schedule, too.

In the model, Sunday‘s YellaWood 500 carries the highest championship leverage of any remaining race — meaning it has the greatest potential to swing each contender‘s odds from their current state, for good or for bad. If any of them win at Talladega, they may just find themselves becoming a strong favorite for the title (especially if it‘s Bell, Larson or perhaps even Briscoe) … and if any of them have a disastrous day on par with Larson‘s at Phoenix, or worse — a distinct possibility in the chaos of the draft, with the Big One lurking around every turn — they could drive themselves directly out of the championship picture.

We‘ve already seen how much can change in just the span of a single race: One week ago, Larson seemed to have one hand on the championship trophy. Now he‘s in a serious battle with little margin for error and a bunch of challengers coming for the crown. And with Talladega up next, the biggest moves in this title fight may still be to come.

Reddick‘s thrilling triumph wasn‘t the only eye-popper of the weekend, though. With Kyle Larson‘s 34th-place finish and just three points earned, the defending Cup champion and current Chase leader saw his points cushion shrink by 44, with every other Chaser gaining markers as a result. Larson and the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports camp now sit only five points clear of Christopher Bell and the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team with three races until a champion is crowned.

RELATED: Phoenix results | Cup Series standings

Of course, Bell isn‘t the only driver within striking distance of Larson. Drivers second through seventh in the Chase standings are within 56 markers of the No. 5 driver, split among three separate organizations: Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske and 23XI Racing. In this week‘s “Last Call” question, our panelists discuss which organization could usurp the Larson/Hendrick duo.

Which organization is best positioned to overtake Larson and Hendrick?

Cameron Richardson: Without a much-needed Phoenix win for Ryan Blaney or Joey Logano, the hill is a lot steeper for either Team Penske driver to get to the championship. However, Talladega and Martinsville back-to-back couldn‘t line up any better for them with their backs against the wall. If the updated rules package for Sunday‘s race plays out similarly to Daytona in the summer, it could see Penske back to its usual dominance on superspeedways. Blaney, Logano and even teammate Austin Cindric are familiar with Victory Lane on NASCAR‘s largest oval, and the synergy between the three could be the difference maker versus Joe Gibbs Racing‘s Bell, Hamlin and Briscoe, who will want to overtake each other on points all day instead of work together. Martinsville has been a playground for Blaney in the fall with two wins and no finish worse than third over his last four postseason trips, while Logano has finished top 10 in 14 consecutive events at the Virginia short track. Homestead is a bigger question for Penske, but the key factor for the organization right now is to run up front and finish at Talladega. Accomplish that, and the 2026 trophy is well within reach.

Dustin Albino: Given Joe Gibbs Racing has three bullets in the chamber, the powerhouse Toyota team is inching closer to the No. 5 Chevrolet. Sure, Team Penske should be among the pre-race favorites for the next two weekends, but there is very little weakness in JGR‘s game across any style of race track. Christopher Bell is the closest he‘s been to the championship lead all season, and though he has a single victory in the first 33 races, the No. 20 team has been ultra-consistent with eight runner-up finishes. Chase Briscoe is on a career heater, gaining 99 points on Larson in the last three races alone while posting a 3.5 average finish over his last four starts, his best four-race stretch ever. Meanwhile, Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 team have stumbled out of the gate with plenty of missed opportunities. Given how strong their regular season was, it would seem likely that the Chris Gayle-led team will find their mojo in the next few weeks.

Zack Albert: With three championship contenders lined up 2-3-4 in The Chase standings (Bell, Briscoe and Hamlin, in that order), the most prime of challenging positions belong to Joe Gibbs Racing. Beyond the points proximity, JGR bolsters its case through its yearlong excellence, plus a history of winning at the three tracks that loom on the schedule. With nods to Team Penske‘s prowess at Martinsville and Reddick‘s statistical knack for Talladega and Homestead, their deficits — 40 points or more — feel like a tall though not impossible hurdle. Though Talladega‘s treacherous nature could deal another serious shake-up to the postseason field, JGR‘s three-pronged attack is within much closer reach of its first Cup crown since 2019, the last time Homestead-Miami Speedway hosted the season finale. A full-circle moment this year seems nigh.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Pat DeCola: It feels a little ridiculous to call the guy with a series-best six wins this season a dark horse, but here we are. Tyler Reddick sits seventh in The Chase, 56 points behind Larson, yet may have one of the clearest paths to the title with past victories at two of the three tracks remaining — Talladega and Homestead — including that unforgettable last-lap pass in Miami just two years ago. Sunday‘s Phoenix win was a pretty emphatic reminder that the 23XI team that won five of the first nine races hasn‘t disappeared, either. Martinsville is the obvious question mark, but with victories worth as much as they are in this format, I‘m not sure I‘d bet against an organization that‘s already proven it can win on just about anything, and I wouldn‘t rule out a similar run to close the season in the same fashion it opened it.

Zach Sturniolo: No team has a better reputation for coming to life at the end of the season than Team Penske. And with both Ryan Blaney (minus-40) and Joey Logano (minus-44) within striking distance with three strong tracks ahead in their pursuit, this championship might just be Team Penske‘s for the taking. Kyle Larson and the No. 5 Hendrick team represent a mountainous obstacle in front of this duo of teammates. But consider Blaney‘s track record at each of the three tracks ahead, and that mountain slowly starts looking more like a hill: three wins at Talladega, two at Martinsville and three near-misses at Homestead, where he‘s led 47 or more laps in each of his last three starts. Logano, just four points back of Blaney, is also a three-time ‘Dega winner in addition to single wins at Martinsville and Homestead. The task is never easy in the Cup Series, but Team Penske has quite an edge this time of year that should not be ignored.

And with Talladega Superspeedway on deck (Sun., 2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), this postseason could be completely turned on its head.

RELATED: Cup Series standings | Talladega weekend schedule

For the first time in seven races, points leader Kyle Larson dropped the ball, qualifying 22nd, failing to earn stage points, ultimately crashing with 30 laps to go and finishing 34th. He earned just three points, allowing the likes of Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe and even Denny Hamlin — who didn‘t have a clean trip to the desert himself — to take a chunk out of their points deficits.

Equally important, it opened the door for three more drivers, creating a sudden seven-headed monster atop the series heading to one of NASCAR‘s most daunting tracks.

Tyler Reddick led the final 18 laps at Phoenix, earning his series-best sixth victory of 2026 and his first in 23 races. He gained a whopping 58 points on Larson, going from minus 114 to just minus 56. Team Penske mates Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano treated Phoenix as a must-win, and while it only produced second- and sixth-place finishes, respectively, they each chopped their deficits in more than half.

And while an intimidation factor certainly comes into play at the 2.66-mile Talladega, those three are among the best in the draft — positioning themselves for a last-chance shot at the Bill France Cup.

Courtesy of Racing Insights, let‘s dive into the numbers ahead of the antipenultimate race of the 2026 season.

With group pit strategies, track position and the inevitable “Big One,” sustaining superspeedway success is extraordinarily difficult. But Reddick is a rare outlier, at least in the Next Gen era.

In five drafting-track races this season, Reddick averages a 5.4 finish, including victories in the Daytona 500 and at EchoPark Speedway the following week. If Reddick maintains that pace through Talladega, he could finish with the best season-long average at drafting tracks in the Next Gen era. He has earned a whopping 233 points at this track type, 64 more than Carson Hocevar, the next highest.

Despite the boatload of points, he‘s surprisingly led just 69 laps, a testament to how he and the No. 45 23XI Racing team manage races in the draft. He led just one lap in the “Great American Race,” and his winning move at EchoPark came with just two laps to go, outfoxing teammate Bubba Wallace in the waning moments. But that is a common trend in these races: the final lead change in each of the last 11 superspeedway-style races happened with one or two laps to go.

Reddick is not the only driver with late-race victories. Blaney has made winning passes on the final lap twice since August 2025 — at Daytona last summer and EchoPark in July. He has tallied the third-most points in the five drafting track events this year (163), and his 66 stage points top the league. Specific to Talladega, he‘s won three of the last 14 and led laps in 13 of the last 16. Meanwhile, Logano has banked six career drafting wins across all three venues.

The organization has paced 256 circuits across the five races this year, and its 1,649 laps led on drafting tracks since the start of 2022 are nearly double the next closest team (Hendrick Motorsports, 844). Logano is responsible for a majority of those, leading 710 laps with Blaney hot on his heels (512) and Austin Cindric (427) rounding out the Penske podium.

The numbers seem Penske-perfect. The finishes aren‘t.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Blaney has DNFs in three of five superspeedway-style races this season and has finished 20th or worse in five straight races in Alabama, despite leading laps in three of them. Three-time Cup champion Logano owns a pair of key postseason EchoPark victories, but aside from that, he has finished 16th or worse in 14 of the last 18 drafting-track races. It‘s been eight years since the last time Logano pulled into Talladega‘s Victory Lane, finishing inside the top 10 just once since 2019.

For Reddick, Blaney and Logano, championship hopes haven‘t always hinged on what happens at Talladega, at least until now. A win could put them at the forefront of the title conversation with two races to go. Anything less than that could mean game over.

All three drivers enter Talladega with less than a 5% chance of hoisting the Bill France Cup. A Blaney victory ups his odds to 25.2%. A Reddick victory raises his odds to 20.5%. A Logano victory ups his odds to 15.4%.

Even if one of the trio shoulders the famed horseshoe wreath after 188 laps of high-stakes racing, it will take flawless performances — and maybe some help at Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway — to earn the championship. But the most important race is always the next one; Talladega is just the first of three steps across three very different racing venues.

Higher in points, the top four are volatile. Larson, who now leads the Cup Series by just five points, has the worst average drafting-track finish of any driver at 30.6. Briscoe, 24 points back in third, is fifth-worst at this style of racing in 2026, though he is the defending Talladega winner. Hamlin, a three-time Daytona 500 winner, runs fourth in points at minus 31 but has lacked momentum throughout the entire postseason. Even Bell, who has finished inside the top 10 in the past two fall Talladega races, has placed 17th or worse in four of this year‘s five drafting-track events.

The window is cracked, and there‘s a draft — will someone take advantage for a last-ditch championship run?

Honeycutt, the current Truck Series points leader, is slated for his second season in the No. 11 Toyota Tundra, while Ruggiero will return to the No. 17 for the third consecutive year.

RELATED: 2027 Truck Series schedule

A Texas native, Honeycutt joined Tricon ahead of the 2026 season following a full 2025 campaign split amongst three organizations. His final eight races of that season came in Halmar-Friesen Racing‘s No. 52 entry, navigating the truck to the Championship 4 in place of the injured Stewart Friesen.

Through 22 races this season, Honeycutt has four wins, including a victory in the series‘ most recent race at Phoenix Raceway. His first career victory came in May at Watkins Glen International — just hours after winning his first ARCA Menards Series race at the New York road course. Honeycutt leads the series with 14 top fives, 17 top 10s and a 7.8 average finish. With three races remaining in The Chase presented by Mobil 1, Honeycutt owns a 39-point advantage over Layne Riggs heading to Talladega Superspeedway on Friday (4 p.m. ET, FS1, FOX One, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

The 23-year-old ran part-time national series slates from 2022-24 while primarily focused on late model racing, earning the 2024 CARS Tour Pro Late Model championship.

Ruggiero embarked on his first Truck Series season in 2025, joining Tricon after running the full 2024 ARCA Menards Series East schedule. He missed the postseason as a rookie, but scored his first win that fall at Talladega. Through sustained consistency in 2026, Ruggiero qualified for The Chase, earning the No. 5 seed. The Massachusetts native has 11 top 10s through 22 races, sitting seventh in points at 151 markers behind Honeycutt.

Honeycutt is currently paired with veteran shot caller Scott Zipadelli while Ruggiero works with Jeff Stankiewicz, but no additional information about 2027 driver/crew-chief pairings was disclosed.

There is still hope that Year 21 will be different. On the heels of his worst finish of The Chase so far, Hamlin still stands fourth in the points standings, just 31 points behind series leader Kyle Larson with three weeks left to surpass him for Hamlin‘s first Cup Series title.

A new format for The Chase, less reliance upon a singular race to settle a title winner and factoring him in as this season‘s No. 1 seed all seemed to indicate the 2026 season truly favoring Hamlin and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing group. But from the perspective of sheer dominance and capability, The Chase has gone anything but right for the entire team.

MORE: Chase standings | Talladega schedule

Perhaps trickiest for the No. 11 team is the weight of accomplishing Hamlin‘s ultimate goal of becoming a NASCAR Cup Series champion. On one hand, there is crew chief Chris Gayle, the team‘s foremost leader whose emphasis on “it‘s not over” following Sunday‘s 28th-place result at Phoenix Raceway embodies the desperation in his goal to win a title with Hamlin, knowing that time is short with Hamlin set to retire following the 2027 season.

On the other hand, though, is Hamlin, who simply appears exhausted after 20 years of coming up short since his rookie season in 2006.

“I am mentally drained at the Cup Series,” Hamlin said in Monday‘s episode of “Actions Detrimental,” his Dirty Mo Media podcast. “I have reached … my fun meter is pegged to the absolute fullest.”

Overhanging Hamlin is the burdensome shadow of his shortcomings over the decades. The common phrase goes: “Past success does not guarantee future results.” The problem is that Hamlin nearly appears as ill-fated every time The Chase rears its head — almost in the way that his past failures would guarantee future failures.

“Some things are meant to be, some things are not meant to be,” Hamlin said after Sunday‘s race. “There have been so many cards that have been dealt in my career in these playoffs, Chase, that I‘ve seen it all. Nothing surprises me. I‘m not shell-shocked because I‘ve been here.”

That is not meant to imply that Hamlin has either thrown in the towel or is suddenly hopeless in his championship pursuit. His 2026 season has been remarkably successful, collecting four wins, 16 top fives and 21 top 10s in 33 starts this season. That includes a red-hot stretch in late spring that produced a trio of consecutive wins at Nashville Superspeedway, Michigan International Speedway and Pocono Raceway that propelled him to ninth on the Cup Series‘ all-time wins list with 64 victories — directly behind Dale Earnhardt (76), Jimmie Johnson (83), Cale Yarborough (83) and Darrell Waltrip (84).

This summer, there was a palpable swagger Hamlin carried into the race track on a weekly basis. He worked to erase Tyler Reddick‘s 129-point lead in May and by late June took over the top spot in points, a lead he didn‘t relinquish until the Bristol Night Race in mid-September. Ahead of Pocono, Hamlin admitted that portion of the season marked “the peak” of that week-to-week confidence, knowing he and his team could become dominant whenever it needed to.

Whatever swagger he and the No. 11 team had then has evaporated in The Chase. Mistakes on pit road, atop the pit box and behind the wheel have doomed Hamlin since the opening race at Darlington Raceway. There, he finished 18th, then ninth at World Wide Technology Raceway, eighth at Bristol Motor Speedway, third at Kansas Speedway, 16th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fifth at Charlotte Motor Speedway and 28th at Phoenix.

Hamlin‘s average start (5.71) to average finish (12.43) comparison shows the greatest disparity of anyone on The Chase grid at almost a full seven positions. An argument can be made that Hamlin showed winning speed in the opening two stages of Darlington‘s Southern 500, where he led 68 laps. But winning speed hasn‘t come back since.

RELATED: Last Call: What stands between Hamlin and first Chase win

Now over four months since his last trip to Victory Lane, the frustration is taking a toll on Hamlin.

“Monday mornings are the worst because by the time I get to sleep, it means if I‘ve slept, then my mind has calmed,” Hamlin said on his podcast. “And then my first thought every Monday morning when we get the Vegases, the [Phoenixes], the Darlingtons is [expletive! Expletive, expletive, expletive]. That‘s what it feels like. Every Monday morning. I just need one. I want one smooth race that no bull-[expletive] happens. That‘s what I want. But you can‘t will it. It just has to happen. And some things are meant to happen. Some things are not meant to happen. But at this point, I feel like the racing gods are picking on me.”

If Las Vegas was the worst of it — a decision to pit at Lap 45 allowed Kyle Larson to get back onto the lead lap, followed by Hamlin‘s over-eager drive in Turn 4 that led him to spin out and damage his car — Phoenix was a close second. The good news in Arizona is that the No. 11 Toyota appeared on the verge of contention and charged to fourth place — until his right-rear tire went flat, sending him to pit road, where he then incurred a speeding penalty that kept him off the lead lap despite being the first car one lap down when a caution flag waved for a separate incident that coincided with his pit stop.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

But for all the dread, all the doubt and all the “here we go again” of what could be another fruitless championship campaign for Denny Hamlin, the driver himself still carries a glimmer of optimism — even if it‘s of the “fake it till you make it” ilk — trailing Larson by just 31 points heading to Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

“We‘ve just got to get it back,” Hamlin said. “I mean, again, here we are. It could not have been worse [at Phoenix]. We still control our own destiny. We still control our own destiny.”

RELATED: Cup Series Chase schedule | Cup Series standings

Analysis: Well, there goes the cushion. Six races of near-perfection built Larson a 49-point championship lead entering Phoenix, and one afternoon in the desert reduced it to five measly markers. Worse, this wasn‘t a case of the No. 5 running up front until a tire failure ruined everything. Larson struggled from the jump; he qualified 22nd, scored no stage points, fell off the lead lap and was already looking at a miserable result before a right-front tire finally gave way and sent him into the wall, landing 34th. His worst Chase race by a mile, and one that suddenly makes the remarkable 2.8 average finish from the first six feel like ancient history. We‘re keeping Larson atop the rankings because that larger body of work still matters (and it‘s still his to lose), but the championship no longer looks anything close to secure. And now comes Talladega, where he finished 40th in April after getting swept up in the massive Lap 115 crash. If there‘s a worse place to arrive with a five-point lead and a whole lot of uncertainty, it‘s hard to imagine where.

Analysis: Five points. That‘s all that separates Bell from the championship lead after spending most of The Chase lurking just outside the spotlight while Larson seemingly ran away with the thing. Bell was excellent again at Phoenix, leading a race-high 85 laps, finishing third in both stages and coming home fourth. Add that to his near-miss against Briscoe at Charlotte Motor Speedway (where he lost by 0.029 seconds), and it‘s becoming increasingly difficult to argue that anybody has consistently brought more speed these last few races. The wins haven‘t followed, but the points certainly have. There‘s an interesting Talladega wrinkle, too: Bell led a race-high 31 laps there in April before a final-lap crash left him 17th, another result that obscured how competitive the No. 20 actually was. He also finished eighth there last fall. Bell has spent much of 2026 looking capable of something enormous, and now the championship is practically sitting in front of him. The question is whether Talladega lets him reach for it.

Analysis: The winning streak ended, but Briscoe somehow came away from Phoenix with another pretty significant reason to celebrate. He finished eighth after running up front, scoring 15 stage points and briefly controlling the lead on the final restart before Reddick charged through. Not exactly the follow-up to consecutive victories that makes headlines, but consider the larger picture: Briscoe has erased 99 points of Larson‘s advantage over the last three races, and now he‘s only 24 behind the championship leader with three remaining. That‘s a remarkable reversal from where things stood before Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and the No. 19 still looks plenty capable of adding another win to the pile. Better yet, we‘re heading back to Talladega, where Briscoe stole the fall race last year with a last-lap pass and a tremendous assist from teammate Ty Gibbs. The hottest stretch of Briscoe‘s Cup career has turned him into a genuine championship threat. Now he gets another crack at the track where he made his title aspirations legitimate a year ago.

Analysis: Four consecutive top-five finishes, and they‘re getting better: fifth, fifth, third, second. Blaney‘s slow-burn Chase is becoming one of the more compelling developments in the championship fight, particularly given how badly the first few races went despite the speed being there. Phoenix was another strong afternoon, with the No. 12 starting from the pole, leading 51 laps and finishing runner-up to Reddick after another pit-road setback interrupted his day. A third consecutive Phoenix victory would‘ve been nice, but second still helped erase 45 points of his championship deficit, leaving him just 40 behind Larson. That‘s no longer a number requiring much imagination to overcome. Talladega? Blaney has won there three times, so this isn‘t exactly unfamiliar territory. He was collected in April‘s massive crash, but if we‘re ranking championship contenders by the combination of speed, recent form and the ability to deliver under pressure, Blaney‘s case has become awfully convincing.

Analysis: Remember Reddick‘s assessment of gaining five points after finishing third at Vegas? “Whoop-de-doo.” Phoenix ought to make him feel a little better. No. 45 finally returned to Victory Lane at Phoenix after going winless since April, making a bold four-wide move on the final restart before eventually taking the lead from Briscoe with 18 laps remaining. It was his sixth victory of 2026 and, much more importantly for the championship, helped cut his deficit to Larson from 114 points to 56. The No. 45 team spent much of the summer looking completely incapable of recreating its remarkable early-season form, but the last three races have changed that conversation considerably. Talladega isn‘t exactly a bad place to try extending the comeback, either; Reddick won there in 2024 and was running well before getting caught in multiple incidents this April. The championship is still a long shot. It suddenly doesn‘t feel like a lost cause, though.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Analysis: Now that looked like the Joey Logano we‘ve been expecting to see when the championship gets serious. He started alongside teammate Blaney on the front row at Phoenix, swept both stages, led 84 laps and appeared capable of taking the whole thing before a vibration and pit-road complications helped derail the winning opportunity. Sixth place certainly undersells that afternoon, but the 20 stage points did plenty of damage to Larson‘s advantage on their own. Logano entered the weekend 92 points back and left down just 44, a remarkably successful result considering he didn‘t even finish in the top five. It‘s not difficult to envision another significant jump at Talladega, where he‘s won three times, even if April‘s visit ended with the No. 22 getting swallowed by the enormous multicar wreck. We spent a good portion of this season waiting for Logano to start behaving like a three-time champion again. The last few weeks suggest strongly that the wait might be over.

Analysis: Of all the drivers who needed to capitalize on Larson‘s Phoenix disaster, Hamlin might have had the most frustrating afternoon of anybody. The No. 11 was running fourth when a right-rear tire went down with fewer than 100 laps remaining, forcing an unscheduled stop that became considerably more expensive when Hamlin was caught speeding on pit entry. That cost him the free pass when a caution followed shortly afterward, and a potentially excellent afternoon became 28th in a hurry. The particularly maddening part? He still gained 18 points on Larson, reducing his deficit to 31, but fell from second to fourth in the championship as the other contenders cashed in; not exactly the kind of progress Hamlin had in mind. The No. 11 remains one of the strongest cars in the field, and the regular-season standard is absolutely still in contention, but this is the shakiest his 2026 title hopes have felt to date.

Analysis: Well, look who‘s finally showing up near the front again. Elliott‘s third-place finish at Phoenix was easily his best of The Chase and came after starting 16th, giving the No. 9 team its strongest afternoon in weeks. That doesn‘t erase a postseason in which sustained momentum has been frustratingly elusive, but there‘s something to be said for finding speed as the schedule starts running out. The problem, of course, is that Elliott remains 149 points behind Larson with only three races remaining, so the championship is still an awfully steep climb. Here‘s where it gets interesting: Elliott finished fourth at Talladega in April and has won twice at the superspeedway, making Sunday one of his more inviting opportunities left on the schedule. He has spent much of this Chase watching his Hendrick teammate control the championship conversation, but Phoenix offered a reminder that the No. 9 can still be part of it, even if the larger math isn‘t particularly encouraging. 

Analysis: Nineteenth at Phoenix wasn‘t exactly the follow-up Cindric wanted after his promising intermediate-track stretch, and it leaves him 130 points behind Larson with three races to go. But this is where the schedule gets considerably more interesting for the No. 2. Remember, Cindric won at Talladega last spring, edging Ryan Preece in a 0.022-second finish, then returned this April and finished eighth. That‘s some pretty useful recent history for a driver who spent much of 2026 looking for something to build on before the Kansas-Vegas breakthrough. Phoenix wasn‘t good enough to extend that momentum, but it hardly erased what had come before it. And now the series returns to one of the few tracks where Cindric has already proven he knows how to finish the job. If the No. 2 is going to make one more significant appearance in the championship conversation, this would be a pretty appropriate place.

Analysis: There have to be less gut-punching ways to lose races than whatever Wallace has been experiencing lately. One week after getting collected in somebody else‘s accident while running fifth at Charlotte, the No. 23 showed up at Phoenix looking capable of winning the whole thing. Wallace led 52 laps, took the lead late and had put together a genuinely impressive afternoon before a pit-road speeding penalty wrecked his chances during the final round of stops. Seventeenth was the eventual result, which obviously doesn‘t illustrate the pace the car actually showed. The speed is undeniably there, and this rankings jump reflects it, but the championship deficit is now 162 points with three races remaining. Talladega offers another interesting complication: Wallace was leading there in April when a push from Ross Chastain triggered the massive 26-car crash that effectively ended his day. There‘s no shortage of evidence that the No. 23 can run up front. The deficit is in afternoons that actually end that way.

Analysis: Finally, a top 10. Gibbs started at the rear at Phoenix after an alternator change, worked his way back into contention and ultimately finished 10th, snapping a three-race stretch of 17th, 17th and 34th. It wasn‘t the afternoon he needed to meaningfully change the championship picture, but after the way things have gone lately, stopping the bleeding is something. He‘s still in rough shape compared to how he started The Chase, but Talladega comes with a particularly interesting bit of history for the No. 54. Gibbs finished third there last fall and supplied the crucial final-lap push that helped teammate Briscoe win the race. This April was much less cooperative, with damage from the massive Lap 115 wreck eventually sending him hard into the wall and leaving him 34th. Gibbs has spent most of 2026 establishing that he belongs among the sport‘s strongest contenders, but the last few weeks have tested that argument rather severely. At least Phoenix gave him something better to build on.

Analysis: If anybody in the lower half of these rankings has reason to be excited about the next stop, it‘s probably Hocevar. Phoenix was relatively straightforward — from green flag to checkered flag, at least — with the No. 77 climbing from 28th to 12th, but now comes the place where he scored his first career Cup victory. And it wasn‘t just some lucky superspeedway escape act, either. Hocevar led 19 of the final 37 laps, survived three late restarts and held off Chris Buescher by 0.114 seconds, a performance that was every bit as convincing as it was entertaining. Plenty has happened since April, of course, including a Chase that has been equal parts genuine speed and frustrating outcomes. He‘s 158 points behind Larson, which isn‘t exactly championship-friendly territory, but the confidence should be considerably higher than that number suggests. Talladega can undo an entire afternoon in about half a second. Hocevar already knows it can make a career just as quickly.

Analysis: The 13th/14th-place streak is officially over, and Suárez finally has something a little more interesting to show for himself. He finished seventh at Phoenix, his best result of The Chase, after working his way back through the field despite a pit-road speeding penalty that threatened to ruin the afternoon. That‘s a meaningful improvement for a No. 7 team that has spent most of the postseason looking capable of surviving races without doing much to alter them. Of course, he‘s still 188 points behind Larson, and we‘re well past the point where a seventh-place finish can be mistaken for championship momentum. But this season has already demonstrated that Suárez can produce a spectacular result from seemingly nowhere, and Talladega certainly isn‘t a place where conventional expectations mean much. His last two starts there both ended in 12th, but there‘s at least a little reason to wonder whether something bigger could come.

Analysis: Here‘s the frustrating thing about Buescher coming into the weekend and being mostly out of title contention — we already know he can put together an excellent Talladega race. He did exactly that in April. The No. 17 led 22 laps, finished top four in both opening stages and came within 0.114 seconds of beating Hocevar for the victory. It was one of his strongest afternoons of 2026, and considerably more encouraging than the 22nd-place finish he just produced at Phoenix. Buescher has spent too much of The Chase hovering around the middle of the field, occasionally looking like something more is possible without actually delivering the result. Now he‘s 204 points behind Larson and essentially out of meaningful championship contention without something extraordinary happening, even if he does win this weekend.

Analysis: Remember when Byron was quietly putting together one of the more encouraging Chase recoveries in the field? Four consecutive top 10s had started to repair the damage from his disastrous Darlington opener, only for Charlotte‘s wreck to leave him 39th and Phoenix to follow with a thoroughly unremarkable 21st. The No. 24 did collect Stage 1 points in the desert, but little else about the afternoon suggested the turnaround was ready to resume. He‘s now 190 points behind teammate Larson and suddenly looks a long way removed from the driver who spent portions of 2026 near the top of these rankings — and opened the year on top of them. Talladega wasn‘t much kinder in April, when Byron was collected in the massive crash and finished 35th. There are still three races left for this championship-caliber team to find something worthwhile to take into 2027, but the title hopes are rapidly becoming something to file under “maybe next year.”

Analysis: There is at least one reason to feel better about Preece‘s chances this week than his position at the bottom of these rankings might suggest — Talladega has been awfully close to giving him something special before. He crossed the finish line second there last spring, just 0.022 seconds behind Cindric, before a post-race disqualification erased the result. This April, Preece returned and won Stage 1, only to get caught in a final-lap crash and finish 18th. So the speed and drafting ability have been there, even if the payoffs haven‘t always survived to the official results. Phoenix was another fairly anonymous afternoon — 18th, no stage points, not much to get excited about — and he‘s now 211 points behind Larson with three races remaining. That‘s obviously not a championship situation anybody would choose. But Preece already won the summer Daytona race, and the idea of him producing another superspeedway surprise isn‘t particularly far-fetched anymore. If there‘s one place left on the schedule where the No. 60 can turn this thing around and regain some ground, Talladega is probably it.

Smith is penalized under Section 10.5.2.5a in the NASCAR Rule Book, which states that “any violations compromising Event or participant safety will be addressed on a case-by-case basis with the highest level of seriousness.” Additionally, NASCAR officials cited Section 4.4a in the rule book, which provides potential penalty options and guidelines of “general examples of behavior that may fall into certain Penalty levels.”

MORE: Phoenix results | Smith slams Hocevar‘s bumper

Smith rammed the back bumper of Hocevar‘s No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet after the checkered flag in Sunday‘s Freeway Insurance 500, expressing obvious displeasure with Hocevar for contact that was made during the race on Lap 296. After a late-race restart, Hocevar received contact from Ross Chastain entering Turn 3 in a battle around 10th place. That contact sent Hocevar up the track and into Smith‘s No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford as well as Josh Berry‘s No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford.

Hocevar finished 12th, and Smith placed 15th. After crossing the start/finish line, Hocevar and others began their cool-down laps by rolling out of the throttle as is commonplace once the checkered flag is taken. Smith accelerated to the back bumper of Hocevar‘s No. 77 car and slammed into the rear bumper of Hocevar‘s car before following him down to pit lane.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

The two drivers have a long-standing feud that led to contact during a July 5 race at Chicagoland Speedway. NASCAR officials met with both drivers at EchoPark Speedway one week later to discourage further on-track incidents, but that discussion did not lead to any mended fences between the two rivals.

Making his first appearance in The Chase presented by Mobil 1, Hocevar sits 11th in the points standings, 158 points back of series leader Kyle Larson entering Sunday‘s race at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Hocevar is the most recent Cup Series winner at Talladega. Smith sits 26th in the points standings heading to Talladega.

Here‘s where we stand in The Chase after the Freeway Insurance 500 at Phoenix and before Sunday‘s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

RELATED: Phoenix results | Cup Series standings

Chase Changer

Larson‘s weekend began on the back foot after qualifying 22nd, but the pivotal moment came on Lap 283 when his No. 5 Chevrolet pounded the outside SAFER barrier in Turn 1 with a flat right-front tire. With zero stage points and a 34th-place finish, Larson walked away with just three points easily his worst finish all Chase long.

The other turning point in The Chase came on the ensuing restart at Lap 294, when Reddick restarted fifth and shot through the middle of a four-wide hole in Turns 1 and 2 to rocket into second place after a two-tire pit call by crew chief Billy Scott. That positioned Reddick perfectly to pounce on race leader Chase Briscoe and his older Goodyear Racing tires just one lap later, overtaking the lead and launching himself back into the championship picture with three races remaining.

The Chase Board

What once appeared to look like a Larson runaway has instantly become a seven-racer slugfest leaving the Arizona desert, with names like Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin and Tyler Reddick each eyeing their first NASCAR Cup Series championship while Larson, Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano look to collect another Bill France Cup trophy.

Larson‘s opponents finally got what they were looking for — a bad day for the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team — and yet the two-time champion remains atop the leaderboard. Larson‘s problem now, of course, is that his lead is down to just five points over Christopher Bell while everyone between Larson and Reddick in seventh is within a 56-point margin. The championship picture is wide open for the taking for any of those drivers with three chances left on the schedule.

The trouble Larson encountered allowed each of his 15 Chase competitors to close the gap on the No. 5 team. But the Chase driver who fell hardest in Sunday‘s standings was perhaps who we thought may have been Larson‘s biggest threat for the title — Hamlin. Hamlin gained 18 points on the gap to Larson‘s lead, but the No. 11 team slid two spots to fourth in the standings, 31 points behind the defending champion after Hamlin‘s day was derailed by a late flat tire that ultimately trapped him one lap down — an issue compounded by a simultaneous pit-road speeding penalty. Only four other drivers gained as many points or fewer on Larson as Hamlin: William Byron (18), Ryan Preece (16), Austin Cindric (15) and Chris Buescher (12).

Source: Racing Insights

Next Up

The only thing predictable about Sunday‘s race at Talladega Superspeedway is that it will be unpredictable.

NASCAR returns to the 2.66-mile superspeedway with a 3.5-inch rear spoiler, half the size of the rear blade teams used in the spring during the series‘ last visit to Alabama. With less rear downforce should come more maneuverability for drivers behind the wheel, providing drivers options to move throughout the drafting pack of cars during the 188-lap contest.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

But with the tight confines of the draft come potentially big consequences — like the “Big One,” the infamous multicar pileup known to rear its head at superspeedways like Talladega. A mistake by one driver in the pack could instantly send the points standings into further disarray with such tight margins throughout the top half of The Chase field.

Larson is still looking for his first superspeedway victory. Briscoe, Hamlin, Blaney, Logano and Reddick have each won at Talladega — including three wins for Blaney. Other Chase drivers know the pathway to Talladega‘s Victory Lane as well, like April victor Carson Hocevar, Austin Cindric, Chase Elliott and Bubba Wallace. But with a seven-car breakaway out front, stage points and race wins will dictate the pace of the final two Chase races to follow Talladega.

Daniels mentioned the team‘s resilience, its inner strength and the opportunity to rebound in the season‘s final three races — even with the severely scuffed No. 5 Chevy  prematurely loaded on its hauler. Still, it‘s a far closer title fight than it‘s been in recent weeks, with Larson‘s Sunday hardship opening the door for more drivers and teams to close the gap.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Phoenix

It might be counterintuitive, but Daniels welcomes that, too. More competition? That‘s the mark of a championship that‘s well won.

“I mean, I think it‘s great, and I think it‘s no different than how it‘s been all year long,” Daniels said. “I chuckle every time we try to crown a champion before the end of the year. Everybody tried to crown (Tyler) Reddick the champion early, and then they tried to crown Denny (Hamlin) the champion. Then they tried to crown us. You‘re just like, there‘s still three races left. There‘s so many things that can change. Fantastic teams in the top 10, really, and I know it‘s six or seven that are more in contention now? That‘s what you want. That‘s a great title fight. They‘re the best teams on pit road, and it‘s going to be a tough fight from here on out. So we‘ve got to do our part. We‘ve got to obviously not have days like this, but we‘re not going to get lost in just the disappointment of what today is. We‘re going to keep fighting for the next three.”

The Chase presented by Mobil 1 reached another crucial point in Sunday‘s chaos-heavy Freeway Insurance 500, with a championship contest that‘s suddenly a wide-open tilt heading to one of NASCAR‘s most treacherous tracks. The pre-race anticipation about whether anyone could catch Larson in the postseason‘s second half was answered with a resounding yes, after his early Chase dominance finally hit a snag in the Arizona desert. The measure of striking distance just got a bit shorter, and the championship is nowhere near being settled.

Everyone else in the 16-driver Chase field made double-digit gains on Larson‘s lead in the Cup Series standings, which fizzled from a robust 49-point advantage to a mere five over new second-place runner Christopher Bell.  “I mean, absolutely. I‘m absolutely in it,” Bell said. “So, just got three more races to decide a champion. I think there‘s a lot of us that are in it.”

Indeed, the “Mythical Top Six” threshold for serious championship contention made room for a seventh, with race winner Reddick recapturing the magic that made him one of the early anointed that Daniels mentioned. Reddick was the biggest gainer on a day full of them, cutting his 114-point deficit by more than half to just 56 points out, with a half-dozen of the sport‘s elite ahead of him and within range.

Reddick‘s Sunday celebration was especially jubilant with over-the-top burnouts and an impromptu catch-fence climb. “Making up for lost time,” he said, noting how he won five of the season‘s first nine events, then went 23 races without in a sometimes-exasperating stretch. If there was ever a right time for his 23XI Racing No. 45 team to regain stride, it‘s now — especially with the competition and plot both that much thicker.

“I think we‘re going to stay on attack mode,” said No. 45 crew chief Billy Scott. “If it was maybe one competitor or maybe two that we were looking at contending with, it might be a different story. With so many people right there close together, every one of them are excellent, right? They could all be champions. I think you have to stay aggressive. If we can ultimately get the win, that‘s going to go a long way.”

Larson‘s lead was under constant threat Sunday, and his postseason perch was imperiled long before a downed tire and wall crunch ended his race 31 laps short of the full distance. Larson started a subpar 22nd in the 37-car field and was unable to approach the stage-points pay window as he wrestled a No. 5 Chevrolet with cantankerous handling.

MORE: Cup Series standings | Watch NASCAR video highlights

His closest challengers saw a golden opportunity, but the degree to which they cashed in varied. Reddick‘s rebound denied that group the points premium for winning, tempering the rest of the gains for teams that capitalized instead of maximized, to borrow a phrase heard around the Cup Series garage.

Larson didn‘t have the market cornered on Phoenix trouble. Ryan Blaney finished a strong second to Reddick, chopping his deficit from 85 points to just 40, though a pair of sluggish pit stops hampered his progress. Hamlin had his own issues — a slow stop in the Stage 1 break, contact with Shane van Gisbergen in a Stage 2 restart and ultimately a flat right-rear tire and speeding penalty while running fourth during the final stage. He gained 18 points but slid two spots to fourth in the standings. Joey Logano came closest to a maximum-points swing by sweeping the stage wins, but slipped to a sixth-place result Sunday after an 11.8-second pit stop on Lap 225 dropped him from first to fifth in the running order.

Logano still enjoyed a 48-point boost on a day he characterized as “must-win” before Saturday‘s qualifying session, but his late fade from the top five subdued his outlook.

“Bittersweet is kind of the word that comes to mind,” said Logano, who led 84 of the 312 laps — second only to Bell‘s race-best 85. “Had a car that was capable of winning if it was up front and led a bunch of laps, won a couple stages, so that‘s a pretty solid piece there, and just had one hiccup, right? One mistake, and we lost some spots. Just gotta be perfect these days. That‘s all it was. It‘s just … there‘s one little hiccup, so it is what it is. We still had a solid day, scored a bunch of points, and we‘ll move on.”

Moving on this time of year means visiting the track that‘s loomed for most teams as the wildest of the wild-cards on the 10-race postseason slate. Next Sunday‘s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) has the potential to jostle the Chase field even further with a surprise winner and/or the colossal crashes the 2.66-mile oval typically produces.

The pressure, though, might not be as staggeringly high, since some of the must-win desperation level has subsided. “No, not anymore,” Logano admitted. “No, we‘re close now.”

Several others who faced daunting margins before Sunday‘s showdown can say that, too.

“We‘re in the hunt,” Bell said. “That‘s all you can ask for.”

“Opportunities lost in various ways by all of us,” Chris Gayle, crew chief of Hamlin‘s No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team, said to a group of media members Sunday evening, summing up the group‘s disappointing Chase presented by Mobil 1.

MORE: Race results | Phoenix weekend schedule

With Kyle Larson searching for answers throughout the Freeway Insurance 500, Phoenix offered a prime opportunity for his championship rivals to capitalize. Hamlin looked poised to do just that, banking 12 stage points through the first two stages before settling into fourth with the best-handling car he‘d had all afternoon.

Hamlin‘s afternoon took a hit on Lap 221 of 312 when the No. 11 Toyota suffered a right-rear tire failure while navigating Turns 3 and 4. He limped to pit road for service and lost a lap seconds before Cody Ware had a similar issue and backed his car into the Turn 1 wall. The ensuing caution left Hamlin trapped a lap down.

Hamlin was penalized for speeding on pit road and deemed ineligible for the wave-around. As a result, he was relegated to restarting outside the top 30.

“I‘m thinking that this is not ideal, but thinking we‘re going to be early on this green-flag sequence and probably come out with the lead for a portion of the time,” Hamlin said of what was racing through his mind while experiencing the flat tire, “and when the caution comes out, we‘ll pit for that last set of tires and be up front. Blowing a rear tire when the best the car had been all day. We had battled back and were able to pass a bunch of really good cars. Just frustrated.”

Gayle said the No. 11 team‘s tire pressures shouldn‘t have been a concern, as they stayed above his predetermined minimum threshold. Race winner Tyler Reddick ran the same tire pressures, he said, leading him to suspect Hamlin had run over a piece of debris around the 1-mile oval.

“I wish I could change it, you just can‘t,” a dejected Hamlin said after finishing 28th, snapping his record streak of 31 consecutive lead-lap finishes.

MORE: Cup Series standings | Cup Series schedule

Larson was the first to pit during another round of green-flag pit stops at Lap 262. Hamlin pitted five laps later on the same circuit as race leader Bubba Wallace. Gayle wanted to keep his driver on offense, knowing the No. 11 Toyota was unlikely to earn the free pass if a caution fell during the cycle because of its lack of track position.

From there, the strategy hinged on a late-race caution that would give Hamlin an opportunity to take the wave-around and regain a lap. That caution came on Lap 283 when Larson experienced his own right-front failure, pancaking the Turn 1 wall. Chase Briscoe, Chase Elliott and Ty Gibbs all stayed on track, preventing the No. 11 team from regaining its lap.

“Some things are meant to be, some things are not meant to be,” Hamlin added. “There have been so many cards that have been dealt in my career in these playoffs, Chase, that I‘ve seen it all. Nothing surprises me. It‘s not like I‘m not shell-shocked because I‘ve been here.

“We just cannot finish races to the best of our capability. Until we can start doing that in a really big hurry, you never know what can happen.”

Hamlin slipped to fourth in the Chase standings, surrendering positions to Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell and Briscoe. However, he gained 18 points on Larson and now sits 31 points behind the championship leader with three races remaining.

Despite the setback at Phoenix, Hamlin and the No. 11 team remain firmly in contention for the title.

“Just one win — it‘s doable,” Hamlin stated. “One win, we‘re right there, and we need to do that.”

Gayle concurs with his driver, knowing that the No. 11 team remains in the title hunt. With Reddick snapping a 23-race winless skid, the top seven drivers are separated by 56 points entering Talladega Superspeedway.

“It‘s unfortunate that we didn‘t close the gap more because there was opportunity to do it,” Gayle indicated. “We were sitting in the spot to do that before the flat tire. It is what it is — there‘s three more. All you can do is the best you can every week. As long as you don‘t leave anything on the table that you knew you should have done, lay your head down at night and however it all plays out in the next three, it will play out.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Hamlin has recorded three top-10 finishes in nine Next Gen starts at Talladega. From there, the series heads to his bread-and-butter track, Martinsville Speedway, for the penultimate race of the season before the championship is decided at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The 64-time Cup winner has multiple victories at all three venues throughout his Hall of Fame-worthy career.

“It‘s not over,” Gayle stressed.

Snookering the top contenders in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 after a restart on Lap 294, Reddick surged past Chase Briscoe and into the lead a lap later, pulling away to beat runner-up Ryan Blaney by 0.801 seconds in the Freeway Insurance 500 as Briscoe faded to eighth on older tires.

Reddick‘s sixth win of the season and first at Phoenix Raceway, combined with Larson‘s catastrophic 34th-place result, brought seven drivers into the mix for the series championship with three races left.

The driver of the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota won five of the first nine races this season, including the first three, but since then had endured a winless streak of 23 races.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Phoenix

“That‘s way too long,” a relieved Reddick said after performing a massive celebratory burnout in front of the main grandstand. “Man, the way we worked there, I mean, thinking of Phoenix, we wanted to be a lot better when we came back here (after the March race). I think we checked that box.

“For us, this group never lost motivation, never lost the drive to keep searching and keep trying to find ways to make ourselves better, just be an all-around better team … Just something about today, I had a really good feeling. Practice was amazing. Yeah, we‘re back to Victory Lane.”

Before Sunday‘s race at the 1-mile speedway, Larson led second-place Denny Hamlin by 49 points with four races left in the postseason. After Reddick won for the 14th time in his career, there are now six drivers within 56 points of The Chase leader.

Fourth-place finisher Christopher Bell climbed one spot in the standings and trails Larson by five points, having trimmed 46 points from his previous deficit to the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.

SHOP: Winner gear

“We‘re right there in it,” said Bell, who led a race-high 85 laps and finished third in each of the first two stages. “Really proud of our team. They‘ve been doing a really good job of bringing fast race cars, executing races. We‘ve been able to qualify well and run up front in stages.

“I felt like our performance probably tapered off a little bit as the day went on. We had the strategy to put tires there at the end, had good restarts to get some track position. We‘re in the hunt.”

Briscoe is 24 points back in third place, followed by Hamlin, who fell from second to fourth but gained 18 points to 31 back, despite a blown tire that relegated him to 28th at the finish.

“The beginning was not great, and once we got back in traffic, I thought the second half of the race we were really strong,” said Hamlin, who was trapped a lap down after pitting with a shredded tire on Lap 221 and incurring a speeding penalty.

“Could contend for the win. Just right there with the 19 (Briscoe) when the tire blew (while battling) for third.”

Blaney, the pole winner, is 40 points in arrears, followed by Team Penske teammate Joey Logano, who swept the first two stages of Sunday‘s race and is 44 points behind Larson after a sixth-place run.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

“It was good and bad, I guess,” said Logano, who led 84 laps but lost track position on pit road. “The good part is that we were fast and led a bunch of laps and won two stages.

“The bad part is we gave away a win. That part hurts a little bit, but I guess we made up close to 50 points to the leader, so you can‘t be too mad about it. I wish we had it back.”

After qualifying 22nd, Larson struggled from the outset in a car that lacked speed. Despite a two-tire call that vaulted him temporarily to fifth, Larson remained 22nd at the end of Stage 1. From that point, his race went from bad to worse.

On Lap 283, Larson blew a tire in Turn 1, slammed the outside wall and retired from the event, scoring just three points for his efforts, compared with Reddick, who notched 61.

MORE: What happened to Larson | What happened to Hamlin 

“We never found the improvements we needed, so that was a bummer,” Larson said. “I didn‘t expect to be good, but I didn‘t expect to be that bad either. It wasn‘t a lot of fun today, but we were just trying to salvage what we could of the day.

“We‘ll go to Talladega and try to forget about today and get back after it. We‘ve done well at the superspeedways, so hopefully we can execute, get some points and keep ourselves in the hunt.”

The only saving grace for Larson was that Reddick‘s win kept him in the series lead. Either Bell, Briscoe or Hamlin could have taken the top spot in The Chase with a victory.

Larson‘s teammate, Chase Elliott, finished third but remains 149 points out of The Chase lead. Reddick‘s teammate, Bubba Wallace, led 52 laps and had control of the race in the final stage before a pit road speeding penalty under caution for Larson‘s accident knocked him back to 17th at the finish.

Corey Heim came home fifth, followed by Logano, Daniel Suárez, Briscoe, Ross Chastain and Ty Gibbs.

All told, there were six cautions for 43 laps and 21 lead changes among 10 drivers. Reddick led only the final 18 laps after a lane opened up for him soon after the final restart.

“Yeah, just got really fortunate,” Reddick said. “I didn‘t have a good launch. There was a hole. I was able to get through it. I thought the 19 (Briscoe) was going to be able to cover the move into (Turn) 3.

“I got him loose. We checked out.”

The NASCAR Cup Chase continues next Sunday with the YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Stage 2 recap: Logano sweeps the first two segments

Joey Logano swept the stages in Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series Chase race at Phoenix Raceway, earning max points in the first two frames. The race is the seventh of 10 postseason events in The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

Chase Briscoe finished second, followed by Christopher Bell, Josh Berry and Bubba Wallace. Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Denny Hamlin, Todd Gilliland and Chase Elliott rounded out the top 10 and points earners.

RELATED: At-track photos: Phoenix

Logano held serve after pit stops during the Stage 1 break, restarting from the top spot after taking right-side tires.

But that advantage didn‘t last long as Bell snuck past the three-time champion in Turn 2 to take his first lead of the afternoon on Lap 69.

Bell jolted ahead to a multi-second advantage, but as the stint progressed and tires began to wear out, Logano reeled the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. Bell darted for pit road on Lap 123, taking four fresh Goodyear tires and fuel and handing the lead to Logano.

Hamlin pitted moments later from just outside the top 10, executing a clean four-tire stop after a hang-up on the left-rear last time down.

MORE: Full Stage 2 results | Watch Logano sweep the stages

Midway through service, Brad Keselowski spun entering pit road, nudging the rear of Connor Zilisch‘s No. 88 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet. The race stayed green.

Blaney pitted on Lap 127, along with Larson — who continued plummeting through the field. Logano surrendered the lead for service a lap later, and Bell cycled back to the lead with the No. 22 Team Penske Ford seven seconds behind him — but with a tire advantage.

Larson, who entered Sunday‘s race with the series lead, cycled to 27th, a lap down and multiple spots behind the free-pass position.

On Lap 157, Austin Dillon suffered a flat tire entering Turn 3, bringing out the second caution for incident of the afternoon.

The leaders came down pit road for service, with most drivers electing to take four tires. Logano eked past Bell as the first car off, setting him up for the lead on the restart.

Because all lead-lap cars pitted, that allowed for Larson to take the wave around and return to the lead lap — a key development for the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet near the race‘s midpoint.

Logano held serve on the restart as Briscoe jumped into second, the highest the No. 19 driver has run in his quest for three straight wins.

With 15 laps left in the stage, John Hunter Nemechek suffered a tire issue, but nursed his No. 42 Legacy Motor Club Toyota to pit road, and the race stayed green the rest of the frame.

Stage 1 recap: Logano wins opening frame

Joey Logano won Stage 1 of Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series Chase race at Phoenix Raceway, leading the final nine laps of the opening frame in the desert.

Denny Hamlin finished second by a hair over Christopher Bell, followed by Ryan Blaney and Chase Briscoe. William Byron, Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain, Tyler Reddick and Josh Berry rounded out the top 10 and points earners.

MORE: Full Stage 1 results | Watch Logano win Stage 1

Blaney, the polesitter, jumped out to the lead on the initial start and paced the first 44 laps until the first caution of the afternoon. Michael McDowell and Riley Herbst crashed in Turn 4 while battling for 20th, Herbst contacting the No. 71 Chevrolet from behind after close-quarters racing down the backstretch.

That resulted in the first batch of pit stops. Hamlin, Byron and Elliott each took two tires and were the first three drivers off pit road. Larson, who started 22nd and gained only a minuscule position during the first stint, also took two and lined up fifth. Blaney had a slow four-tire stop and dropped to eighth in the running order.

But it was Logano, who elected for four tires, who passed Hamlin on Lap 51 to win the stage. Larson struggled on two tires and plummeted back to 22nd, where he started the 312-lap event and did not earn points.

Note: Post-race inspection was completed in the Cup Series garage with no issues, confirming Reddick as the Phoenix winner.

Contributing: Staff report

That investment didn‘t translate into results during Sunday‘s Freeway Insurance 500. Larson‘s torrid pace through the opening six Chase presented by Mobil 1 races, highlighted by a 2.8 average finish, came to an abrupt halt.

MORE: Race results | Phoenix weekend schedule

“We put as much effort into this race as we have for a Phoenix race, really, ever — and that‘s a lot to say because typically Phoenix is the championship race,” Cliff Daniels, crew chief for the No. 5 team, said to a group of media members after Larson DNF‘d with a tire failure and was credited with a 34th-place finish. “We put a lot of hard work into it. I‘m a big believer that the Good Lord has us right where we‘re supposed to be, and sometimes you have difficulty, you have struggles. Today was a terrible day. Our car was way off, don‘t know why, because we had done a lot of work in the sim.

“Kyle, to his credit, was really invested in it, and we were too as a team. We thought we were solving for something correctly from where we‘ve been here in the past. It obviously didn‘t come together today.”

Larson sounded the alarm throughout the week, repeatedly acknowledging that the 1-mile oval hasn‘t historically been one of his strongest tracks. Yet when the checkered flag waved in previous instances, the No. 5 team had capitalized on every opportunity, extending its streak to three consecutive third-place finishes and four straight top fives entering this weekend.

From the moment the track opened for practice Saturday, Larson and the No. 5 Chevrolet appeared a tick behind, especially compared to his primary championship rivals, who swept the top five starting spots in qualifying. Larson could manage only the 22nd-fastest lap in time trials.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

When the green flag waved Sunday, Larson made early progress, climbing five positions in the opening four laps. By the end of Stage 1, however, he had slipped back to 22nd after a two-tire gamble briefly brought him inside the top five.

His struggles intensified during a lengthy green-flag run in Stage 2, as Larson fell a lap down and dropped to 28th. A caution on Lap 157 allowed him to take the wave-around and return to the lead lap, which he managed to maintain — barely — through the end of the stage.

An extended pit stop at the end of Stage 2 allowed Daniels to make a massive swing, hoping to find answers.

“We threw so many things at that car, that man, I‘m just waiting to see a sign of life, and I don‘t know that we made it a lot better,” Daniels added. “Don‘t know why, very unfortunate. I very much give Kyle a lot of credit for not cussing me out or quitting, all the things that he could have done — he kept fighting, too. Just an ugly day.”

During another round of green-flag pit stops, Larson pitted early and climbed to 16th in the running order. He quickly slipped back to 17th behind Austin Cindric before suffering a right-front tire failure on Lap 281, 31 laps shy of the finish.

“I went to the brakes into [Turn] 1 and the right front was down,” Larson said from the infield care center, “so couldn‘t slow down and along for the ride.”

Larson wasn‘t stunned by the No. 5 team‘s struggles at Phoenix. But just how much the Daniels-led group missed the mark was puzzling, particularly given its knack for finding solutions during the heat of battle.

“I didn‘t expect to be good, but I didn‘t expect to be that bad either,” Larson added. “We were just trying to fight as much as we could and scratch and claw for whatever finish we were going to get.”

MORE: Cup Series standings | Cup Series schedule

Daniels was surprised the team had run the tire pressure too low. He noted that the No. 5 team had a full pound more air pressure in its tires than it did during last year‘s Championship 4 race, when Larson also suffered a tire failure.

Daniels said: “I thought we had margin in the tank there and obviously we didn‘t.”

With Larson scoring just three points, the competition ate into their deficits. The reigning champ now holds a five-point lead over Christopher Bell while Chase Briscoe (minus-24), Denny Hamlin (minus-31), Ryan Blaney (minus-40), Joey Logano (minus-44) and Tyler Reddick (minus-56) are all in the mix with three races remaining.

As Daniels explained, having a misstep isn‘t uncommon for the No. 5 team.

“If you plot the average finishing position of the 5 team, ever, it looks just like this,” Daniels noted. “We‘re OK, and we have a lot of strength; we have a lot of poise. We are not fearful of what‘s ahead. We‘re going to keep fighting hard.

“I know Talladega is a tough one next, but we are typically capable of putting together two-thirds of a really good race at Talladega. Now we just need to put all three of the thirds together. Martinsville, we will be OK, and Homestead, it‘s game on. Three more races, we‘re going to be strong, we‘re going to be tough.”

All 15 of Larson‘s fellow Chase competitors gained at least 12 points on the championship leader at Phoenix. Tyler Reddick, who earned his first victory since mid-April, made the biggest move, gaining 58 points and cutting more than half of his 114-point deficit. Larson‘s average race over the last seven races ballooned to 7.3.

On Saturday at the same 1-mile track, he may have done it again with a victory in the Timberland PRO 200.

Unlike last year, however, there are three races left in the O‘Reilly Series Chase presented by Mobil 1, run under a new nine-race format this season. But with his second win at Phoenix, his second this season and the fifth of his career, Love established himself as the convincing frontrunner for the series title.

In a race that spelled disaster for former Chase leader Sheldon Creed, Love opened a 36-point lead over second-place Justin Allgaier, who finished third. Fourth-place finisher Corey Day is 39 points behind in third, with Creed falling to fourth in the standings, 59 points back, after finishing 32nd, two laps down.

RELATED: Race results | Best Phoenix photos

“I would say it‘s a day we prepared for, not just dreamed of,” Love said after climbing from his car. “I‘ve got a great group around me, just preparing me to be in these situations, to be calm, cool and collected.

“I‘ve learned from a lot of mistakes that allow me to execute at a high-level at a track like this. I‘ve been here, it feels like, a million times… Grateful to the fans for coming out. It‘s my favorite race track. I love coming to Arizona—I‘m a West Coast kid.”

The 21-year-old from Clovis, California, swept the first and second stages and led 156 of 200 laps, scoring 75 points for his efforts—one short of the maximum. The statistics, however, don‘t tell the story. Over the final 35-lap green-flag run, race runner-up Sam Mayer hounded the No. 2 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet all the way to the finish line.

Gaining ground over the final two laps, Mayer got to Love‘s bumper off the final corner but finished 0.128 seconds behind the race winner. Mayer‘s effort was all the more spectacular, given that his No. 41 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet started the race from the rear of the field after an engine change.

“Hats off to them, man,” Love said. “The 41 team did a great job coming from the back and making their car better. Honestly, it felt like they were a little better than we were at the end. I was having to just drive a lot over the tire to make any sort of lap time.

“I‘m just grateful to be in a situation to win races. I‘ve got a great pit crew who just maul everybody on pit road every week. It makes my job a lot easier. I‘m really proud of the whole group.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Mayer, who remained sixth in The Chase standings, 86 points behind Love, knew he had narrowly missed an important opportunity.

“Good job to him (Love)—he drove a great race,” Mayer said. “We definitely pressured him the whole time. It came down to making a mistake or not, and he executed really well. Really close…

“The Hendrick Engine shop brought a really good engine for us—two of them, technically I guess, ‘cause we blew one up. I haven‘t had fun this year like that. That was just a lot of fun. It was just great racing, and hopefully we put on a show for everyone at home.

“That‘s some pretty big championship implications if we could have won that one. I‘m looking at the numbers right here, and they look pretty ugly for the old 41 and, honestly, the 00 (Creed), too.”

Creed, who entered the race with a two-point Chase lead, finished second to Love in the first stage with no idea what was about to happen to his car. During the caution for the stage break, a “kill switch” malfunction shut off the engine of his Chevrolet, and Creed lost three laps on pit road as his crew tried to get the car to refire.

MORE: Creed loses power early | Creed looks to rebound after Phoenix

It was only through attrition that Creed climbed from 37th to 32nd at the finish.

Sammy Smith finished fifth, followed by Brandon Jones, who lost a lap early after a move to wet tires during a brief shower in the first stage. Dean Thompson, William Sawalich, Rajah Caruth and Carson Kvapil finished seventh through 10th, respectively.

Next up for the O‘Reilly Series drivers is The Progress Group 250 on Oct. 24 at Talladega Superspeedway (3:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

In qualifying for Sunday‘s 312-lap Freeway Insurance 500 at Phoenix Raceway (3 p.m. ET on USA, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), Ryan Blaney claimed the pole position with a lap at 137.143 mph (26.250 seconds).

Blaney is one of five drivers closest to Larson in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 standings, and those five drivers earned the top five positions on the grid for Sunday‘s race, while Larson qualified a disappointing 22nd in Saturday‘s time trials.

Blaney, who is going for his third straight Phoenix win, is fifth in the race for the NASCAR Cup Series title, 85 points behind Larson. His Team Penske teammate, Joey Logano, qualified second at 136.926 mph, 0.032 seconds off Blaney‘s pace.

RELATED: Starting lineup | Phoenix weekend schedule

A four-time Phoenix winner, Logano is sixth in The Chase standings, 92 points in arrears.

Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota drivers Chase Briscoe (136.825 mph), Denny Hamlin (136.809 mph) and Christopher Bell (136.617 mph) qualified third through fifth, respectively.

Hamlin is second in the standings, 49 points back, with Bell trailing by 51 in third and Briscoe by 65 in fourth. Briscoe is seeking his third straight win in The Chase, having triumphed at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Accordingly, Sunday‘s race presents a golden opportunity for those chasing Larson both to score stage points and compete for a crucial victory.

“It‘s really, really important, just from our side, to put yourself up toward the front early in the race, try to get some points early and try to keep track position,” said Blaney, who claimed his fourth Busch Light Pole Award at Phoenix, his fifth of the season and the 17th of his career.

“Job one done today, so I‘m proud of everybody for doing a good job and taking that first step, and then a whole new challenge tomorrow. Hopefully, we can keep going.”

Blaney also posted the best single-lap speed in Saturday‘s practice, covering the one-mile distance in 26.969 mph (133.487 mph).

Three-time series champion Logano described his current Chase position as “pretty desperate.”

“If we want to win the championship, this race in particular is one that we have circled and has been good for us,” he said. “If we‘re going to make up 90-plus points in four races, you have to win.

“It‘s a must-win scenario and probably multiple times to do that, so if we want to win this whole thing and do it without wishing bad luck upon somebody, then we‘re going to have to win.”

Tyler Reddick (136.374 mph), Ty Gibbs (136.291 mph), Michael McDowell (136.199 mph), Josh Berry (136.142 mph) and William Byron (135.936 mph) completed the top 10 on the starting grid for Sunday.

It‘s worth noting that in the last 18 Cup races at Phoenix—from 2017 through the entire Gen 7 era—no winner has started deeper in the field than 13th, and all but three winners in that span have started in the top 10.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Practice

Blaney logged the quickest lap in Saturday‘s 50-minute practice session. The No. 12 Team Penske Ford laid down a best circuit of 133.487 mph and ran 77 laps around the 1-mile oval.

Fellow Chase drivers Carson Hocevar (133.433 mph), Joey Logano (133.259 mph), Denny Hamlin (132.91 mph) and Christopher Bell (132.841 mph) were the five quickest on single-lap time.

MORE: Practice results

Larson was dissatisfied with the balance of his car throughout the day. He was 13th fastest in practice and 12th in best consecutive 10-lap average.

Contributing: Staff report

But that‘s not to say the stakes aren‘t high. Just four races separate a driver from the title, and after three consecutive intermediates, the Cup Series pivots to a flatter, shorter track. The always unpredictable Talladega Superspeedway follows, with Martinsville Speedway then setting the stage for the highly anticipated return to Homestead-Miami Speedway to crown a champion.

RELATED: Starting lineup | At-track photos

Kyle Larson heads to Phoenix with a 49-point advantage over Denny Hamlin, who‘s looking to avenge his Championship 4 defeat a year ago and finally score a Chase victory. Christopher Bell (minus 51) and Chase Briscoe (minus 65) both have plenty of momentum on their side, and Team Penske mates Ryan Blaney (minus 85) and Joey Logano (minus 92) look to make a splash as the schedule shifts in the organization‘s favor.

Read on to see drivers worth monitoring over 312 laps in Arizona, as well as Racing Insights‘ full projected results for the Freeway Insurance 500.

DRIVERS TO WATCH

RYAN BLANEY: Look no further than Blaney, the current king of the desert. The 32-year-old has won the last two Phoenix races, including holding off Christopher Bell on a restart with 12 laps to go for a springtime romp. He‘s finished inside the top five in eight of nine Next Gen races at Phoenix, with the only exception an engine expiration in spring 2025. Blaney earned top fives in each of the last three races, and adding another at Phoenix would tie the longest streak of his career. A big points day is quite possible for the No. 12: he‘s the only driver to earn points in all 12 stages in The Chase, and his fifth-best pit crew should keep him up front all afternoon. Saturday went perfectly according to plan, turning the fastest time in practice and earning the Busch Light Pole Award. With a victory, Blaney would become the first Penske driver to win three consecutive races at a track since Rusty Wallace at Martinsville (1994-95).

CHRISTOPHER BELL: If Blaney‘s the bar, then Bell isn‘t far below it. The No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing driver has finished inside the top five in four of the last five Phoenix races, including wins in the 2024 and 2025 spring races. He dominated again this spring, leading 176 laps before finishing second — the first of what‘s now eight runner-up results in 2026 after another one last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. In total, he‘s led 474 circuits — the most in the series — since the start of 2022. Through six Chase races, Bell has earned the most stage points (79) and the second most points overall (266), only trailing Larson. Ford might be the headliner, but this Toyota driver could very well earn his second win of the postseason.

KYLE LARSON: The two-time and defending Cup Series champion had his worst race of The Chase at Charlotte … sixth. He still earned 49 points on the afternoon, extending his lead by seven more markers over Hamlin. Larson remains on pace for one of the strongest postseasons in history, as his 2.8 average finish over six races is the best start to a Chase in NASCAR history. And while the notion is that Hendrick Motorsports struggles at flat tracks, Larson bucks that trend. He won at World Wide Technology Raceway last month, and his Phoenix numbers are stellar. The No. 5 driver finished third in each of the last three desert races and owns a 4.9 average over his last seven at the track. A win on Sunday could make Larson‘s series lead nearly insurmountable — but with a 22nd-place starting spot, he‘ll have his work cut out for him.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

FULL PROJECTED RESULTS FOR FREEWAY INSURANCE 500 (3 p.m. ET, USA)

Crew chiefs throughout the Cup Series garage are expecting all teams to cash in on that opportunity to make the approved modification.

RELATED: Weekend schedule | At-track photos: Phoenix

“You are going to change, for sure,” Rudy Fugle, crew chief for William Byron‘s No. 24 Chevrolet, told NASCAR.com. “I think the entire field will be changing just to have that fresh rotor, fresh pad and have the comfort and ease the mind that you are going to have enough.”

“I don‘t know why you wouldn‘t just check the box and eliminate an unknown,” added Jonathan Hassler, crew chief for Ryan Blaney, the two-time defending winner at the 1-mile oval.

Historically, Phoenix has been a venue that has been rough on brake pads. Catastrophic failures have been less common at Phoenix than at other tracks with significant braking demands, including Gateway, Iowa Speedway and Nashville Superspeedway.

Fugle views Phoenix as a blend of Iowa and Gateway, though the Arizona oval presents its own unique challenges. Entering Turn 3 requires heavy braking, albeit not to the same degree as Gateway, where longer straightaways allow the brakes to cool before the next application, creating thermal shock. At Phoenix, the challenge lies in the frequency of brake usage throughout an entire lap, which can generate significant vibration and increase the risk of overheating.

“[Phoenix] is tough because you hold on to the brake longer to help your handling,” Fugle noted. “You have a hard time getting off them, so you drag a little more duration and brake usage that way if your handling is not good. With the added power, a lot of the issues this year was us not getting the setups right. Hopefully, that tames it down a little bit.”

The challenge has intensified this season with NASCAR‘s move to a 750-horsepower, lower-downforce configuration at tracks shorter than 1.5 miles.

Finding the right balance is difficult, especially as crew chiefs tape up their cars, trying to gain an aerodynamic advantage. External factors can also contribute to brake failures, including a malfunctioning cooling fan or damage sustained during an on-track incident. Plus, they have a single 50-minute practice session to make an educated guess on which direction to go come race day.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

“A lot of it comes down to trying to guestimate with our 50-minute practices and short sessions on track of how to get the temperatures in the rotors perfect,” Fugle said, “and the temperature in the caliper is separate from that cooler, so the caliper and the pedal feels good. Sometimes, we just miss.”

Hassler learned valuable lessons from the No. 12 car blowing a right-front rotor at Gateway while Blaney was running inside the top five. That proved to be costly, as it was the first of consecutive DNFs during The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

MORE: Blaney feels Phoenix is a must-win to keep title hopes alive

The good news for Hassler is that this brake package has been used at Phoenix several times before. He‘s familiar with its demands and, more importantly, knows what it takes to succeed with it.

“We know what to expect,” he said emphatically. “The big difference is the extra practice time will sort of mitigate that with the ability to change the rotors before the race. I feel pretty confident.”

Neither crew chief expects problems with the rear rotors, which teams may inspect during Sunday‘s pre-race adjustments. But no stone will be left unturned as teams extract maximum performance.

“I think with the rears, there is a slim chance,” Fugle elaborated. “But you will check them out for sure.”

The No. 12 team will have track position from the green flag on Sunday, as Blaney won his fifth Busch Light pole award of the 2026 season. Byron rounds out the top 10, the best of the four Hendrick Motorsports entries.

Chase hopes hinge on Phoenix opportunity

AVONDALE, Ariz. — It‘s a smidge different returning to Phoenix Raceway in the fall this time around, marking the first time since 2019 that the 1-mile track isn‘t the host of championship weekend. That slot on the schedule goes back to Homestead-Miami Speedway this year, but finale or not, Phoenix still looms as a pivotal postseason venue for the NASCAR Cup Series — even if it‘s taking some getting used to.

“It‘s usually like the last-day-of-school moments, right, when you come to Phoenix,” said 23XI Racing‘s Bubba Wallace. “So yeah, we‘ve still got three more races after this, but definitely is interesting.”

Sunday‘s Freeway Insurance 500 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) marks the sixth of 10 races in The Chase presented by Mobil 1. While the 312-lap showdown in the desert won‘t decide the championship outright, as it did six times in the playoff era‘s elimination-style system, an ever-so-compelling pursuit of points is on the table as the new-look Chase format nears its crescendo. It‘s a familiar, crucial spot on the calendar for Phoenix, which hosted the circuit‘s penultimate race for years after joining the Cup Series schedule in 1988.

MORE: Weekend schedule | At-track photos: Phoenix

One holdover from the last time the postseason was here: Kyle Larson is in front of Denny Hamlin. Last November, that positioning was especially painful as Larson lunged to his second Cup title, making the most of a split in pit strategies and denying Hamlin again in the final battle for the Bill France Cup. This time, Phoenix isn‘t winner-take-all, but the window for Hamlin to make substantial gains on Larson‘s 49-point advantage is becoming narrower.

“No desperation, but the gap needs to close starting now,” Hamlin said. “That‘s probably pretty accurate with our position. Then just to get back on our front foot. I think that you have to start by winning the day and then go from there. But ultimately, with the races winding down, we‘ve got to start chopping into this.”

The Chase contenders made at least signs of a preliminary trim in Saturday‘s qualifying session, when Larson stumbled to a 22nd-place starting spot after a bobble during his timed lap. All of his closest challengers, meanwhile, thrived. Team Penske drivers Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano swept the front row to give themselves prime footing for the “must-win” situation they‘re in, and Joe Gibbs Racing drivers rounded out the top five, with Chase Briscoe, Hamlin and Christopher Bell (in order) all savoring starting berths further up the grid.

Bell lurks third in the Cup standings with a 51-point deficit, but also with a reputation for accumulating runner-up finishes this year — including a heart-stopper last weekend at Charlotte. Behind that lead trio are two drivers carrying separate bids for three in a row — Briscoe (minus-65) and Blaney (minus-85), whose streaks could help sway the complexion of The Chase for both.

Briscoe is vying for his third consecutive Cup Series win in Sunday‘s event, having closed out a white-hot scorch through the three-race stretch of 1.5-mile tracks with finishes of fourth, first and first. Phoenix was the site of his first Cup Series victory during his sophomore season in 2022, but his last seven races here have failed to produce a top five, with a series of tire-pressure issues thwarting those efforts in the last three Phoenix events.

RELATED: Saturday recap

“We‘ve been really, really strong here. Just been a matter of keeping air in the tires and them not blowing,” Briscoe said. “I know that we‘ve brought a different approach, at least that‘s the plan. So we‘ll find out, I guess, here in a little bit if that plan worked out.”

Blaney‘s streak is more Phoenix-specific, with victories in the tour‘s two most recent visits to the Southwest. The track historically has been friendly to his Team Penske outfit, home to clinching performances in title runs for himself in 2023, and teammate Joey Logano in 2022 and 2024.

Making strides in the pursuit of Larson has been made more difficult by the No. 5 team‘s near-flawless execution and an impeccable 2.83 average finish through the postseason‘s first half-dozen races. Blaney, for one, isn‘t waiting for Larson to tumble back to earth.

“No, I‘m treating it as they‘re not gonna have a mistake and we have to go win races to catch him,” Blaney said before scoring his fourth Phoenix pole and his fifth of the season. “It could go either way. Everyone is like, ‘Oh, the law of averages, he‘s gonna have a bad weekend,‘ but they might not, and if they don‘t, then props, 100 percent. You did a heck of a job. You really whooped up on everybody, so that‘s my mindset is they are not going to have a bad week and we have to capitalize on it. If he fifths it out the rest of the way, we have to go win a couple at least to try to get there. That‘s where our mindset is at.”

The last two races here have also boiled down to a split in pit-stop strategy, with right-side tires only being the winning ticket over four-tire stops in the closing laps. Larson downed Hamlin in the 2025 championship contest after a two-tire stop provided track position, and Bell‘s dominant performance here last spring was short-circuited after a four-tire stop in the late going resulted in the first of his eight second-place finishes this year.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Leadership skills: Setting the Phoenix pace

Sunday‘s race will mark the 10th Phoenix race for the Next Gen car platform that debuted in the 2022 season. The nine events in the books so far have produced an elite list of Cup Series pros who have a tendency to be out front — and usually win.

Seven of the top eight lap leaders at Phoenix in the Next Gen era are firmly in The Chase field, aiming to pad their numbers in Sunday‘s 312-miler.

Speed reads

Race-day essentials:

• Phoenix hub: Weekend information, pit stalls, additional results | Read more
• Sunday Setup: Crew chiefs put the brakes on Phoenix prep | Read more
• Paint Scheme Preview: Hot designs in the desert for all three series | View gallery
• Neil Paine: Briscoe‘s recent run gives Kyle Larson an unintended lift | Read more
• NASCAR Classics: Dive into the video vault with full-race replays from Phoenix | Watch now
• Power Rankings: Blaney banking on further Phoenix success | This week‘s ranks

Majeski showed the strength of the No. 88 Ford in the opening stage, powering by fellow Chase competitor Layne Riggs to claim the Stage 1 victory. It was his first stage win since North Wilkesboro Speedway, some three months prior. He followed with a dominant second stage, giving him more stage victories at Phoenix than he had earned through the first 21 races of the 2026 season.

As the sun went down, the handling on Majeski‘s No. 88 truck faded. He remained inside the top five but couldn‘t match the pace of Kaden Honeycutt, Christian Eckes or Riggs. Majeski took the checkered flag in fourth, earning his first top-five finish since placing third at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park in late July.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Phoenix

“Missed opportunity, for sure, when you win those stages,” Majeski told NASCAR.com after debriefing with the No. 88 bunch. “The race track came to everybody else and was going away from us. When the sun started going down, we slowly got worse.

“We were really good the first run. We were good the second run — not as. As the sun went down, the track went through a change. I felt like the track came to those guys and didn‘t suit the strength of our truck and took away the strength we had from everybody else. Good run, but certainly a missed opportunity.”

Majeski led 49 laps, his highest single-race total since pacing the field for 143 circuits at Richmond Raceway in August 2025. He entered Friday with just 34 laps led across the 2026 season, 23 of which came at North Wilkesboro.

Running at the front of the field was a relief for the Wisconsin native, who said ThorSport Racing had one of its roughest outings in recent memory last week at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Majeski led the four-truck brigade with an 11th-place finish, with none of its drivers earning a single stage point.

Returning to the top five allowed Majeski to breathe a sigh of relief.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

“Just to get everything back going again for us,” Majeski added. “That was probably our worst race, maybe as a company, in a long time last week at Charlotte. To rebound like this, win two stages — I see the 98 finished fifth. Two trucks in the top five, trying to get the pendulum swinging in the right direction for us.”

With 53 points scored at Phoenix, Majeski leapfrogged Daniel Hemric and Gio Ruggiero to break into the top five in the standings for the first time since Dover Motor Speedway in May. He now has his sights set on cracking the top three by the end of the season, sitting just 23 points behind third-place Eckes.

“It‘s going to be tough sledding to win the championship,” Majeski admitted, 135 points behind Honeycutt. “But we‘re in the game for a podium or a top five. So, we want to go out, try to win these last few races and see what happens.”

With his fourth victory of 2026, Honeycutt extended his championship lead over Riggs to 39 points entering Talladega Superspeedway. Having captured seven checkered flags this season, Riggs knows the fight is far from over with more than 500 miles of racing remaining between Talladega, Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway.

“It‘s anybody‘s game still at this point,” Riggs stated after Phoenix. “With Talladega coming up, Martinsville, always been good there and Homestead, another track I felt like I‘ve been good at. We just have to get on our game.”

Taking control of the race in the third stage at Phoenix Raceway, thanks in no small part to a flawless effort from his pit crew, Honeycutt cruised to victory in Friday‘s Zero Carbon Bioethanol 150 Powered by POET and expanded his Chase lead to 39 points over second-place Layne Riggs, who finished third.

Honeycutt led a race-high 53 laps — all during the final green-flag run — and beat a frustrated Christian Eckes to the finish line by 1.556 seconds to record his first win at Phoenix and the fourth of his career, all accomplished this season.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Phoenix

Second out of the pits on the final stop at the second stage break — and first among the Chase contenders — Honeycutt quickly dispatched Stewart Friesen, who had taken two tires on the stop and jumped 12 positions into a short-lived lead.

After seizing the top spot on the Lap 99 restart, the 23-year-old from Willow Park, Texas, remained out front the rest of the way. His victory was also the 39th in the series for crew chief Scott Zipadelli, who is now five wins shy of Eric Phillips‘ all-time lead.

“My pit crew, they did a great job,” Honeycutt asserted. “I give them so much credit because they‘re so damn good. I‘m so fortunate to be able to drive these things. They spend all their hours in the day just for me to drive ‘em, and I can‘t be more grateful for them.

“In Stage 1, I just struggled. I just didn‘t have good rear grip at the start of that first stage. Scott went to work for me. He was never concerned. He kept me locked in the whole time.”

Riggs led the first 43 laps from the pole before Ty Majeski prevailed in a spirited battle for the Stage 1 victory. Majeski scored his second stage win of the season and went on to sweep the stages at Phoenix and lead 49 laps before finishing fourth.

Riggs passed Majeski for the third position on Lap 104 of 150, but that was as far as he could advance.

“I‘ve got to congratulate the 11 guys — they had a really good truck tonight,” Riggs said. “Obviously, they won the championship here with Corey last year, and they‘ve got a really good package for Phoenix.

“It just wasn‘t our night … We‘ve got Talladega next week. You don‘t know what‘s going to happen there. Obviously, we‘re running up front every single race, kind of a back-and-forth battle right now. Tonight, just wasn‘t our night. I‘m not going to hang my head on it, and I‘m really proud of the effort by the team.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Seeking his first victory of the season, Eckes couldn‘t get close enough to Honeycutt to make a move during the final run.

“It still feels great to contend, but, man, it sucks, for sure,” said Eckes, who has finished second in the No. 91 McAnally-Hilgemann Racing Chevrolet for three straight races. “I came back here [to the Truck Series] to win, and we haven‘t done that yet.

“We‘re bringing race trucks that are just close enough to contend, but just kind of missing one or two things [compared with] the 11 [Honeycutt] and 34 [Riggs] right now.”

Eckes climbed to third in the standings with the runner-up finish, but he‘s 112 points behind Honeycutt with three races left.

Jake Garcia finished fifth, followed by William Sawalich, Daniel Hemric, Gio Ruggiero, Grant Enfinger and Brent Crews.

Chandler Smith, Riggs‘ Front Row Motorsports teammate, drew a pit road penalty for too many men over the wall and finished 15th. He fell one spot to fourth in the Chase standings, 117 points out of the lead.

The race featured two cautions for 16 laps, with the second yellow for debris in Turn 1 coinciding with the Stage 2 break. There were six lead changes among five drivers.

The Truck Series returns next Friday at Talladega Superspeedway (4 p.m. ET, FS1, FOX One, NASCAR Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Three races remain in the 2026 season.

With four races remaining in the 2026 Cup Series season, the cream has risen to the top of The Chase presented by Mobil 1. The six drivers who have separated themselves from the pack have combined to win 10 of the last 14 visits to Phoenix Raceway, with Ryan Blaney chasing history as he aims to become just the third driver to win three consecutive races in the Sonoran Desert, joining Kevin Harvick and Jimmie Johnson. In the fantasy realm, though, the battle will be Team Penske versus the field.

Returning to Fastlane this year is my weekly NASCAR 36 for 36 pick, where you can come play along. It‘s a season-long points battle introduced in 2024 where strategy is the primary emphasis. With 36 chartered cars and 36 races on the 2026 schedule, players can choose each car once for the duration of the season.

MUST START
Driver: Ryan Blaney, Team Penske, No. 12 Ford
Selections remaining: 3
Comment: Blaney scored his crowning achievement at Phoenix in 2023, hoisting the Bill France Cup. But he has been stellar here for years, placing inside the top two positions in six of the last eight visits. The No. 12 pit crew — now with Austin Cindric — had multiple woes during the spring race and Blaney still rebounded to win.

Driver: Christopher Bell, Joe Gibbs Racing, No. 20 Toyota
Selections remaining: 2
Comment: Outside of the Penske walls, Bell seems to loom as Blaney‘s toughest opponent in “The Valley of the Sun.” The No. 20 team has won twice in its last five trips to Phoenix, with four top-five efforts during that span. Bell led a race-high 176 laps in the spring but left dejected after the first of his eight runner-up finishes in 2026.

Driver: Joey Logano, Team Penske, No. 22 Ford
Selections remaining: 4
Comment: Despite a 92-point deficit, don‘t count the three-time Cup titleist out yet. Logano has captured four checkered flags at Phoenix, tied for his most at any race track (Las Vegas Motor Speedway). Team Penske thrives on flat tracks, and Logano has won this race — and the championship — twice in the last four years.

DRIVERS TO AVOID
Driver: Ty Gibbs, Joe Gibbs Racing, No. 54 Toyota
Selections remaining: 4
Comment: Gibbs has been streaky at Phoenix since joining the big leagues, though he placed fourth in March. His two victories have come at short tracks in 2026, but an average finish of 20.3 here ranks him 13th out of the 16 championship hopefuls.

Driver: Carson Hocevar, Spire Motorsports, No. 77 Chevrolet
Selections remaining: 5
Comment: Hocevar trails Gibbs among Chasers with a 22.7 average finish, tied with Ryan Preece for 14th among the 16 Chase drivers. His Phoenix struggles are apparent, with three consecutive finishes of 20th or worse and a best result of 15th in six starts.

SLEEPERS OF THE WEEK
Driver: William Byron, Hendrick Motorsports, No. 24 Chevrolet
Selections remaining: 3
Comment: Byron‘s championship hopes may be fading, but his Phoenix numbers shouldn‘t be overlooked. The 2023 winner has finished seventh or better in six of his last eight starts at the Avondale oval and leads all drivers in laps spent inside the top five (1,963) and top 10 (2,510) in the Next Gen car.

Driver: Josh Berry, Wood Brothers Racing, No. 21 Ford
Selections remaining: 4
Comment: We are all in on Team Penske this weekend, which includes its affiliate Wood Brothers Racing. Berry has been phenomenal down the stretch, especially at flatter venues. Two of his three Phoenix top 10s have come in the famed No. 21 machine, earning a personal best of fourth place (March 2025).

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

FEATURED MATCHUPS
Kyle Larson vs. Denny Hamlin
Pick: Hamlin
Comment: Hamlin has lost ground to Larson in all six Chase races, but Larson believes Phoenix is a wild card for the No. 5 team as the finishes have overshadowed the performance in recent years. Hamlin led 208 of 319 laps last year, and the Chris Gayle-led group should come out swinging.

Ryan Blaney vs. Christopher Bell
Pick: Blaney
Comment: This is a dead heat to call, as Phoenix ranks among both drivers‘ best venues. Blaney gets the historical edge, with six top-two finishes in the last eight races. It may take a win to settle this one.

Chase Briscoe vs. Joey Logano
Pick: Logano
Comment: With back-to-back victories, Briscoe is the hottest driver in Cup, shaving 58 points from Larson‘s lead in just two weeks. Despite being a former Phoenix winner, he faces an uphill battle against Logano, with Team Penske poised to come out guns blazing at one of its strongest tracks.

Bubba Wallace vs. Chase Elliott
Pick: Wallace
Comment: History favors Elliott, who clinched the 2020 championship with a walk-off victory at Phoenix. But the No. 9 team hasn‘t scored a top-five finish here since 2021 and has managed just one since its May victory at Texas, which came at Richmond. Wallace offers more upside this weekend, with a pair of top 10s in the last four appearances.

MY LINEUP
Starting five: Ryan Blaney, Christopher Bell, Joey Logano, Josh Berry, William Byron.
Garage: Austin Cindric.

36 FOR 36
Pick: Riley Herbst, 23XI Racing, No. 35 Toyota
Comment: Getting down to the nitty-gritty part of the 2026 season, there are limited options here. Herbst is a formidable Phoenix player, winning the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series season finale in 2024 in dominant fashion. His best Cup finish in three Phoenix starts is 18th, which came earlier this season, and his results have improved with each visit.

Two wins and a fourth-place finish in the past three races have him firmly in the championship conversation, just behind his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell, all chasing Hendrick Motorsports‘ Kyle Larson in the points lead.

Surely, with four races to go, that means this championship is a battle between JGR and Hendrick Motorsports, right?

“I don‘t know if I would say that,” Briscoe cautioned after his Charlotte victory. “I think Penske is still very much in the mix.”

MORE: Chase standings | Phoenix schedule

Lurking at the back of the top five is Team Penske‘s Ryan Blaney, 85 points behind Larson and 20 markers behind the JGR trio that sits between them. Logano, Penske‘s three-time Cup Series champion, sits sixth, 92 points in arrears but still getting a whiff of the lingering point lead. In previous editions of the postseason, Team Penske had a knack for coming alive late, earning critical wins to advance through rounds and capitalizing at Phoenix Raceway, one of its most successful venues. Gone are the days of win-and-in, but victories for either Blaney or Logano could significantly alter the championship conversation with Phoenix ahead on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Blaney has won each of NASCAR‘s past two trips to the Arizona gem, not to mention his three Talladega Superspeedway wins and two straight fall wins at Martinsville Speedway … the two tracks where NASCAR heads after Phoenix.

“When you think about Phoenix, they‘ve been almost untouchable,” Briscoe said. “You go to Martinsville, I mean, Blaney has been absolutely unreal. So I feel like Penske is still very much in play. Blaney has even been leading on the white flag at Homestead too, and they‘re going to be great at Talladega. So, I mean, I definitely think it comes down to Hendrick, JGR and Penske, which we hear every single week, right? But yeah, I would not say that it‘s just a two-team race at this point.”

The 2023 champion has recent momentum on his side too. Blaney has finished inside the top five in each of the last three races, notching three straight top fives for the first time this season and all on intermediate ovals — the exact track type that concerned Team Penske entering The Chase.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

“I‘m very proud of the effort for sure,” Blaney said. “It‘s at tracks that we‘ve really put a big emphasis on ‘we have to get better here.‘ And the last three weeks have been very, very good. Like our cars, the 2 (Austin Cindric) was good. The 22 (Logano) has been strong, so I feel like we‘ve taken a big step in the right direction. We still have about another half step to go, I think, to catch a couple of those other guys, but overall, very proud of the effort that we want at Team Penske for digging in and getting better. … We‘re not throwing sinks at it anymore. It‘s small knobs.”

Team Penske‘s competition director Travis Geisler knew this stretch of The Chase would be pivotal if any of the team‘s three entries would contend for a championship. With two champions under the team‘s banner inside a 100-point margin and a career-best stretch in progress for Cindric, he sees the Bill France Cup well within sight.

“It‘s certainly been a good three races for us — it‘s not as good as we need to be right now,” Geisler told NASCAR.com. “We‘ve still got a little bit of margin to close up, but I think from where we‘ve been, we feel like we‘ve at least closed the gap significantly and have had some really strong cars. I think the 2 car‘s performance over the last couple weeks has been great, honestly. The finish (Sunday) is unfortunate, but the rest of the races, they‘ve had really good speed, and obviously Ryan‘s had good speed. So yeah, still need to clean up some execution. Still got a little bit to go to be the best at these intermediates, but certainly able to walk out of these three and at least feel like we didn‘t bury ourselves and we can race from here.”

RELATED: Cindric re-signs to remain with Penske in 2027

Now heading to some of the organization‘s best tracks to close the season, the focus remains on improving rather than resting on its laurels. Blaney is a three-time winner this season, his most recent coming at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in August before The Chase began.

“He‘s certainly got to get wins,” Geisler said of Blaney‘s title hopes. “There‘s no doubt you‘re going to have to win a couple from here — which, hey, that‘s the way the playoffs work. You should have to get wins in the playoffs. That‘s the way any format of the playoffs should be. So I think that‘s very possible. Obviously, the tracks line up really well for us. Still have a lot of confidence in that. Talladega is kind of an outlier for everybody, and that one‘s just going to be ‘just try to finish.‘ And if we finish there, we know we‘ll be where we need to be.

“I think it‘s all still up in the air right now. Certainly need to close the gap here over the next couple weeks and at least keep everybody honest at the end.”

A good chunk of the focus centers on Blaney thanks to his two wins at Phoenix and his recent Chase success at Martinsville. But Logano shouldn‘t be an afterthought in this conversation. The three-time champ often performs best when the odds are stacked against him. They are right now, and Logano concedes he likely needs to win multiple times before the season‘s over in order to win the title. But all the No. 22 team needs is a chance.

“At this point, I feel like we‘ve definitely got to win at least two of the next four — maybe more — to pull this one off, which we can,” Logano said. “I feel like we‘ve got a lot of good race tracks ahead of us. So still a positive attitude on it that we can still do it. It‘s just gotten a little bit harder than we needed. I was really hoping to get out of this three-race stretch and these mile-and-a-halves 60 (points) or so out and try to make it up on our good tracks. But obviously, we‘re a little further back than that.”

In the meantime, Blaney is all eyes forward, starting with Phoenix on the heels of his best stretch of races this year.

“I‘m a big believer in carrying previous weekend momentum, confidence, stuff like that and going back to places that you‘ve run well at,” Blaney said. “We got a lot of points to make up, but it is what it is. The best thing we can do is just go try to win two or three of them and see where you‘re at and just keep going to work. So they‘ve been doing a great job the whole Chase when we‘ve been able to finish races, so just got to stick in there and keep running up front. Hopefully, we can get to Victory Lane a couple more times.”

McKee, 16, will drive the No. 9 Chevrolet for JRM part-time in the 2027 and 2028 O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series campaigns before becoming eligible to compete full time in 2029 with JRM.

The Kannapolis, North Carolina, driver — who shares a hometown with Dale Earnhardt — is set to make his O‘Reilly debut at Bristol Motor Speedway on Aug. 13.

RELATED: JR Motorsports website | Watch NASCAR video highlights

“Adding a driver like Tristan to our organization for multiple years is a testament to how we operate as a company,” Kelley Earnhardt-Miller, co-owner and CEO of JRM, said in a team release. “JRM has always looked to help the growth of young, up-and-coming drivers, and Tristan fits that mold. His accomplishments at such a young age behind the wheel speak for itself and I‘m really looking forward to watching him develop and mature over these next three years while competing for race wins and championships.”

McKee remains deeply embedded in Spire Motorsports‘ pipeline for the future as well. Shortly after his 16th birthday, McKee made his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series debut at Richmond Raceway, qualifying 13th and finishing eighth. In three Truck Series starts, McKee has finished inside the top 10 each time, placing sixth at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and fifth at Bristol, becoming the youngest driver to ever score a top-five finish in one of NASCAR‘s national series. McKee will continue to make part-time Truck Series starts in the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet in 2027.

“I can‘t wait to get started at Bristol next year with JRM,” McKee said in a team release. “It means the world to have the opportunity to compete in one of their cars, and I can‘t thank Dale (Earnhardt Jr., co-owner), Kelley, LW (Miller) and everyone at JRM and Spire for this chance. I‘m really looking forward to seeing what we can build together.”

MORE: Key players in 2026-2027 Silly Season

In addition to his select NASCAR starts this season, McKee also won the ARCA Menards Series East championship with four victories, two of which also came on the national ARCA tour. McKee also won the TA2 Series championship in the Trans Am Series in 2025, becoming the youngest driver to win the series‘ title.

“We‘ve been really fortunate to be a part of Tristan‘s development and felt that this next step to JRM was the best thing for him as we look ahead to the future,” Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson said in a release. “JRM has been the benchmark of the NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series for years, and I can‘t think of a better place for Tristan to go and to learn from than with the best that the series has to offer.”

It‘s true that Smith‘s teammate, Layne Riggs, is the only driver within close striking distance of Chase leader Kaden Honeycutt. After completing a season sweep at Charlotte last Friday, Riggs is 17 points behind his Tricon Garage rival.

Smith is third in the standings, 77 points in arrears, but with Phoenix on the horizon, he has reason to be optimistic.

RELATED: Truck Series standings | Phoenix weekend schedule

“That‘s good,” said Smith post-race last Friday after confirming he was third in the standings. “Sweet. It sounds good to me. Let‘s go to Phoenix.”

It shouldn‘t be surprising that the driver of the No. 38 Ford is eager to get to the Sonoran Desert. His average finish at Phoenix is 3.6, a record that includes a victory in 2021 and three third-place finishes in five starts.

Honeycutt is second-best at the one-mile flat track, with an average result of 6.8.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Overall, Smith‘s aggregate average finish of 7.4 over the last four Chase tracks — Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and Homestead-Miami — also leads the Chase field. Both Riggs and Honeycutt are winless at the four remaining tracks.

“We just need to go out there and execute at the highest caliber that we can, and the points will sort themselves out, however that may be,” Smith said. “If we just go out there and execute and take what we can on a given weekend, the points will sort themselves out.”

Last week‘s “Last Call” installment saw our NASCAR.com experts discuss the Indiana native and his ability to go on a Tony Stewart, circa 2011, title run, with the panel collectively agreeing that, while not mathematically impossible, it was going to be a tough hill to climb, even with another race win or two.

RELATED: Charlotte results | Cup Series standings

This week, the discussion revolves around a fellow Joe Gibbs Racing teammate: Denny Hamlin. The 64-time Cup Series victor, who entered The Chase as the No. 1 overall seed with four 2026 wins already in the books, still hasn‘t found Victory Lane six contests into this year‘s postseason. What is the biggest obstacle between Hamlin and more triumphs? Our insiders give their answers here.

What‘s the biggest thing standing between Hamlin and his first Chase win?

Zach Sturniolo: The key separation so far, in my opinion, has been the No. 11 team itself — including the driver. Nearly all of Hamlin‘s postseason rockiness can be traced back to mistakes on pit road, questionable pit calls or errors on the track. The Chase opener at Darlington Raceway set an ominous tone for Hamlin‘s postseason: Hamlin led 68 laps before a slow pit stop during the Stage 2 break dropped him midpack, leading to contact that put Hamlin in the wall, damaging his Toyota and sinking him to an 18th-place finish. The decision to pit from the lead at Lap 45 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway allowed championship points leader Kyle Larson to take the wave-around and get back onto the lead lap, and Hamlin later spun trying to make up the difference in spots lost behind the wheel. Top fives at Kansas and Charlotte were good, not great, and simply lacked the winning speed his teammates have shown. In short, the entire No. 11 team needs to produce cleaner races in order to win any of these final four races.

Pat DeCola: The biggest thing? The 49-point deficit … but the number itself isn‘t nearly as troubling as when Hamlin accumulated it. No. 11 squandered his pre-Chase points buffer almost immediately, but still left Bristol in good shape, just one point behind Larson. Then came Kansas, Las Vegas and Charlotte — three consecutive 1.5-mile tracks, easily the No. 11‘s greatest strength this season and tailor-made for him to clean up — and he emerged from that stretch in a much larger and deepening hole. Hamlin is capable of winning at each remaining track, and has, but the schedule already handed him perhaps his best opportunity to take control of this thing with a win or two, and instead he spent it going backward. That dials the pressure up to *ahem* 11, and he may find himself grinding so hard over the next four races that mistakes continue to mount on both the track and pit road — as another victory eludes him.

Zack Albert: While tempting to say Kyle Larson, team execution or any measure of self-induced pressure, the answer is nothing. It‘s been well-documented how momentum in stock-car racing rides in waves — on top one week, in the doldrums the next. Witness Tyler Reddick‘s 2026 campaign for a prime example of how quickly a head of steam can evaporate for a driver who looked like a world-beater a quarter of the way through. Hamlin has spoken in recent weeks about needing a bit extra speed here, a smidge of execution clean-up there, but there seems to be no single, glaring factor that‘s blockading the No. 11 team‘s path to Victory Lane. The four remaining Chase races will be held at venues where Hamlin has won multiple times. Breaking up that postseason shutout seems inevitable.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Dustin Albino: As Sturniolo pointed out, in-race execution has been the biggest dagger for the No. 11 team since the start of The Chase. Hamlin has consistently surrendered points to the competition — Larson alone has outscored him by 104 points over the six-race stretch — whether through self-inflicted mistakes or pit-road miscues. Beyond closing the gap to Larson, he now has to fend off Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe, both of whom have shown more speed during the three-race intermediate swing. All that is in the past, though, and Hamlin still has four races remaining to snap a four-month winless drought. It would surprise few if he rattled off multiple victories down the stretch, though surviving Talladega remains a potential wild card in his championship pursuit.

Cameron Richardson: Hamlin has curated a whopping resume of postseason shortcomings that only the NFL‘s Buffalo Bills and NHL‘s Toronto Maple Leafs can rival. Looking at last year‘s finale and now six races deep in the 2026 Chase, it simply comes down to unforced errors from the No. 11 driver and team. Both share accountability in why Hamlin has failed to hoist the Cup Series title in his otherwise illustrious 20-year career. Pitting at Las Vegas during Stage 1 with current points leader Larson a lap down is likely going to be the gaffe that costs Hamlin another golden opportunity. Hamlin‘s results have been good, but he‘s missing the one thing Larson and the No. 11‘s teammates Bell and Briscoe all have — a win. Phoenix redemption can flip the script entirely, but both driver and crew are not showing the fortitude right now to overcome 49 points and take this championship.

RELATED: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Ever since taking over the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing car from Martin Truex Jr. in 2025, Briscoe has been rapidly building his reputation as one of the sport‘s top drivers. He followed a trip to the Championship 4 last season with another strong campaign — a career-high Driver Rating of 95.2 —filled with steady improvement as the schedule rolled on. It all has culminated in the past few weeks: A near-win over Larson at Kansas (he led up until the final seven laps) and then back-to-back wins at Las Vegas and Charlotte, part of what is only the 18th postseason win streak by a Chase/Playoff driver since 2004:

The wins have earned Briscoe some well-deserved time in not only Victory Lane, but also the spotlight of The Chase.

He‘s now up to fourth in the current standings, 65 points behind Larson as we enter the final four races on the schedule — Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and Homestead-Miami. That‘s a big leap from where he sat coming out of the Bristol Night Race (ninth place) just a few weeks ago. The streak has even taken a lot of the attention away from Larson, whose dominance in The Chase was one of the defining early storylines as the schedule seemed to be creating a Larson-versus-Hamlin championship referendum at three consecutive 1.5-mile tracks this month.

But in a counter-intuitive kind of way, Briscoe crashing that party has been the best favor anyone could have done for Larson. By taking wins off the board that might have belonged to other, closer title challengers to the No. 5 team, Briscoe‘s streak has, ironically, helped Larson‘s championship odds just as much as it has added to his own.

We can see this if we compare the current output from my NASCAR Cup Series forecast simulation model — which lists Larson as a commanding 72.5% title favorite over Christopher Bell (10.6%), Hamlin (8.9%) and Briscoe (4.6%) — with a series of counterfactual scenarios in which someone else other than Briscoe won those races instead.

Specifically, we‘ll look at the six drivers who sat between Larson at No. 1 and Briscoe at No. 8 in the standings after the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway: Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Ty Gibbs and Tyler Reddick. What if any of those drivers, who ostensibly went into the past two races as greater threats to Larson than Briscoe, won one or both of the races at Las Vegas and Charlotte — what would Larson‘s odds be then?

(Note that, for the purposes of this exercise, we‘ll slot a given driver from that group in as the race-winner, and we‘ll keep the rest of the running order behind them exactly the same sequentially. So this weekend, for instance, we might make Christopher Bell the winner of the photo-finish instead of Briscoe, which would render Briscoe second, Blaney third, and so forth. We‘ll also only be changing the finishes, so stage points remain constant in each simulation.)

Here‘s what those alternate-universe scenarios would look like in terms of the championship odds:

The main victims of Briscoe‘s winning streak are clearly Bell and Hamlin, both of whom would actually have been outright favorites to win the title over Larson — despite Larson‘s prior dominance and his solid finishes at Las Vegas and Charlotte — if either had rattled off consecutive wins over the past two races. Instead, Bell finished a costly 23rd in Vegas and had one of history‘s closest runner-up finishes at Charlotte, while Denny followed up a 16th-place finish at Vegas with a fifth-place run at Charlotte.

Interestingly, if either of the two leading Penske contenders (Blaney or Logano) had the win streak instead, it wouldn‘t have vaulted them to favorite status, though it would have eaten into Larson‘s edge on the rest of the field compared with his current odds. And Reddick or Gibbs could have done the same thing as Briscoe and it would have had a similar effect, since neither has an especially great track fit over the remaining four races on the calendar.

In other words, outside of somebody truly low in The Chase‘s pecking order — or simply not in The Chase at all — Briscoe was just about the best choice Larson could have asked for to rattle off those wins, keeping the likes of Bell and Hamlin out of the winner‘s circle in the process.

Even if those two races were split between different contenders, Larson‘s odds would have taken a hit. For instance, a Bell win at Vegas paired with Briscoe‘s real-life win at Charlotte would drop Larson‘s title odds by 21 percentage points relative to his current figure, and a Hamlin win at Charlotte would drop Larson‘s odds by seven points even if it followed Briscoe‘s real-life win at Vegas:

By winning back-to-back trophies, Briscoe ensured such a split could never happen. And at the same time, his own championship bid began this two-race stretch as just enough of a long-shot — even after piling up a whopping 143 points over the past two races, Briscoe still trails Larson by 65 points in total — that this recent surge has done little to threaten Larson‘s position atop the championship odds.

This could change, though, if Briscoe keeps winning more races. If he extends the streak to 3 in a row this week at Phoenix, his title odds would rise to nearly 20% while Larson‘s would drop by nearly 10 percentage points. Keep it rolling to 4 in a row at Talladega, and things really get interesting: Briscoe would suddenly be your title favorite at 55%. And if Briscoe runs it to 5 or 6 to close the season, he would very likely win the championship.

So Briscoe has certainly been Larson‘s ally in the past few weeks… but that only goes so far. The longer this streak keeps going, and the driver who‘s been doing Larson the most favors might suddenly become his biggest threat.

The updated procedure comes a month after World Wide Technology Raceway — a flat, heavy-braking oval similar to Phoenix — where multiple Cup cars suffered brake failures during the Enjoy Illinois 300 on Sept. 13.

RELATED: Phoenix weekend schedule | Cup standings

“We‘ve elected that we‘re gonna let the teams at least look at their brakes and if they need to make a pad change, which is uncommon for us to do on an impound practice,” Cup Series Senior Managing Director Brad Moran said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio‘s “The Morning Drive” Wednesday. “But we‘ve got a procedure set up to do that.”

Toward the end of the 2025 season, NASCAR announced all tracks shorter than 1.5 miles in length would have the 750-horsepower setup, increased from the baseline 670.

Phoenix was the first traditional oval for Cup to run the package in March, won by Ryan Blaney, who currently sits fifth in The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

Moran added that there is no criteria for what will constitute a brake change for the teams.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

“There‘s no limit,” Moran said. “If a team chooses to change their brake pads, it‘s on them to do so. The teams are allowed to do quite a bit of work in the brake area. We‘re just giving the opportunity to make sure they get it right and hopefully we don‘t have any brake issues at Phoenix.”

Sunday‘s Chase race at Phoenix (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) marks the seventh of 10 events in the battle for the 2026 Cup Series championship. Defending titleholder Kyle Larson holds a 49-point lead in the standings over Denny Hamlin.

Consecutive victories at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway (and nearly another one right before that at Kansas) have erased 58 points of Briscoe‘s standings deficit to the defending champ, and while the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota has certainly been fast, his biggest advantage lately may not have come from anything having to do with horsepower or pace.

It‘s the five guys standing in the No. 19 pit stall.

During one of his services on Sunday at Charlotte, Briscoe‘s crew changed four tires in 8.536 seconds, the fastest such stop in Racing Insights‘ records. It broke the record the team had established just two weeks earlier at Kansas Speedway.

And it wasn‘t even the most consequential stop of Briscoe‘s Bank of America 400 victory.

RELATED: The Chase Report | Cup Series standings

Just four races remain in the 2026 Chase presented by Mobil 1, with Briscoe 65 points behind Larson‘s No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. The No. 19 crew is doing its part to make that deficit less daunting, one fraction of a second at a time.

Let‘s dig into the numbers, courtesy of Racing Insights.

At Kansas, Briscoe‘s crew delivered four-tire stops of 8.576 and 8.616 seconds, the two fastest on record at the time. At Charlotte, it went even faster.

The three quickest recorded Cup stops per Racing Insights now belong to the No. 19, all from the past three races. Six of the 10 fastest four-tire stops during The Chase came from Briscoe‘s team, too.

But here‘s the number that might matter even more.

During the regular season, just 8% of the team‘s competitive four-tire stops clocked in under nine seconds. Through six Chase races, that figure has climbed to an almost absurd 41% — more than double the rate of any other team. Only 13 teams have managed even one sub-nine-second stop during that span.

Nor has the speed come at the expense of reliability. Briscoe‘s team has gone 15 consecutive races without a pit-crew mistake, the longest active streak among Chase contenders. Flawless and fast? That‘s a dangerous combo.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Veteran rear-tire changer Lee Cunningham — part of a crew that also includes front changer AJ Rosini, jackman Caleb Dirks, carrier CJ Bailey and fueler Matt Tyrrell — offered a glimpse after Briscoe‘s Chicagoland win in July.

“It always seems to take us a little while to jell,” Cunningham told NASCAR.com‘s Zack Albert.

Apparently it has, and the wait was worth it.

After Charlotte, Briscoe‘s crew now leads the season-long pit-crew rankings for the first time this year. Even after the Indiana native‘s close-but-no-smoked-brisket P4 at Kansas, crew chief James Small recognized its progress.

“Those guys are executing at a super high level,” Small told NASCAR.com‘s Dustin Albino, joking that with this group in 2024, “maybe Martin (Truex Jr.) would still be racing.”

What‘s kind of scary, however, is that the record-setting Charlotte stop came on Lap 167. The race-changing one arrived later. It suggests there‘s even more in the tank if and when the pressure mounts even higher, and they need to dig down even deeper.

Christopher Bell had been the car to beat, winning Stage 2 and leading 93 laps. But when a caution with about 60 laps remaining brought the leaders down pit road, Briscoe‘s crew delivered another blistering stop: 8.696 seconds.

Briscoe emerged ahead of Bell, took the lead for the restart and held it for the final 61 laps. Bell nearly caught him at the line after some contact between the two, losing by 0.029 seconds in the closest Cup finish of 2026.

“We just lost the lead on pit road, man,” Bell‘s crew chief, Adam Stevens, told NASCAR.com.

The record stop made history. The other one helped win the race. Neither is likely to be the most consequential stop of the year at this rate.

Briscoe collected 68 points to Bell‘s 53. Those extra points are vital when the driver you‘re chasing keeps piling them up himself.

Even still, perhaps the most revealing comparison isn‘t between Briscoe and Larson or even Bell, however. It‘s between Briscoe and teammate Denny Hamlin.

Hamlin entered The Chase as the No. 1 seed, 55 points ahead of Larson. Six races later, he‘s 49 behind, and the No. 11 team‘s pit-road performance illustrates part of that 104-point reversal. The No. 11 crew ranked fifth during the regular season, gaining a net of five positions on pit road. In The Chase, it‘s fallen to 20th, with three recorded mistakes and a net loss of 40 positions.

The No. 19 gang, conversely, ranks first among Chase teams, with no mistakes and 20 positions gained. That‘s a 60-position difference in cumulative pit-road gains and losses between two teams from the same organization.

Pit-crew performance during The Chase

*Ranks among all full-time teams

The stop averages tell another story — on clean four-tire stops, Briscoe holds a three-tenths advantage, 9.36 seconds to Hamlin‘s 9.66. Factor in mistakes, and Hamlin‘s overall average slips to 10.15 seconds, while Briscoe stays at 9.36.

It‘s not just raw speed, either. It‘s keeping that speed from getting swallowed by mistakes. This, of course, raises the question — will Briscoe‘s bunch remain perfect or will the inevitable mistake bite them?

Bell‘s crew ranks seventh, with two mistakes and 11 net positions lost. Larson‘s group unsurprisingly ranks second, with no mistakes and five positions gained. Ryan Blaney‘s crew, meanwhile, has climbed from 32nd in the regular season to fifth in The Chase after a personnel change.

MORE: Blaney, Cindric react to swap: ‘Best chance to win the championship‘

These numbers don‘t fully explain the standings — strategy and race circumstances matter, too. But they reveal an advantage Briscoe‘s closest competitors haven‘t matched; one that has clearly buoyed his breakout.

Remember this weekend, Phoenix Raceway (Sun., 3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) has a habit of rewarding the team that gets its late-race pit decisions right and punishing the ones that don‘t.

Last November, Hamlin led 208 laps before losing track position on pit road in the closing moments and finishing sixth in yet another championship crusher. In March, Bell led 176 laps but dropped from first to eighth after taking four tires during a late caution. He recovered to second behind Blaney, who took two.

Those were strategic calls, not simply faster or slower stops. Still, they illustrate how quickly being the fastest car can cease to matter as much if you‘re buried in the field after a long or incorrect pit stop.

Briscoe‘s own history at Phoenix is an added wrinkle to how this weekend will be impacted, too. His first Cup victory came there in March 2022, yet his last four finishes, however, are 29th, 35th, 18th and 37th — a 30.0 average. Larson has finished fourth or better in six of his last seven Phoenix races.

That leaves the No. 19 team little margin for error.

Luckily, they may not need it.

The drivers made contact on the cool-down lap, sending Stenhouse spinning.

On the latest episode of the “Hauler Talk” podcast, NASCAR vice president of racing communications Mike Forde said in-car cameras and an overhead shot were among the many angles that were reviewed.

RELATED: Charlotte results | Listen to McDowell-Stenhouse post-race chatter 

“It was a lengthy discussion,” Forde said. “A lot of discussion on whether we penalize, or whether we don‘t. I would probably say that this is probably the closest it‘s gotten to being a penalty without it being a penalty. But we looked at it as emotion again. And they came down pit road, and Stenhouse went to (McDowell‘s) window and had a conversation. It cooled down pretty quickly.”

Forde said both drivers would likely have been penalized if their cars had hit the wall or damaged another car. Both drivers also still had their window nets up.

Bubba Wallace was fined $50,000 for hitting Alex Bowman‘s No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet on the cool-down lap after the 2024 Chicago Street Race. Bowman had already lowered his window net, and his car hit a concrete barrier from the bump by Wallace.

Forde said NASCAR officials will meet with McDowell and Stenhouse at Phoenix Raceway to discuss their dustup.

“We didn‘t love it, so we did look at different examples of what we did in the past in these types of instances,” Forde said. “We decided that it was close but did not fully rise to necessitating a penalty.”

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Other topics covered by Forde and senior director of racing communications Amanda Ellis during the 73rd episode of “Hauler Talk,” which explores competition issues in NASCAR:

— How NASCAR staff adapted to the Sunday doubleheader of the Cup Series and NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series.

— The safety review of Wallace‘s crash at Charlotte.

— The rules governing how teams mark and tape their pit stalls.

Click on the embed below to listen or search for “Hauler Talk” wherever you download podcasts to hear it on your phone, tablet or mobile device.

Nate Ryan has written about NASCAR since 1996 while working at the San Bernardino Sun, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA Today Co. and for the past 10 years at NBC Sports Digital. He is a contributor to the “Hauler Talk” show on the NASCAR Podcast Network. He has also covered various other motorsports, including the IndyCar and IMSA series.

RELATED: Cup Series Chase schedule | Cup Series standings | Watch NASCAR video highlights

Analysis: Larson finally finished worse than fifth in The Chase, but naturally … his championship lead somehow got bigger, anyway. The No. 5 looked capable of winning Charlotte early, leading 97 laps and taking Stage 1 before Christopher Bell eventually wrestled the lead away. Contact from Hamlin on a restart knocked Larson from second to seventh, and he ultimately finished sixth after spending the closing run fighting to stay among the leaders. That still gives him an average finish of 2.8 through six Chase races, the best opening six-race stretch in postseason history, and a 49-point advantage over Hamlin with four to go. Briscoe and Bell have certainly started making things interesting, but Larson isn‘t exactly handing over control. Phoenix is where he clinched his second championship last November without leading a lap, then finished third in March, so he‘ll likely keep rolling.

Analysis: At Kansas, he couldn‘t quite hold off Larson. At Vegas, Larson couldn‘t catch him. At Charlotte, his teammate nearly stole it at the stripe, yet Briscoe still found a way. That‘s one hell of an exciting three-race stretch, culminating in his first consecutive Cup victories and a 0.029-second win over Bell — the closest finish of 2026. The No. 19 led the final 61 laps after its pit crew helped turn the race around, with Briscoe‘s team recording the three fastest stops of the afternoon. That crew now ranks first in the series for the season, too, and suddenly just about everything is clicking. Briscoe has gained 58 points on Larson over the last two races, chopping his championship deficit to 65. Phoenix wasn‘t kind to him earlier this year, when he crashed out and finished 37th, but that almost feels like a different lifetime now, and he‘s a proven winner at the track. Briscoe and the No. 19 are no longer just threatening to change The Chase; they already have.

Analysis: Eight second-place finishes this season. Eight. The No. 20 was arguably the best car at Charlotte, leading 93 laps, winning Stage 2 and ranking first in both speed and defense according to NASCAR Insights. Briscoe‘s crew ultimately gained the advantage on pit road, and Bell spent the final 61 laps trying to reclaim it, nearly pulling off the pass in the final corner and almost beating him at the line. That‘s painful, sure, but he‘s now only 51 points behind Larson and heads to a track where he‘s been downright outstanding. Bell won the spring Phoenix races in 2024 and 2025, then led 176 laps there this March before finishing — you guessed it — second. It‘s hard to imagine a more appropriate place for his latest breakthrough to Victory Lane.

Analysis: Phoenix is coming, and Hamlin probably doesn‘t need a refresher on how quickly things can go wrong there and make or break a championship. He led 208 laps in last year‘s title race before a late caution and overtime strategy scramble helped hand the title to Larson. Now he‘s heading back to Arizona still searching for his first series crown, and the circumstances are somehow feeling a little too familiar again. Hamlin finished fifth at Charlotte despite a pit-road safety violation and an awkward stop that forced him to back up before leaving his stall, but still lost another nine points to Larson. He‘s 49 back now, with only two top-five finishes in six Chase races after dominating much of the regular season. The No. 11 remains first in season-long speed according to NASCAR Insights, and Hamlin finished fifth at Phoenix this spring, so we know the talent and equipment aren‘t going anywhere. But neither is the clock, and the mistakes are catastrophically expensive at this point. He needs a flawless race.

Analysis: Lost in the Larson-Briscoe-Bell-Hamlin championship shuffle is a pretty important development: Blaney has quietly been just as capable of executing as that upper tier. Third at Charlotte marks three consecutive top-five finishes, his longest such streak since last season, and it came despite a pit-road speeding penalty and another slow stop that cost him five positions. The No. 12 ranked third in both speed and passing Sunday, continuing a stretch in which the car has looked considerably better than a couple of crash-induced finishing positions have made it appear. Now comes Phoenix, where Blaney has won the last two Cup races, including this spring‘s thriller over Bell, and probably no one in the field is happier to see that track coming up. He‘s still 85 points behind Larson, but with four races remaining, another desert win could make things interesting in a hurry. Blaney has the speed, he just needs his pit stops to cooperate, as he has all season long.

Analysis: Reddick continues to look a little more like himself lately, even if the results still aren‘t quite doing him justice. Charlotte was another adventure, with contact while battling Cindric for second, a brush with the wall and another incident involving lapped traffic all interrupting an afternoon that ultimately ended eighth. Despite all that, NASCAR Insights rated the No. 45 first in passing, and he‘s now finished third and eighth in consecutive weeks after a fairly miserable stretch. That‘s encouraging, especially after the way this team‘s season has unraveled since spring, but the task remains at hand. He‘s 114 points behind Larson with four races remaining, and Phoenix produced an eighth-place finish in March. The speed is showing signs of returning, which is encouraging. but the championship opportunity can‘t wait around for the rest to catch up.

Analysis: Logano has stayed close enough to matter without doing anything particularly spectacular lately, and it feels like that could change soon. Charlotte was another example, as contact with Ty Gibbs on an early restart forced an extra stop and sent the No. 22 backward before Logano recovered to ninth. That‘s consecutive top 10s, though neither afternoon offered much evidence that the three-time champion is ready to run down the guys currently controlling The Chase. Fortunately, the calendar is about to get more interesting for him and Team Penske at large. Logano has four Phoenix victories and started from the pole there in March, leading significant portions of the race before a crash ended his afternoon in 31st. He‘s 92 points behind Larson, which is considerably less comfortable than where he stood after winning Bristol, but then again, this is precisely the kind of situation in which Logano has made himself hard to put away over the years, and he‘s certainly still in it.

Analysis: The finish (17th) suggests Cindric‘s intermediate breakthrough stalled out at Charlotte, but the race itself says something a little different. He was challenging Larson for the lead when the competition caution arrived, scored fourth- and sixth-place stage finishes and spent a considerable portion of Sunday looking capable of another top five. The No. 2 eventually faded, ending his streak of two consecutive top-five finishes and costing him ground in the championship. That‘s disappointing, but it doesn‘t make Kansas and Vegas any less real. The bigger question now is whether Penske‘s recent gains on 1.5-mile tracks will translate elsewhere as it hits some more favorable locales, even if Phoenix was downright miserable for Cindric in March, when a crash left him 34th. He‘s 145 points behind Larson and the last three races established something worth building on, but now comes the harder part.

Analysis: At some point, you simply run out of ways to explain away the finishes. Gibbs was running eighth when a Lap 41 incident at Charlotte damaged the No. 54‘s suspension, ultimately sending him to the garage and leaving him 34th. That follows consecutive 17th-place finishes at Kansas and Las Vegas, turning what once looked like a promising Chase into a pretty brutal three-week stretch. The speed hasn‘t completely disappeared — NASCAR Insights still rates Gibbs second in season-long passing and fifth in defense — but the results certainly have. Here‘s the intriguing part: Phoenix was one of his better races this spring, so don‘t bury the No. 54 quite yet. Gibbs led late before Blaney passed him with 10 laps remaining, ultimately finishing fourth. So the opportunity is there, even if the current momentum isn‘t. Four races remain, and Gibbs is suddenly 156 points behind Larson. He needs something to change immediately.

Analysis: Elliott climbs two spots here as a result of some shuffling around him, although Charlotte wasn‘t exactly the kind of afternoon that would ordinarily justify much celebration. An extra pit stop to tighten a loose wheel interrupted his early progress, and a speeding penalty later cost him track position while he was running ninth. He ultimately finished 12th, ending a brief streak of consecutive top 10s and leaving him 185 points behind Larson. That‘s an awfully large deficit for a former champion who still hasn‘t put together the kind of sustained Chase run that would make a second title feel particularly realistic. The No. 9 has been steadier lately, sure, but steadiness alone isn‘t going to solve for the title at this point in 2026. Phoenix produced a 23rd-place finish in March, and the remaining schedule isn‘t getting any easier. The comeback needs to be much more convincing, and he‘s capable, but the signs haven‘t been there lately.

Analysis: Well, how about that — a relatively quiet Carson Hocevar afternoon. No fights, no spectacular accidents, no major controversy, just a couple of stage-point finishes and 14th at Charlotte. That probably doesn‘t sound particularly exciting, but after the last several weeks, it‘s not the worst development for the No. 77 team at large, though it doesn‘t help him much in the championship picture. Hocevar finished eighth in Stage 1 and 10th in Stage 2, hovering around the edge of the top 10 before settling into a somewhat less remarkable finishing position. The biggest obstacle, however, continues to be execution. NASCAR Insights ranks his pit crew 26th this season, with 13 mistakes and a net loss of 110 positions on pit road. There‘s been enough legitimate speed in the car to make that particularly frustrating, and Hocevar has already shown he can win in 2026. Building the rest of the operation around that capability remains a work in progress, but the arrow points upward.

Analysis: Sometimes racing is just plain cruel. Wallace was running fifth at Charlotte when Alex Bowman got loose underneath him and slammed into the No. 23, sending both cars into the outside wall and ending Wallace‘s afternoon before Stage 1 was complete. He finished 37th, which is an awfully ugly way to follow three consecutive top 10s, but obviously was not evidence that his recent improvement had disappeared. NASCAR Insights still rated Wallace seventh in speed and first in restarts for the race, and the No. 23 was genuinely competitive before getting collected. The championship picture is considerably less forgiving, though. Wallace is now 185 points behind Larson after entering Charlotte 137 back, and there simply aren‘t many opportunities remaining to repair that kind of damage. He finished sixth at Phoenix in March. Another afternoon like that would be welcome, but he could use considerably more.

Analysis: Finally, a top 10. Buescher‘s 10th-place finish at Charlotte was his best result of The Chase and first top 10 on a non-drafting track since San Diego. Even this one required some recovery work after the No. 17 had to back up on pit road to tighten a wheel during the Stage 1 break. Buescher managed to get things pointed in the right direction again, though, and came away with at least something useful. He‘s now 216 points behind Larson, so the championship conversation has become increasingly theoretical, but that doesn‘t mean there‘s nothing left to prove. This team has spent much of 2026 looking capable of more than the results suggest, and the final month offers one last opportunity to do something about it. Respectable is fine. At some point, though, you want a little more than fine as 2027 comes into focus.

Analysis: That‘s a brutal way to end one of the more encouraging stretches of Byron‘s season. Four consecutive top 10s had finally given the No. 24 some legitimate momentum after the Darlington disaster, and Charlotte looked capable of extending it. Byron was running seventh when Bowman‘s accident involving Wallace also collected him, leaving the Hendrick driver with a 39th-place finish and a championship deficit that ballooned to 208 points. NASCAR Insights ranked him fifth in speed and third in defense before his race ended, so the performance certainly wasn‘t as poor as the result suggests. Still, there isn‘t much time left to separate bad luck from bad outcomes when The Chase standings only care about the latter. Phoenix produced a seventh in March, which gives Byron something useful to revisit; the larger championship comeback, though, has become too difficult to envision this year.

Analysis: The consistency continues. Suárez followed three consecutive 14th-place finishes with 13th at Charlotte, giving the No. 7 four straight afternoons of near-identical finishing positions. He even grabbed Stage 1 points and spent portions of Sunday running considerably better before a second stop for major adjustments interrupted the progress. It‘s not nothing, but it‘s also a long way from the kind of performances needed to make a serious championship push. Suárez is now 215 points behind Larson with four races remaining, and the magic that produced his remarkable Coca-Cola 600 victory at this same track in May has been largely absent throughout The Chase. There‘s still time for another plot twist, technically. It would certainly be nice to see something other than 13th or 14th for a change.

Analysis: Charlotte was an improvement over Las Vegas. Preece finished 15th after a fairly anonymous afternoon in which he failed to score stage points and spent most of the race outside the top 15. That‘s now consecutive Chase races without a top 10 after opening the postseason with three in the first four, and the No. 60 has slipped to last among the 16 Chase drivers, 227 points behind Larson. Phoenix at least offers a reasonable baseline after Preece finished 13th there in March, but the larger picture is becoming awfully difficult to dress up. He has already delivered a couple of finishes this season that nobody saw coming. At this point, he probably needs another one simply to make the final month interesting.

The three series will carry over the same tire combinations from their most recent visits to the 1-mile Arizona oval. The NASCAR Cup Series and O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series will use the familiar setup from their visit last March, and the Craftsman Truck Series last used this combo for its season finale last fall.

RELATED: Weekend schedule | NASCAR on TV this week | Watch NASCAR video highlights

The NASCAR Cup Series will ride on left-side rubber that‘s used only at Phoenix. The right-side rubber for Sunday‘s Freeway Insurance 500 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) — the sixth of 10 races in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 — has been deployed at five other tracks this season, most recently at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in August.

“The Goodyear Racing Eagles we are bringing this weekend have already been proven on track at Phoenix,” said Justin Fantozzi, Goodyear‘s Director of Racing for the Americas. “This is a somewhat unusual track, so we draw from our typical short track and intermediate track packages, along with a left-side Cup Series tire that only races here.”

The O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series will take part in Saturday‘s Timberland PRO 200 (7:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) with a tire setup last used at World Wide Technology Raceway in Gateway last month. The Craftsman Truck Series will compete in Friday‘s Zero Carbon Bioethanol 150 Powered by Poet (7:30 p.m. ET, FS2, FOX One, NRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), riding on a Goodyear combination that has seen action four times since last year‘s championship race.

All three series will also have access to wet-weather tires (four sets for each Cup Series team, and three sets each in the O‘Reilly and Trucks Series) in the event of inclement weather.

Tire allotments for each team competing this weekend:

• Cup Series: 11 total sets — 8 new sets for the race, 1 for qualifying, which transfers to the race and 2 for practice.
• O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series: 5 total sets — 3 new sets for the race, 1 for qualifying, which transfers to the race and 1 for practice.
• Craftsman Truck Series: 5 total sets — 3 new sets for the race, 1 for qualifying, which transfers to the race and 1 for practice.

Here‘s where we stand in The Chase after the Bank of America 400 at Charlotte and before Sunday‘s Freeway Insurance 500 at Phoenix Raceway (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

RELATED: Charlotte results | Cup Series standings

Chase Changer

There were two big moments in Sunday‘s race that had profound effects on what the standings look like today — or what they could‘ve looked like had these moments played out differently. The top one was when Briscoe‘s No. 19 Toyota crew turned in the three fastest pit stops of the day, including on Lap 207 when Briscoe took the lead from Bell and held onto it for the final 61 laps to win the race by 0.029 seconds. Any lost time on pit road could have cost Briscoe the win, and had Bell won, he‘d be only 31 points behind Larson instead of 51.

The other big moment came earlier on Lap 123 when Larson received contact from Denny Hamlin and dropped from second place to seventh. Up to that point, Larson had dominated, winning Stage 1 after leading the first 45 laps and leading a long stretch between Laps 59 and 107. But after the bump from Hamlin, Larson led only two more laps the rest of the way. Larson finished sixth and gained nine points over Hamlin in the standings and now enjoys a 49-point gap, but the margin could‘ve been a lot bigger had Larson continued his dominance throughout the race and ended up winning.

The Chase Board

Despite Briscoe‘s hot streak, Larson‘s lead over the second-place driver in the standings has grown. This is both a testament to Larson‘s ability to avoid the catastrophes that have plagued other Chase drivers and the fact that the driver in the hottest pursuit of him is coming from pretty far back to begin with. It would be a different story if it were Hamlin who was on a two-race winning streak and cozying himself up to Larson in the standings.

The rest of the field needs Larson to have a bad day, but that just hasn‘t happened. The sixth-place finish at Charlotte was his “bad day” of this Chase so far, but it‘s certainly not the type of meltdown needed to make a big difference. Meanwhile, Bubba Wallace and William Byron were collected in a massive wreck with Alex Bowman and saw their days end early. Hamlin had issues on pit road that caused him to lose track position. Ryan Blaney picked up a speeding penalty on pit road. Chase Elliott had to come back down pit road to tighten a lug nut, and the list goes on without Larson being on it.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

As a result of Larson‘s near-perfection, the pressure is building on the other drivers. And that pressure is perhaps no greater than on Hamlin, who has set the deadline of this year or next for him to finally win a championship. Hamlin was supposed to gain ground on Larson in the stretch of three intermediate tracks, but instead his deficit to Larson has grown from one point to 49 points. Hamlin‘s demeanor has also seemed to change as the chances for him to snap out of his Chase “funk” have started to melt away.

Source: Racing Insights

Next Up

Phoenix Raceway is next, with the former host of Championship Weekend starting a string of three races all on different track types, with Talladega Superspeedway and Martinsville Speedway to follow before the season finishes up on a 1.5-mile track at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Perhaps the driver most likely to benefit from this stretch is Blaney, who has won multiple times on all three of these tracks, including the last two Phoenix races.

But he will get competition from teammate Joey Logano, who has four wins at Phoenix, and Bell and Hamlin, who each have two wins there. Briscoe got his first Cup Series win in 2022 for Stewart-Haas Racing but has struggled there of late with no finishes better than 18th over the last four races.

Kyle Larson also has a win at Phoenix back in 2021 when his pit crew executed a perfect final stop to propel him to the championship. Larson has finished in the top four in six of the last seven Phoenix races, so a chance for a slip-up does not appear too good — unless you believe in the law of averages.

Fellow Chase drivers Byron and Elliott also have wins at Phoenix, with theirs coming in spring of 2023 and fall of 2020, respectively. So Hendrick, Gibbs and Penske appear headed for a battle in the desert to see where this Chase journey takes us.

Behind them, Kyle Larson walked away without a top-five finish for the first time this year in The Chase presented by Mobil 1. The No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet took the checkered flag a postseason-worst sixth … which serves as a reminder of how blindingly fast the defending champions have been through The Chase so far.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

JGR is trying to claw away at Larson‘s points lead, particularly on the heels of Briscoe‘s second consecutive victory: Larson extended his lead over Hamlin to 49 points, while Bell and Briscoe now trail by 51 and 65 points respectively. In theory, that‘s a healthy margin ahead of the competition considering second place pays just 35 points. But with four races remaining, Larson knows better than to feel safe out front.

“I won‘t feel comfortable until it‘s over,” Larson said. “I mean, obviously, like Briscoe winning and having a good day, like you can take big chunks out if you win. We‘re gonna go to some tracks where others are really good at here coming up, and just got to keep putting in days like we did today when we weren‘t the fastest but still get good points.”

Larson has been the class of the field throughout the opening 60% of The Chase, claiming two wins and posting an absurd 2.8 average finish. The team rallied from a sluggish start at Las Vegas and was strong early in Sunday‘s Bank of America 400 at Charlotte, leading a race-high 97 laps. But Larson wasn‘t able to overcome Toyota‘s strength once his Chevrolet was caught in traffic.

Cliff Daniels, crew chief of Larson‘s No. 5 team, saw Sunday‘s result as a helpful look inside the true battle for this year‘s NASCAR Cup Series championship.

“I mean the Toyotas were really fast, and honestly, a good reality check for us,” Daniels told NASCAR.com. “I think that they‘re pushing hard and we have to continue to push ourselves really hard. Up front earlier, our car was OK. I think Stage 2, we weren‘t bad. Stage 3, when we got back in traffic, we just weren‘t quite as strong, and we‘ll certainly pick through what we could have done better to try to keep up with the track, with the car. Kyle, talking to me after the race, said, ‘Man, I just didn‘t feel that bad. Just need a little bit of this or that.‘ So again, good reality check for how fast those guys are, and yeah, we‘ve just got to keep pushing hard for the next four.”

Joe Gibbs, team owner and namesake of Joe Gibbs Racing, sees good prospects ahead for his top three teams. And all he needs is an opportunity.

“I‘m just really thrilled where we are as an organization, and I think we do have three that are sitting there probably 50 to (65) points behind,” Gibbs said. “We don‘t know what‘s going to happen, but hey, with four races to go, all you can ask for in pro sports is to have a chance, and I think we have a chance.”

For a moment at Kansas Speedway on Sept. 27, Briscoe seemed destined for victory after passing Larson for the race lead late in the going — a win that would have marked the first of three consecutive victories for the No. 19 Toyota. Instead, Briscoe‘s handling built too loose late and Larson surged back by him for the race win. No. 19 crew chief James Small was furious that afternoon. Now, in consecutive weeks, Briscoe has held off fierce charges late — at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, against Larson; at Charlotte, against Bell — and cut his deficit to Larson‘s points lead from 123 points (eighth) to 65 (fourth) in just two weeks.

“I think we‘ve got to step on their throats while we can,” Small said. “You‘ve got to keep winning. It‘s still a big gap, and if they just consistently score points and answer, even if we go and win the next three, it‘s still very hard to close that gap. So yeah, I‘m not going to let off the throttle pedal right now.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Briscoe is admittedly not a guy who carries a step-on-their-throats kind of demeanor. Actually, “definitely not,” Small said, but that‘s a balance Briscoe is still managing.

“I mean, you can step on their throat. You can be a nice guy though outside of the race car,” Briscoe said. “But in the race car, I think you‘ve got to be a killer. And yeah, I think for us, that‘s the whole approach is just going, and I mean just trying to dominate races. Like I was saying earlier, that‘s the only way you‘re going to cut into the gap is by winning races. If you just run second or third and Larson runs second or third with you, you‘re not going to gain 65 points in four weeks. So yeah, just have to go win races and just have to be ultra aggressive, truthfully. …

“Compared to Kansas, [the championship] feels a little more realistic. But I mean, the gap honestly still feels huge and just feels like a missed opportunity. Like I said, there‘s four laps I can count on my hand where I‘ve gave up 75 points. So, from that standpoint, it feels like a little bit of a missed opportunity. Just the gap still feels huge, but yeah, you‘re at least still in the mix.”

Somewhere in this equation lies Denny Hamlin, the No. 1 seed entering The Chase, who has been OK but not quite to his winning standard throughout NASCAR‘s postseason. His fifth-place finish Sunday at Charlotte was his second-best result behind a third-place run at Kansas two weeks ago. After starting the 10-race run to a championship with a 55-point advantage over Larson, Hamlin now trails him by 49 points and hasn‘t won since June 14 at Pocono Raceway.

“It just seems like we‘re pretty good, just not really top two right now,” Hamlin said. “So we‘ve just got to improve performance and figure out where we‘ve got to improve. I felt good about where I was all day and just until the very end right there.”

For a moment, Hamlin seemed to have his mojo back. Ripping through the field after a Lap 36 pit penalty, Hamlin keyed his radio at Lap 92 after passing Daniel Suárez for seventh place: “You let these [expletives] know I‘m on my way!” That attitude continued as he moved Larson out of the way inside the top five on a Lap 123 restart. But that surge of bravado eventually faded.

“Well, our run stopped there unfortunately, so I shouldn‘t have opened my mouth on that one,” Hamlin said. “But I just felt like we had a race-winning car for the first 100 (laps) and then after that, just got stuck in that third (or) fourth range and just couldn‘t do anything with it, especially when the track cooled off. I was trying to make up a lot of the time that we had lost in that first stage by going to the back.”

Bell was just 0.029 seconds shy of taking the win away from Briscoe, a swing in points that would have put Bell just 31 points behind Larson and Briscoe 85 out. Sitting third in points, the No. 20 driver wasn‘t interested in any silver linings Sunday night.

RELATED: Bell ‘in shock‘ after Charlotte loss

But as it stands, three JGR Toyotas are now hot on Larson‘s heels heading to a track where he knows he needs to improve: “I mean, Phoenix is difficult for us here lately.”

For Cliff Daniels, the focus remains solely on his No. 5 team, regardless of JGR‘s progress or any other competitor‘s.

“I feel like it‘s us against us, and it‘s always been that way,” Daniels said. “You have to stay focused on your game and the things that you have to do to improve yourself. We know how good those guys are. I mean, the whole world knows how good those guys are. So to spend time thinking about how good they are would just be a waste of brain cells, really. We‘ve just got to go focus on the things that we‘ve got to do to be strong from here on out.”

Jesse Love and Justin Allgaier also contended for victory under the lights at the 1.5-mile oval, but a late restart with 10 laps to go helped Day leapfrog both pilots, with the pair left with second- and fourth-place results, respectively.

Love, driver of the No. 2 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, said losing the aerodynamic and lane advantages to Day on the final restart made it difficult to regain the lead.

RELATED: Unofficial results | At-track photos: Charlotte

“Feel like I ran a good race and did a lot of things right, and then made a mistake on the restart and kind of washed up a little bit,” Love said. “Feel like I was still in a fine spot, but without the control of the air in the front and not having any traffic to really navigate, and my car kind of only working in one lane — when he kind of took it away from me, it was pretty hard to put the air (on Day). It is what it is. If I could redo it, I would.”

Day, Love and Allgaier swapped the lead all night, and all three showed the speed to separate themselves from everyone else.

Allgaier, who led 54 laps and won Stage 2, had one of the strongest cars on the long run, but ultimately didn‘t have enough time after the final restart to get his No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet going before the checkered flag.

“Just disappointing from my standpoint,” Allgaier said. “We did a lot of really good things tonight. Had a really good car. Great in the long run, and I think that‘s what makes that last run so disappointing. That last set of tires just didn‘t react the same. I fired off tight and got even tighter, and that wasn‘t really the case of what we fought all night.”

During the final stage, Allgaier brushed the wall and surrendered the lead to Love as Day joined the battle.

It didn‘t fully hamper Allgaier‘s night, but made the No. 7 vulnerable until the finish.

WATCH: Allgaier rehashes Charlotte finish | NASCAR video highlights

“The incident with the wall — I mean — it was kind of insult to injury at that point,” Allgaier said. “I already knew we were in trouble. First thing I did was look at the front tires to see if we had any cording or anything like that because I felt like we really abused them there on that last run and just came up short.”

While the coveted win bonus wasn‘t in the cards for either Love or Allgaier, they both cut into Sheldon Creed‘s points lead with four races to go.

Love sits just two points behind Creed for the championship lead heading to Phoenix Raceway on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), while Allgaier gained 15 points on the No. 00 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet driver — an important bounce back for the 2024 O‘Reilly champion after wrecking out at Las Vegas Motor Speedway the previous weekend.

Four unique venues await a championship battle that sees four drivers separated by just 15 points.

MORE: O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series standings | O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series schedule

“Got a good track for us in Phoenix coming up and probably not a great one for a lot of people, so looking forward to that,” Love added. “But at the same time, try to get in the best points position possible because the last couple of races are going to be pretty hectic. Homestead and Martinsville, you‘re kind of weighing risk, reward  and what you want to do. I feel like I have somewhat of a good enough reputation with most of the guys in the garage to kind of help my case at Martinsville. But we can go in there and get wrecked at Talladega again, get wrecked at Martinsville, so again, just gotta try to be smart, and then go to Homestead with a shot.”

“We got a lot of racing to go,” Allgaier said. “That‘s been kind of our motto at the shop is like we were down, but there‘s so much racing left to go, and there‘s so many places, so many different styles of racing that we still have left. I think everybody‘s got strengths. Obviously, Jesse and I had a great battle tonight. I think that everybody in that top four has a shot at it. Even Carson being 40 back. I mean, I was 30 back when the night started, and we‘re only 15 back. So one good night can really change the game for everybody. I think we‘re all going to go down to the end at Homestead and hopefully do a good job.”

With 10 laps left in Sunday’s rain-postponed Blue Cross NC 300 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Day steered his car beneath the No. 2 Chevy of defending series champion Jesse Love and the No. 7 Camaro of Justin Allgaier and surged into the lead.

Pursued closely by Love for the remainder of the race, Day crossed the finish line 0.728 seconds ahead of the Richard Childress Racing driver. Series leader Sheldon Creed passed Allgaier on the final lap to secure third place.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

With his first victory at Charlotte, his fourth of the season and fourth of his career, Day climbed two positions to third in the Chase standings, seven points behind Creed, who leads second-place Love by a mere two points.

With consecutive wins at Las Vegas and Charlotte, Day has made up 85 points on the series lead in the two outings.

“I think the 2 got really loose from what I could see up there in front of the 7, and that kind of messed them both up,” Day said of the winning pass in the middle of the backstretch at the 1.5-mile track. “That was just enough for me to get a good run (off Turn 2) and take my run.

“That was crucial. I think if I don‘t do that, I don‘t win the race.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

After winning the first stage, Day rallied from a penalty for driving through too many pit boxes during the stage break. He restarted 30th on Lap 54, but by the end of the second stage (Lap 90), he had charged through the field to seventh.

“What a job by my guys,” Day said. “I screw up and (go through) too many boxes on entry and just have the car to do that (drive back to the front).”

With Love and Day chasing him, Allgaier held the lead from a restart on Lap 164 until Lap 183. But his car tightened up on his last set of tires, and Allgaier scraped the outside wall in Turn 4 with 17 circuits left, allowing both Love and Day to pass.

Brent Crews slammed the wall on Lap 186 to cause the seventh and final caution, setting up the final restart on Lap 191 and Day‘s dramatic pass for the win, after he fell briefly to third behind Love and Allgaier in the first two corners of the restart lap.

Love thought he had a better car at the end of the race but couldn‘t find a way around Day.

WATCH: Hear from Creed | Hear from Allgaier

“At the end, the 17 was not quite as good as we were, but just good enough that, when he took my air away, it was really hard to make up ground,” Love said. “I wish I could have had that one back, but I‘m still proud of myself for driving really hard and doing a lot of things right tonight.”

Creed recovered from early contact with the wall and a lengthy repair under caution to secure the third spot. Behind Allgaier in fourth, non-Chase driver Carson Brown made a late charge into fifth.

Brandon Jones, Austin Hill, Anthony Alfredo, Taylor Gray and Brennan Poole completed the top 10.

Polesitter Carson Kvapil, who came to Charlotte 19 points behind Creed in second place, suffered a cut right rear tire and contact with the outside wall. Kvapil finished 32nd, 29 laps down, and dropped three spots to fifth in the standings, 40 points behind Creed.

The O‘Reilly Series Chase continues next Saturday with the Timberland PRO 200 at Phoenix Raceway (7:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

With three laps to go in Stage 1 of the Bank of America 400, Bubba Wallace, in the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota, and Alex Bowman, in the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, made contact, with Bowman getting loose in Turn 2 and slamming into Wallace while battling for fifth.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

Wallace hit the outside wall before sliding down the backstretch, then backing into the inside wall before his car came to rest. He suffered significant rear-end damage. Wallace sat in his car for several minutes while track personnel tended to him, before exiting under his own power.

“No warning. I saw it in the last second — the 48 (Alex Bowman) come up and clip us,” Wallace said. “No hard feelings, that is just racing. I was starting to drop, and it gets into a tight spot. To get on pit road smooth, we wanted to stay in front of him. He just got loose and got us. The first hit wiped our brakes out. The second hit got me good. But we are good. Still got nine fingers and nine toes (laughter), so we are fine.”

“Yeah, I‘m fine,” Bowman said. “I had run down there a lot and been really tight on exit, and yeah, as soon as I touched the throttle, it snapped, and it really, obviously, caught me off guard, and I overcorrected, and just did a [expletive] job, and we ruined some guys‘ days. So I hate that for William and Bubba. It‘s on me. Should be better than that. But yeah, just not really sure why it snapped as bad as it did. We had been down there so much and been really tight on exit, but should have been ahead of it better than that.”

WATCH: Wallace describes wreck | Bowman: ‘It‘s on me‘ | Byron on getting caught in incident

William Byron, another Chaser, was also involved in the wreck, his No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy receiving right-front damage.

“It looks like the No. 48 (Alex Bowman) just got loose and overcorrected it into the wall,” Byron said. “I was running the top, and I lifted right away, but I couldn‘t get low enough because he kind of came back off the wall. I hate it for this No. 24 Valvoline Blood Cancer United Chevrolet team. We had a top-five run going, so it‘s just unfortunate.”

All three drivers saw their day end following the incident, with Wallace, Bowman and Byron scored 37th, 38th and 39th, respectively. They were all evaluated and released from the infield care center.

Wallace entered Charlotte action 10th in The Chase standings, 137 markers behind points leader Kyle Larson. Byron ranked 12th in points entering Sunday‘s race, 160 points behind the leader.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

On Wednesday leading into Charlotte, Bell called his shot, saying, “If we can go out and win three of the next five, I think I‘ll be the champion.”

However, the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing driver missed his target Sunday by a mere 0.029 seconds at the checkered flag of The Chase midpoint.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

“I think I‘m just in shock right now,” Bell said. “I didn‘t think it was going to end like that.

“I was just out there logging laps. I stayed with him pretty good, and then I had a couple moments where I slid really bad and let him get away.”

Briscoe and the No. 19 JGR Toyota held off Bell‘s No. 20 machine in the waning laps, the Hoosier getting the better of the Oklahoman in the closest Cup Series finish so far in 2026 and the second-closest finish in Charlotte Cup history. The top mark came over two decades ago, when Jimmie Johnson beat Bobby Labonte on May 29, 2005, in the Coca-Cola 600.

Bell was more than two seconds behind Briscoe with under 10 laps to go.

Lapped traffic halted the No. 19‘s progress, and Briscoe wasn‘t going to take a risk on the longest green-flag run of the day. But parking the bus to Victory Lane nearly granted Bell one of the biggest steals in recent memory.

“I just didn‘t expect to get there,” Bell said. “Whenever I got beside of him, I thought I stalled him, and then I kind of got out of shape. I guess I should have stayed into him a little bit harder and tried to nose him to the line.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Even with a long run to the finish, No. 20 crew chief Adam Stevens said there wasn‘t even a mention of fuel saving until the final laps. He said the difference in what would‘ve been a second win in The Chase happened during the final caution with 60 to go, when an 8.696-second pit stop for Briscoe put him out in front for the final restart.

“We just lost the lead on pit road, man,” Stevens told NASCAR.com. “We can‘t lose the lead on pit road and have it go green the rest of the day.”

For fellow Chase driver Bell, the finish is the No. 20 pilot‘s eighth runner-up result in 2026. Bell led 93 laps during Sunday‘s effort, with that brisk speed garnering valuable stage points thanks to third- and first-place finishes in Stages 1 and 2, respectively.

Bell — who entered Sunday third in The Chase standings, 55 points behind leader Kyle Larson — shaved four points off his deficit, collecting 53 markers on the afternoon.

Despite cutting into Larson‘s championship lead and keeping pace in the title hunt with four races to go, Bell leaves Charlotte frustrated after what could‘ve been a rally that gave the No. 20 driver the most momentum heading west.

MORE: Cup Series standings | Cup Series schedule

“It doesn‘t do any good in the grand scheme of things,” Bell said of his eighth runner-up result in 2026. “I came in negative-55 (to Larson), and I‘m leaving negative-51. So that ain‘t gonna do it.”

The Cup Series competes at Phoenix Raceway next Sunday (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Bell is a two-time winner at the Arizona track, with victories there in the spring of 2024 and 2025.

Briscoe‘s No. 19 Toyota got there first to win Sunday‘s Bank of America 400, just 0.029 seconds ahead of Bell in the second-closest finish in Charlotte Motor Speedway history and the closest in the series this season.

With his second straight victory in the Chase, Briscoe vaulted two spots into fourth place in the postseason standings, 65 points behind leader Kyle Larson, who finished sixth on Sunday, ending his string of five straight top-fives in 2026 Chase races.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

“I don‘t know what it is about these finishes,” said Briscoe, who has run second, first and first by close margins in the last three races. “I‘ve got to quit making it so exciting at the end. Just an amazing car. So cool to get (sponsor) Free Bird into Victory Lane …

“And, yeah, what an amazing run we‘ve been on. Should be three in a row. Amazing job to this team. This pit crew has just been unbelievable. My hero is Tony Stewart. He made a pretty unbelievable run (to the 2011 Cup championship), and hopefully we can do the same thing.”

The 0.029-second margin of victory spelled the difference between Bell climbing to second in the standings, within 35 points of Larson, and remaining third with a 51-point deficit to the leader.

Bell was crestfallen at the narrow loss.

“I got a lot closer than I thought I was going to,” said Bell, who gained just four points on Larson with his runner-up finish. “I‘m surprised that he (Briscoe) fell off as bad as he did at the end. It was a great day, but it‘s a great day that didn‘t get us much.”

SHOP: Winner gear

Bell took the lead in a dramatic three-wide pass after a restart on Lap 173, but a caution for Gray Gaulding‘s spin slowed the field on Lap 205, and Briscoe‘s crew got the No. 19 Camry out of the pits first for a restart on Lap 211.

“They‘ve been an absolute key to it,” Briscoe said of his pit crew, which has excelled during the Chase. “When you can come down pit road and know you‘re going to gain spots every time — or if you‘re in the lead, not lose the lead — it just makes your job so much easier as a race car driver.”

Briscoe stayed out front the rest of the way, logging 61 of his 62 laps led on the final run. Bell, however, closed dramatically over the final five laps as Briscoe encountered lapped traffic and felt he had a tire losing air. After the late contact in the tri-oval, Briscoe prevailed — by the slimmest of margins.

“When I got that final pack of lapped cars with five or six to go, I mean, I just felt like I was going to knock the wall down at any point,” Briscoe said. “It just quit turning.”

Larson, who won the first stage and finished fourth in the second, increased his advantage over second-place Denny Hamlin from 40 to 49 points. Hamlin finished fifth on Sunday but failed to score points in the first stage after incurring a safety violation on his first pit stop of the race under a competition caution.

“I was not in a position of power,” Larson said of the final run, during which he fell from fourth to sixth in the running order. “I was hanging on. Yeah, honestly, I thought I was going to manage that run well. The top two (Briscoe and Bell) pushed really hard, and I could see Denny kind of settled in, so I was settling in just to try to make my tires live.

“Yeah, just got really, really loose on that run. Just not sure if maybe me not pushing enough kind of made the balance shifted rearward, using the rears too much, and I was just hanging on the last 15, 18 laps. Happy to still come in with a sixth and extend the points lead, but there was a couple other guys that kind of closed that gap a little bit.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Ryan Blaney finished third and leaves Charlotte fifth in the Chase standings, 85 points behind Larson. Non-Chase driver Josh Berry trailed Blaney in fourth at the 1.5-mile intermediate speedway.

Larson took the lead from the pole and led five times for 97 laps, including the first 45. Bell led three times for 93 laps and won the second stage handily over Blaney.

The race was a disaster for two Chase drivers, through no fault of their own. On Lap 77, the No. 48 Chevrolet of non-Chase driver Alex Bowman broke loose underneath the Toyota of Bubba Wallace near the Turn 2 exit, sending both cars hurtling hard into the outside wall.

The No. 24 Chevy of William Byron also sustained terminal damage in the wreck.

READ: More info about the wreck

The No. 54 Toyota of Chase driver Ty Gibbs suffered a broken right rear toe link after an accident on Lap 41. Gibbs lost eight laps under repairs on pit road and finished 34th.

Joey Logano ran ninth but scored no stage points and fell two positions to sixth in the standings, 92 points behind Larson.

The Cup Series returns next Sunday at Phoenix Raceway with four races to determine the 2026 champion (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Stage 2 recap: Bell claims the second stage

Christopher Bell won Stage 2 of Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The race is the sixth of 10 in The Chase presented by Mobil 1.

Ryan Blaney finished second, followed by Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick. Austin Cindric, Chase Briscoe, Josh Berry, Chase Elliott and Carson Hocevar completed the top 10 and points earners. Berry was the only non-Chase driver to earn points in the frame.

MORE: Full Stage 2 results | Watch Bell win Stage 2

Larson fired back to the lead on the stage restart on Lap 86, holding that advantage for the next 21 circuits. Bell passed him for his first lead of the afternoon on Lap 107, wheeling away from the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet until a Lap 117 yellow.

That caution was for John Hunter Nemechek, who spun through the infield ballfield in his No. 42 Legacy Motor Club Toyota. His car appeared to have no damage at first, but amid rushing his Toyota back to pit road, a right-front tire went down, tearing up that corner of his ride.

After a Stage 1 pit-road penalty, Hamlin climbed to sixth before that yellow. He gained two more spots on pit road as the lead lappers stopped for service, restarting fourth. Then attempting to fill a gap three-wide middle, Hamlin contacted Larson‘s right-rear, sending Larson up the track and down to seventh.

Bell maintained his lead for the rest of the stage, scoring 10 crucial points as he looks to track down Larson and Hamlin atop the Cup standings.

Stage 1 recap: Larson wins opening frame

Kyle Larson won Stage 1 of Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Chase Briscoe finished second, followed by Christopher Bell, Austin Cindric and Tyler Reddick. Daniel Suárez, Corey Heim, Carson Hocevar, Chris Buescher and Ryan Blaney completed the top 10 and points earners.

MORE: Full Stage 1 results

Larson led every lap in the opening 35-lap stint until NASCAR displayed a scheduled competition caution. The yellow was necessitated after rain washed out practice and qualifying on Saturday.

Denny Hamlin climbed from a 12th-place starting position to sixth during the first run. But while on pit road for tires and fuel, he was penalized for a safety violation after a tire from his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team rolled into Connor Zilisch‘s box in front of him.

Hamlin needed to restart from the rear, along with Blaney and Chase Elliott. Blaney was too fast on pit road, while Elliott needed to make a second stop to retighten the left-front tire.

Hamlin rebounded to finish the stage 15th.

On the restart, Tyler Reddick moved up the track in Turns 1 and 2 from the sixth position, boxing Ty Gibbs in behind him. Gibbs slid up into the wall and immediately suffered damage, plummeting through the field before finally spinning in Turns 3 and 4 and collecting Brad Keselowski. Gibbs fell several laps down while his team assessed the damage.

During the melee, Joey Logano suffered nose damage, piling into Gibbs‘ limp No. 54 Toyota. He needed to visit pit road for repairs, marking five Chase drivers with issues in the opening 42 circuits.

The race restarted on Lap 47 — which featured the first lead change of the afternoon. Wallace darted past Larson, leading 11 laps before Larson quickly regained the top spot on Lap 59.

With three laps to go in the stage, Alex Bowman lost control of his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, hooking right into Bubba Wallace. Wallace then slid down the backstretch, backing into the inside wall. William Byron also suffered damage.

WATCH: In-car cameras capture crash | Hear from Bowman | Hear from Wallace

Wallace was slow to exit his No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota but climbed out and walked away under his own power.

The crash ended the stage.

Contributing: Staff report

Balancing championship defense with offensive mentality

CONCORD, N.C. — In all three national series, the No. 1 seed entering The Chase presented by Mobil 1 has lost the top spot.

Denny Hamlin, Justin Allgaier and Layne Riggs have each surrendered their points leads during The Chase and have ground to make up if they hope to hoist championship trophies at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Current points leaders Sheldon Creed (O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series) and Kaden Honeycutt (Craftsman Truck Series) have each failed to build healthy gaps in their championship leads in their respective series‘ most recent events. Honeycutt lost 20 points in his Truck Series lead to Riggs in the closing laps of Friday night‘s Chase race at Charlotte after sliding up into the wall and being passed for the lead and win by the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports driver.

Those reversals offer a cautionary note for Cup points leader Kyle Larson, who enters Sunday‘s Bank of America 400, the first fall race at Charlotte on the 1.5-mile oval layout since 2017, with a 40-point advantage over Hamlin after a blistering start to The Chase.

Ryan Blaney, who sits fifth in The Chase, compared the pressure of defending a points lead to a recent college football game between two of the country‘s best teams.

MORE: Weekend schedule | At-track photos: Charlotte

“When Ohio State (No. 1 ranked at the time) played Texas early this year, I‘m a big Buckeye fan, they got up, they kind of started playing a little safe, and Texas came back,” Blaney said. “When you start having that lead and trying to keep it, you can maybe shift your mindset to where guys that are chasing, it‘s like, ‘obviously they can‘t afford a mistake either.‘ There‘s that pressure there of like, ‘we can‘t bleed anymore.‘ It‘s just a different mindset of like, ‘oh, we have opportunity to go catch this person.‘ But I‘d much rather have that weight on my shoulders of leading it and just trying to maintain it than having to chase.”

With qualifying washed out due to inclement weather Saturday, two-time Cup champ Larson will lead the field to green Sunday and hold the advantageous first pit stall at Charlotte. He said bluntly that any pressure of being the points leader is a manufactured talking point and there‘s no reason to change course regardless of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team‘s situation.

“I think the media kind of tries to get you to think about it a lot,” Larson said. “For us, I think we‘ve done a good job of just focusing on our race and trying to maximize it, and I don‘t think that you should venture off of that. It‘s easier said than done, I think. But we‘ve done so well in these first five. Why change what your approach has been?”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Recipe for success

Larson has breezed through the first half of the 2026 Cup Series Chase with a whopping average finish of 2.2. He joins a rarefied group of drivers who have blitzed through a five-race stretch during any iteration of the Cup Series postseason, which first debuted in 2004.

The two-time series titleholder joined a crop of drivers who have finished no worse than second in the points standings after race No. 36.

Speed reads

Race-day essentials:

• Charlotte hub: Weekend information, pit stalls, additional results | Read more
• Sunday Setup: Crew chiefs face unknowns after Saturday washout | Read more
• Paint Scheme Preview: Home-cooked designs for Charlotte | View gallery
• Neil Paine: Make-or-break moment looms for Denny Hamlin | Read more
• NASCAR Classics: Rewind with video-vault replays from Charlotte | Watch now
• Power Rankings: Briscoe bolts forward in the latest Top 16 | This week‘s ranks

Unfavorable forecasts provided ample opportunity for crew chiefs to be ready for yet another starting lineup set by the metric ahead of Sunday‘s Bank of America 400 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

MORE: Charlotte starting lineup | At-track photos

Bubba Wallace will take the green flag from eighth place Sunday, matching his finishing result of last week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he earned his career-best 15th top 10 of the season. The No. 23 team at 23XI Racing has been steady through The Chase presented by Mobil 1, garnering four top 10s in five races and sitting 10th in the standings. But with no practice and qualifying on Saturday due to inclement weather, all crew chief Charles Denike has to lean on is the work he and his team put into setting up their No. 23 Toyota at Airspeed, their race shop just 20 minutes west of the speedway.

“It certainly puts all the pressure on our preparation and our tools and everything,” Denike told NASCAR.com. “But we do the same amount of work preparing for practice, the same level of detail to be ready to unload well for practice. So all that will carry over to the start of the race. You‘re just not 100% certain whether you get exactly the ideal balance. And then during the race, you‘re more limited on adjustments during the race than you are for practice on what you can do, certainly within the time that you have on pit road.

“So trying to make sure that you stay in a box that is favorable for that on pit stops. If you decide that you want to do some extra work, you‘re going to be giving up all your track positions. So you don‘t want to be too loose or too tight and not be able to keep it within a good competitive range.”

At Spire Motorsports, Carson Hocevar and the No. 77 team rank 11th in points, the second-best Chevrolet behind points leader Kyle Larson. Hocevar has had excellent runs on the Charlotte oval in recent years, but trouble has thwarted those efforts, most notably through an engine failure in the 2025 Coca-Cola 600. Despite the lack of results to show for their speed, crew chief Luke Lambert is optimistic about returning to the facility‘s 1.5-mile oval instead of the combination road-course/oval that is known as the Roval.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

“For us, we feel pretty confident,” Lambert told NASCAR.com. “The last two Charlotte races, we‘ve been pretty competitive, particularly last year, and obviously things have changed — we‘ve got the new car this year, some things that we‘ve learned over the last year and a half. We kind of have to apply to that, but I think that it‘s really dependent on the team.”

The Next Gen car has never been utilized on the Charlotte oval for a fall race or a Charlotte oval race scheduled for less than 600 miles. How crew chiefs call Sunday‘s race must be different than the approach they bring into May‘s Coca-Cola 600.

“The whole feel of the race is different,” Denike said. “The runs are actually generally a little bit shorter. In the 600, you have four 100-lap stages. It pretty much is broken up into two 50-lap runs, which is about the limit of what we put on this intermediate tire, so a little bit shorter runs in Stage 1 and 2. (We) can get over 50 in Stage 3 but just a whole one less stage. So it makes this race feel a little bit more like a normal mile-and-a-half race for us.”

Charlotte also marks the third intermediate track NASCAR visits in a row, the final in a consecutive stretch of 1.5-mile tracks after Kansas Speedway on Sept. 27 and Las Vegas on Oct. 4. There are “a few things” that teams learned at those two tracks that carry over to Charlotte, but not a ton.

“I think that the tracks are very different,” Lambert said. “Kansas is incredibly smooth, lower banking compared to Charlotte per se, and Vegas is in some ways similar to Kansas, but with a lot more road content — very rough and it was really hot. Now we‘re coming to Charlotte, which is its own animal, really. It‘s an intermediate, but it‘s high-banked, and there‘s definitely some roughness. So yeah, they‘re very different, and the things that we found that work at each of these tracks are not the same.”

There will be a lot of learning throughout the course of Sunday‘s 400-miler. The question now is: who aces the test atop the pit box?

Moments after the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race concluded around the 1.5-mile oval, 10 of Busch‘s most iconic NASCAR rides rolled onto the speedway‘s front straightaway in front of a packed grandstand, with family, fans, former bosses and drivers gathered to reflect on Busch‘s enormous impact on the NASCAR world — through his on-track success, yes, but more importantly and more poignantly, the one-of-a-kind passion he delivered to his loving family.

RELATED: Sights from the celebration | Kurt Busch reflects on his brother

On a night filled with “Rowdy” reflections from Busch‘s contemporaries, the ultimate cap came courtesy of his 11-year-old son, Brexton, who fired up his father‘s No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, waved to the crowd and performed a burnout beyond imagination. The smoke show near Charlotte‘s pit entry ended the only way it could — Brexton climbed from the blue-and-white Chevy and stood on the roof in triumph through the smoke, with his 4-year-old sister Lennix delivering him the checkered flag, cueing Brexton to replicate Kyle‘s signature post-win bow. Brexton leaped off the roof of the car after the bow and embraced his mom, Samantha, and Lennix in a beautiful finale to the evening.

After nearly five months of grieving for Kyle Busch‘s fans, family and peers, Friday offered a chance to relish Kyle‘s greatest victory of all: family.

“This is not the end of Kyle‘s story,” Samantha Busch, Kyle‘s widow, said. “The story continues every time we give a young racer a chance, share something he taught us or tell the next generation what made Rowdy unforgettable. Years from now, I hope people remember Kyle as one of NASCAR‘s greatest drivers. He worked his entire life for that. But I also hope (Brexton and Lennix) meet someone whose life is better because Kyle was here. That‘s a legacy that no checkered flag can contain.”

Some of NASCAR‘s brightest stars stood on stage with FOX Sports‘ Mike Joy to share their funniest, most touching stories from their experiences with Kyle Busch. That list included Kyle‘s older brother, NASCAR Hall of Famer Kurt Busch; Busch‘s former team owner Joe Gibbs; former Kyle Busch Motorsports racers Daniel Suárez, Noah Gragson and Christopher Bell; defending NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Larson; and RCR teammate Austin Dillon.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Memories ranged from life growing up in Las Vegas as a phenom racer to telling Coach Gibbs — a two-sport Hall of Famer — “your cars suck,” to the many nights later in his life spent at Millbridge Speedway mentoring Brexton on the tiny dirt oval.

But the nucleus of the conversation remained the same through each memory, dedicating his life to being the best husband, father and racer all at once.

“As I sit here today, one of the biggest things I learned about Kyle is not just the Rowdy that he leaves behind, but it‘s the love,” Dillon said. “It‘s his love for his family. Every time you see Kyle, you see Samantha. Samantha was a big part of being the marketing, the family behind it. You never didn‘t see Samantha beside Kyle, the support system that he had from her. And let me tell you guys, this sport is tough. It is tough. You‘ve got to be gritty to go out 36 weekends out of the year, travel. It‘s great. It‘s a great life, but I‘m telling you, it‘s a grind. And she‘s right there with him all that time, and that‘s tough. And that‘s what‘s shaping Brexton and Lennix — the love that they all four shared together. …

“Trophies collect dust. Records are meant to be broken. But what you leave behind is your family and your love. And he‘s got an amazing family to leave a legacy forever for him.”

If Larson wasn‘t Busch‘s biggest rival by the end of Rowdy‘s career, he was certainly Busch‘s benchmark. Larson kept winning long into Busch‘s winless drought, giving Larson moments in Victory Lane with his oldest son Owen while Brexton openly asked his father when he would win again in the Cup Series. But rather than let that fuel any animosity, Busch grew an even deeper admiration for Larson — whom he deemed “Tiny Kyle” — and even sought out Larson for help in bettering Brexton as an up-and-coming dirt racer.

“It was kind of unique because I think for a lot of us, you see Kyle in the NASCAR setting, and this was when he was still (with) Joe Gibbs and was very intense and super competitive,” Larson said. “But I got to see him kind of away from that, like out of his element at a dirt track trying to coach Brexton. He was really young and trying to figure out the dirt racing himself as a parent and coach and all that. So yeah, I got to see like a different kind of light-hearted Kyle, I felt like — but also a great coach and intense with Brexton.

“And for me too, having kids a similar age as Brexton and me looking up to Kyle so much and how he was able to coach and lead, I tried to take as many notes as I could, watching from a distance. But yeah, just getting to spend time with him at race tracks that were more my element was kind of cool.”

MORE: Daniel Suárez on how Kyle changed his career

Cindric has driven the iconic car number for the historic team since 2022, winning the Daytona 500 that February. His new contract ensures a continued stay in Penske‘s winningest car number for the near future.

MORE: Cup Series Chase standings | Updated Charlotte schedule

Cindric sits ninth in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 standings after a strong recent run of results, earning two top fives and three top 10s in his last four races, including a notable and season-best second-place finish on Sept. 27 at Kansas Speedway.

Cindric responded simply but emphatically, “That‘s correct,” when asked if he would be staying put for the 2027 season — secured by an additional “yes” when asked to confirm he‘s remaining in the No. 2 Ford.

“It‘s obviously come up in question, and I‘m not entirely certain why it‘s come into question, but there you go,” Cindric said during Saturday‘s media availabilities at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The 28-year-old North Carolina native is producing a career-best 15.7 average finish through 31 of 36 contests this season, bolstered by an impressive stretch that began this summer. Over the last eight races, Cindric has finished 13th or better, supercharging his run into The Chase and performing once the postseason began.

MORE: Austin Cindric driver page | Watch NASCAR video highlights

“I feel like consistency is kind of due to necessity with where we were regular-season points-wise for really the last two or three months,” Cindric said, “so definitely critical for us to be able to execute at that high of a level, and obviously, it‘s that time of year to bring our best stuff and be able to come to race tracks for a second time and apply good notebooks throughout the regular season and into The Chase. So obviously it‘s shown, and we‘ve got to keep it rolling for the next five weeks.”

Cindric‘s champion teammates Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano have taken notice of the general uptick around the No. 2 team‘s performance. Blaney and Cindric have both finished inside the top five in each of their last two starts.

“Austin, I think, has been an incredible asset to our group,” said Blaney, the 2023 Cup Series champion. “It‘s been fun to work with him since ‘22, really, when he (went) full time. Brings a lot of knowledge for how young he is. He brings a lot of good ideas. I enjoy his insight in our meetings and things like that. He makes me think about things a different way — which I mean, Joey does that too. We all kind of play off each other, but it‘s nice that group has been able to have some clean races and have the speed — not only have clean races, but have the speed to run up front. I mean, gosh, I think one thing goes different in Kansas, he wins that race.

“He puts a lot of work in. I think (crew chief) Brian Wilson is very good at what he does. So yeah, it‘s nice for that group to get going, and Austin (is) probably one of the hardest working guys in the garage, I think, of just time and effort he puts into things, and being very methodical, and it‘s nice that it‘s finally paying off for that group.”

Logano, a three-time Cup title winner, has also seen the No. 2 team‘s pace pick up, a trend that can help all of Team Penske in the long run.

“He‘s been really strong here recently, and they‘ve been executing solid races,” Logano said. “And really, they‘ve brought a lot of speed to the race track. That‘s the biggest thing that I‘ve noticed different. Austin‘s always been a great competitor, great teammate, real student of the sport. Works really hard at it. So it‘s not a huge surprise to me. But obviously, we‘re looking and saying, ‘Hey, why are you guys so fast? What‘s going on over here? What are you guys doing?‘ And that‘s part of having a good teammate.”

Cindric stormed to the 2020 NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series championship and was one corner short of a second straight title in 2021. Cindric has 13 O‘Reilly wins, plus a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series victory at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in 2017.

The Team Penske roster is now set for the 2027 campaign after a multiyear contract extension for Blaney was announced in May, and Logano is signed through at least next season. Defending O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series champion Jesse Love will take over the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford in 2027, an affiliate car to Team Penske, replacing Josh Berry after the season ends.

Riggs‘ seventh victory of the season wasn‘t quite as easy as that assessment might have implied. In fact, the driver of the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford had to pass Chase leader Kaden Honeycutt on Lap 128 of 134 to secure his second NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series victory of the season at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the 12th win of his career.

The victory had enormous implications for the series championship. In taking the checkered flag, Riggs narrowed his Chase deficit to 17 points behind Honeycutt, who finished third after losing the runner-up spot to Christian Eckes one lap after Riggs made the winning pass.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Charlotte

“That was a hell of a battle there at the end with me and the 11 (Honeycutt),” said Riggs, who got past Honeycutt when the No. 11 Toyota broke loose in the top lane and tagged the outside wall with the right rear. “That was a lot of fun.

“I think I had to pass the 11 three or four times (after losing spots in the pits). We‘ve got to still work on pit road. That was our weakness still, but I kept driving to the front.”

For Riggs, the victory was redemption for the second Chase race Sept. 26 at Kansas, where Riggs hit the outside wall while running second late in the race and finished 19th.

“At Kansas, I was up there, and internally I pressured myself that I needed to go win. Today, I didn‘t have any pressure. I just went out and wheeled it.”

Honeycutt repeatedly beat Riggs off pit road but couldn‘t hold off the No. 34 Ford on the race track.

“I don‘t know how the heck I saved that,” Honeycutt said of his near-spin near the wall while trying to defend the lead with seven laps left. “Just seeing the replay, I wish I hadn‘t been air-blocking him as much as I did. It just took away what I was trying to do.

“I just focused on him too much. I should have run my own race.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Riggs and Honeycutt split the first two stages, with Riggs winning his 12th of the season in Stage 1 and finishing second to Honeycutt in Stage 2.

Eckes finished second for the second straight race but remains fourth in the standings, 88 points behind Honeycutt with four Chase races left. Chandler Smith came home fifth behind non-Chase driver Bayley Currey and trails Honeycutt by 77 points.

“Our Chevrolet was really solid all day,” Eckes said. “We just kind of slow down the straightaway and struggled with a couple balance items. It‘s still good to finish second in back-to-back weeks.

“Obviously, we want to win, and I feel like we‘re right on the cusp of doing that.”

The race featured five cautions for 28 laps and one 12-minute, 58-second red-flag period for an eight-truck accident on Lap 118. That wreck took out two of the five Kyle Busch tribute cars entered in the race, which preceded a celebration of the life of the late NASCAR Cup Series champion. Both the No. 7 of pole winner Connor Mosack (honoring the 100th Truck Series victory of Kyle Busch Motorsports) and the No. 77 of Rajah Caruth (commemorating KBM‘s first win) exited the race at that point.

Daniel Hemric, Landen Lewis, Andrés Pérez, Tyler Ankrum and Justin Haley completed the top 10.

MORE: Truck Series standings | Truck Series schedule

The Truck Series Chase continues next Friday at Phoenix Raceway (7:30 p.m. ET, FS1, FOX One, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

NOTE: Post-race inspection was completed in the Craftsman Truck Series garage with no issues, confirming Riggs as the Charlotte winner.

While plenty remains unknown at Charlotte Motor Speedway this weekend, one thing appears familiar: Toyota‘s strength on intermediate tracks. NASCAR‘s home track hasn‘t hosted a fall race on the oval in nearly a decade, but Toyota dominated before rain shortened May‘s Coca-Cola 600 and flexed its muscle again last weekend at Las Vegas. Kyle Larson‘s postseason surge, however, could pose the biggest threat yet to the manufacturer‘s recent reign.

Returning to Fastlane this year is my weekly NASCAR 36 for 36 pick, where you can come play along. It‘s a season-long points battle introduced in 2024 where strategy is the primary emphasis. With 36 chartered cars and 36 races on the 2026 schedule, players can choose each car once for the duration of the season.

MUST START
Driver: Chase Briscoe, Joe Gibbs Racing, No. 19 Toyota
Selections remaining: 2
Comment: There might not be a better driver than Briscoe currently in the Cup Series at intermediate tracks. The No. 19 team has won two of the last three races at 1.5-mile venues, including a dominant performance in Sin City. He was out front late the week before at Kansas Speedway before smacking the wall multiple times.

Driver: Denny Hamlin, Joe Gibbs Racing, No. 11 Toyota
Selections remaining: 2
Comment: With a scorching start to the 2026 season, Hamlin shouldn‘t be reprimanded for how The Chase presented by Mobil 1 has begun for the No. 11 team. Before a Lap 77 spin at Las Vegas, he had a streak of eight straight races at 1.5-mile tracks with finishes of fourth or better. That included a third-place effort in May at Charlotte after leading 75 circuits.

Driver: Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing, No. 45 Toyota
Selections remaining: 2
Comment: Reddick recovered from an early alternator issue at Las Vegas to finish third, reminding everyone how solid the No. 45 team is at intermediates. Charlotte fits Reddick‘s wheelhouse, as he led a race-high 119 laps in May. In eight starts at the Charlotte oval, he has an average finish of 9.5, which trails only Hall of Famer Rex White among drivers who have made multiple starts in NASCAR‘s backyard.

DRIVERS TO AVOID
Driver: Joey Logano, Team Penske, No. 22 Ford
Selections remaining: 4
Comment: Penske has made strides at intermediates, scoring two top fives in the last two races. Logano, however, hasn‘t joined the party, with his last 1.5-mile top five coming in his 2025 Texas win. He finished eighth in May at Charlotte, but he didn‘t finish better than 14th in his previous five visits.

Driver: Daniel Suárez, Spire Motorsports, No. 7 Chevrolet
Selections remaining: 5
Comment: Suárez‘s crew chief Ryan Sparks threw a Hail Mary attempt in May to win the crown-jewel race. Suárez fended off a Toyota brigade and was assisted by multiple cautions before Mother Nature prematurely ended the race. The victory is Suárez‘s only finish better than 15th in the last 10 Charlotte races.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

SLEEPERS OF THE WEEK
Driver: Austin Cindric, Team Penske, No. 2 Ford
Selections remaining: 4
Comment: History would tell you to stay far away from Cindric at Charlotte. In five starts, he has an average finish of 30.8, his worst among all Cup tracks. However, the fifth-year driver is amid consecutive top fives for the first time in his career, both coming at 1.5-mile venues.

Driver: Shane van Gisbergen, Trackhouse Racing, No. 97 Chevrolet
Selections remaining: 5
Comment: The road-course ace has led Trackhouse at intermediate tracks in 2026, scoring his best 1.5-mile finish at Las Vegas in ninth. In May, SVG had an average running position of 7.8 and spent 328 of 373 laps planted inside the top 10.

FEATURED MATCHUPS
Ryan Blaney vs. Joey Logano
Pick: Blaney
Comment: With a 20.1 average finish in 16 starts, Charlotte is Blaney‘s worst track on the schedule, statistically. The outlier is a dominant performance in the 2023 Coca-Cola 600, leading 163 circuits. Logano is good, not great in NASCAR‘s hub, but given recent performances at 1.5-mile tracks, Blaney gets the edge.

Kyle Larson vs. Tyler Reddick
Pick: Reddick
Comment: Reddick has defined consistency at Charlotte, while Larson has top 10s in less than 50% of his starts. With just one start remaining with the No. 5 team the rest of the way, I‘m staying clear of Larson this weekend.

Bubba Wallace vs. Carson Hocevar
Pick: Wallace
Comment: Neither driver has finished races off in the Queen City. Hocevar was in contention to win the 2025 Coca-Cola 600 until his engine expired. Wallace has been plenty fast at the quad-oval, with Toyota being the overwhelming favorite entering the weekend. Give me Wallace, even though his 23.0 average finish at Charlotte is his worst among 1.5-mile tracks.

Christopher Bell vs. Denny Hamlin
Pick: Hamlin
Comment: It‘s rare to see Hamlin make a mistake, but his Vegas spin proved costly. Meanwhile, Bell had his own mechanical gremlins, losing power steering. Both JGR drivers need an upswing in performance at Charlotte. While Bell has been ultra-consistent at CMS, Hamlin has five finishes of seventh or better in the last seven Charlotte races, banking 22 top 10s in 35 starts.

MY LINEUP
Starting five: Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, Austin Cindric.
Garage: William Byron.

36 FOR 36
Pick: Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Hyak Motorsports, No. 47 Chevrolet
Comment: With only five races remaining in the 2026 season, it‘s time to get creative with these picks. Ever since Stenhouse made his Cup debut at Charlotte with Wood Brothers Racing in 2011, he‘s had a knack for the track. Dating back to 2017, the two-time NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series champion has 10 top-15 finishes in 12 Charlotte starts, including finishes of 11th and 12th in two attempts with the rebranded Hyak.

Practice and qualifying for both the NASCAR Cup Series and O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series will be moved two hours earlier Saturday. The O‘Reilly Series is set for practice at 8:30 a.m. ET and qualifying to follow at 9:35 a.m. ET, both broadcast on ESPN Unlimited. Cup Series practice is now scheduled for 11 a.m. ET with Busch Light Pole Qualifying at 12:05 p.m. ET, with coverage on truTV, PRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

RELATED: Weekend schedule: Charlotte | At-track photos

The announcement came Friday morning as Isaias moved closer to landfall near Florida‘s Gulf Coast. The storm is expected to bring heavy rain to the southeastern U.S.

Race start times currently remain unchanged for a tripleheader weekend for NASCAR‘s national series.

The Craftsman Truck Series‘ Ecosave 200 is set for a Friday start at 5 p.m. ET (FOX, FOX One, NASCAR Racing Network). The O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series resumes its Chase postseason with the Blue Cross NC 300 on Saturday (4 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). The Cup Series hosts the Bank of America 400, the sixth of 10 races in The Chase presented by Mobil 1, with a Sunday main event (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

The news came as NASCAR‘s top circuit prepares for Sunday‘s Bank of America 400 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It also answers one of the few remaining questions surrounding the Cup Series‘ “Silly Season” driver movement for 2027.

RELATED: Key figures in Silly Season | Weekend schedule: Charlotte

Custer has long been connected to team owner Gene Haas, first through Haas‘ partnership with Tony Stewart under the Stewart-Haas Racing banner and later with Haas Factory Team, which rebranded after Stewart‘s ownership departure ahead of the 2025 season. That reorganization established HFT as a single-car effort in the Cup Series, and Custer has been its driver ever since.

“We are excited to have Cole Custer back in the 41 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet for 2027,” Haas said. “Cole is a championship-caliber driver who brings the consistency we need on a weekly basis and we are proud to continue to support him in the NASCAR Cup Series.”

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights

Custer finished 32nd in the Cup Series standings last year, and that also represents his current ranking with five races left in the 2026 campaign. The 28-year-old California native has one top-10 finish this year, a 10th-place result in the regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway in August.

Custer is a 15-time winner in the NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series, capturing the 2023 championship for Stewart-Haas and finishing as the circuit‘s runner-up three times. He also earned a Cup Series triumph at Kentucky Speedway in 2020, converting a bold four-wide pass on the final lap into a victory that helped him seal Rookie of the Year honors.

Haas Factory Team switched manufacturers from Ford to Chevrolet this season. The organization also fields a two-car effort in the O‘Reilly Series, with points leader Sheldon Creed and Sam Mayer as teammates.

If you want to see what insiders think about these questions, you‘ve come to the right place. Welcome to “Last Call,” a new weekly article series in which a handful of NASCAR.com writers answer a hot topic from the most recent race weekend.

RELATED: Las Vegas results | Cup Series standings | Watch NASCAR video highlights

With Chase Briscoe‘s thrilling victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing driver remains in the title hunt, but with plenty of work still to do. Then again, fellow Indiana native Tony Stewart had plenty of work to do, too, during the 2011 Chase, with the eventual NASCAR Hall of Famer winning five of 10 postseason contests to capture the championship crown. Whether Briscoe can replicate that same success en route to title glory is this week‘s top question.

Can Chase Briscoe go on a Tony Stewart title run?

Pat DeCola: Can he? Sure — but “Tony Stewart run” is probably the right level of bar he‘ll need to clear if he wants the title because Briscoe doesn‘t have much room left for merely strong races. “Smoke” won five of the 10 Chase races in 2011; Briscoe has only one victory in the past three months, with only five weekends left this season. The Vegas winner is 84 points back at the Chase‘s halfway point, so he‘s actually lost ground from where he started before Darlington, despite his seemingly scalding stint since. Thus, to make this real, he probably needs to stack another two to three, maybe four wins to be in the same ballpark as Stewart‘s epic run, but Charlotte and Homestead are exactly the kind of 1.5-mile tracks where the No. 19 has shown it can do that. He also has wins at two of the three remaining tracks between them, so it‘s technically possible. The past few races proved Briscoe‘s 2026 ceiling is certainly championship-level; it‘s just that he and the No. 19 team will need to literally be flawless from here on out to make it happen.

Dustin Albino: Sitting 84 points behind the lead, Briscoe is likely the cutoff for drivers still in championship contention. The schedule sets up favorably for the No. 19 team: He has won two of the last three races at 1.5-mile tracks and was passed late at Kansas Speedway, narrowly missing a hat trick. To match his childhood hero, Briscoe would need to win four of the next five races, a streak no driver has produced in the Next Gen car. The speed is there, though, and even two wins in the final five would vault him way up the standings. If there‘s one thing The Chase has made clear, it‘s the value of winning. Briscoe remains championship-eligible, but even a late surge would make a Tony Stewart-esque comeback a long shot.

Zack Albert: To Dustin‘s point, replicating the type of postseason pounding that Tony Stewart assembled 15 years ago would‘ve required an earlier start. As it stands now, Briscoe and Co. also need two more things — 1) help and potentially 2) gamesmanship. The first part is dependent on Kyle Larson making a dramatic fade after his bulletproof start to The Chase, plus similar drops in performance from the otherwise steady Denny Hamlin, before the No. 19 team can go on a sustained tear. Sealing the deal in Stewart-like fashion, however, would require some old-fashioned head games, the kind that “Smoke” used to rattle Carl Edwards‘ composure in their 2011 showdown at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Needling the opposition might be out of character for the amiable Briscoe, but he‘s shown off some solid acting skills already this year.

Zach Sturniolo: Time just isn‘t on Briscoe‘s side to make this run happen. As everyone else has stated, there is absolutely a pathway to Briscoe overcoming the hurdles ahead of him both on the race track and in the standings. But consider the caliber of teams ahead of him currently: two-time and defending champion Kyle Larson; perennial championship contender Denny Hamlin; Christopher Bell, who hasn‘t finished lower than fifth in points in five years; and two Team Penske champions in Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney. To rely upon all five of those teams suffering critical and sustained errors across the next five weeks is an extraordinarily tall task. The No. 19 team is unquestionably capable. The level of performance is there. Will the execution be there for the next five weeks? Maybe, but he‘ll need a hand from others faltering.

Cameron Richardson: The big phrases in Briscoe pulling off the run are “can he do it?” and “has to do it.” Yes, Stewart started the 2011 Chase ninth, but after winning the first two races, he was already at the top of the standings. Briscoe hasn‘t stacked the points early on to make anyone believe that he can rattle off 70-plus-point days for the next five weeks. The story would be different if he hadn‘t crashed at Gateway and suffered the mechanical failure that parked the No. 19 Toyota in the garage late in the Bristol Night Race. The Las Vegas victory was simply a matter of staying on his feet in a 10-round fight with the five above him rather than being in a back-and-forth tilt. Briscoe will be in the mix Sunday at Charlotte and the following weekend at Phoenix, but then there is the looming Talladega, where title contenders will have their hopes dashed through no fault of their own, and Martinsville, a track that has not favored the Hoosier in his Cup tenure. Barring some miracles, there‘s just no viable trend to say Briscoe is built to stop Penske‘s strongholds (Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville) or be the top dog among his teammates at Charlotte and Homestead.

Every previous season, the answer has always ultimately been, “No.” Some years have looked more promising than others, of course, and some of Denny‘s failed brushes with a breakthrough have bordered on the absurdly cruel — see last year‘s title race as Exhibit A. But for all the different ways he‘s come close, the ending has always managed to leave Hamlin as history‘s greatest driver without a championship.

That was supposed to change in 2026. Going into The Chase presented by Mobil 1, everything seemed lined up for Hamlin to cast off the weight of history and claim the same crown that all of his legendary peers on the career wins list already have. Not only was Hamlin enjoying another of his best seasons — in total defiance of Father Time, at age 45 — while he ran down employee/rival Tyler Reddick for the regular-season title (and top seed in The Chase), but the stretch-run schedule was looking absolutely perfect for his strengths: Many more intermediates and short tracks than the typical mix, and fewer road courses and drafting tracks.

Truly, the only thing standing in the way of Denny‘s first career title appeared to be his own ability to execute. And that, unfortunately, has been a big part of the problem.

As we now sit halfway through the 10-race Chase, Hamlin‘s 25-point lead on the field to begin the championship push was whittled away completely within just three races — through Bristol — and after Sunday‘s 16th-place finish at Las Vegas, he is now staring at a 40-point deficit in the standings to a suddenly dominant Kyle Larson.

WATCH: NASCAR video highlights
Certainly, Larson has driven at an impressive rate since The Chase began. His average Driver Rating in the past five races is 117.7 — the ninth-best start by a Chase/playoff driver through five races since 2005 — and his average finish of 2.2 is the best of any such driver in that sample, beating out Joey Logano‘s average of 2.8 in the first five races of the 2014 Chase. When the competition is on a heater like that, your margin for error will suddenly get a lot smaller.

But Hamlin has also failed to take advantage of opportunities that were presented to him. At the start of The Chase at Darlington — one of his better career tracks, where he‘s won five times and is the only active Cup driver with an average finish in single-digits — Hamlin stumbled to an 18th-place finish at the Southern 500 after taking damage at mid-race. We wrote at the time that this didn‘t have to prove fatal to Hamlin‘s title hopes if he rebounded to meet expectations over the rest of The Chase, particularly in the critical stretch of three straight 1.5-mile ovals — the likes of which Hamlin had dominated all season.

But Hamlin has continued to undershoot his performance predictions throughout The Chase so far. In four of five outings, he has produced a Driver Rating below what his recent history and similar track-type affinity suggested ahead of the race, while Larson has exceeded his own predictions in four of five races. And the only time Denny didn‘t underperform, at Kansas, Larson literally rattled off a perfect 150.0 rating en route to victory, causing Hamlin‘s deficit to grow from one point to 26.

Even on Sunday, Larson began the South Point 400 with major struggles, running well outside the top 20 as the end of Stage 1 approached. This would have been a prime opportunity for polesitter Hamlin to capitalize on one of his trademark 1.5-mile tracks and eat into Larson‘s edge in the points … except that the 11 car lost the back-end in Turn 3 with nobody else around and just over a lap to go in the stage, damaging his splitter and destroying his favorable track position.

A persistent and adaptable Larson, meanwhile, ended up rallying to vie with eventual winner Chase Briscoe late before finishing second, and Hamlin was never as fast again, finishing 16th. Yet another unsatisfying run caused Hamlin‘s championship odds to dwindle even further, to just under 17% in my latest forecast model projection. It‘s the fifth consecutive week in which Hamlin‘s odds either took a dip or stayed roughly level at best:
All of which brings us to this weekend in Charlotte. It‘s the back-leg of those three straight 1.5-mile races, and it represents the second-to-last intermediate on the calendar, ahead of only the season finale at Homestead-Miami on Nov. 8. Not coincidentally, those two tracks also happen to be his highest-rated remaining tracks in the projections, and you can easily make the case that Charlotte is more important to his title chances because it represents such a fork in the road from here, a point at which he still has some chance — however slim at the moment — to win the title.

If Denny wins this week, his title odds would leap by 23.5 percentage points to 40.3% — placing him squarely back in the fight with Larson. But if he finishes outside the top five, Hamlin‘s odds would slide further into the abyss. And if Larson wins again? Then the No. 5 team would have an overwhelming 90% chance at locking down the championship. (It could easily happen, too: Larson owns the second-highest projection this week behind Briscoe, and he won here en route to the title in 2021, albeit in the spring.)

That‘s just how much of a do-or-die week it is for Hamlin. Yes, four races will remain after Charlotte, including several that do still suit his strengths. But this might be his last chance to keep Larson‘s points lead anywhere near manageable territory. Another missed opportunity here, especially if Larson keeps finishing at the front, and what once looked like the year for Denny‘s drought to finally end will quickly become just another heartbreaking chapter in his career.

Kahne, an 18-time NASCAR Cup Series winner, will return to full-time NASCAR competition for the first time since 2018, when health issues forced him to step away.

RELATED:  2027 Truck Series schedule | Current Truck standings

Now 46, Kahne was named one of NASCAR‘s 75 Greatest Drivers in 2023 for his success across the sport‘s three national series, including crown-jewel victories in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway (2006, 2008, 2012) and the 2017 Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The idea to return to full-time NASCAR competition came from Spire co-owner Jeff Dickerson when he and Kahne met earlier this year at the Knoxville Nationals in Iowa.

“I was pretty surprised when it happened,” Kahne said Wednesday in a Zoom teleconference. “We‘d actually just finished an owner‘s meeting for the High Limit Series, and me and Jeff were talking, and he brought that up. He had told me a story that him and Carson (Hocevar) were there the week before at 360 Nationals watching the racing and trying to figure out who they were going to put in one of the trucks for a full-time season, and then have the other truck. Yeah, he just asked me and, like I said, pretty surprised.

“Once I thought about it for a little while, this is like a really good opportunity for someone who hasn‘t been in the sport for a period of time. To get in with a really solid truck organization, Spire Motorsports, who‘s strong in all motorsports, yeah I just thought it was really cool and (I‘m) excited.”

In 2025, Kahne returned to NASCAR competition for the first time in seven years, driving the No. 33 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing at Rockingham Speedway in the NASCAR O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series. Kahne was running fifth when he was collected in a crash early in the contest but rallied for a 14th-place finish.

In addition to his Cup Series success and eight wins in the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series, Kahne is a five-time Truck Series winner despite making just six starts in the series. His lone non-win came in 2010 at Pocono Raceway, where he finished second.

Since departing NASCAR full time in 2018 after competing in 25 of 36 Cup races, the Enumclaw, Washington, native has returned to his dirt-racing roots in sprint cars, including a full-season campaign in the Interstate Batteries High Limit Racing series last year. A six-time World of Outlaws champion as a team owner, Kahne earned his first career World of Outlaws sprint car win in May 2026 at Williams Grove Speedway.

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Ahead of his return to NASCAR in 2025, Kahne said his health was “in a good place because I don‘t do this all the time. I don‘t do the long races, the heat.” While Truck Series races are longer than sprint car races, they are notably shorter than their O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series and Cup Series counterparts.

“The big thing is the short races,” Kahne said of returning to Truck Series competition. “I could always make it in the Cup car. Halfway point (of the season) is when it started really kicking in as the season went, and there‘s no breaks. By July, August, it just keeps adding up. The final one at Darlington, I mean, was just too much built up, could not recover, and that‘s where my body was. Just knowing that these races are shorter, a lot of night races, weekends off in between on some of them, just a completely different schedule than what we had going on back then. So, yeah, I think that‘ll fit me really well.” 

Following his O‘Reilly appearance at Rockingham, Kahne was asked if he would consider more NASCAR racing moving forward: “I don‘t know about more in the future, but I‘m really glad I did this.”

Kahne‘s full-time return will begin Feb. 19 in the 2027 season opener at Daytona International Speedway.

Contributing: Staff Report

Hamlin finished 16th in Sunday‘s NASCAR Cup Series South Point 400 after a spin mired him in traffic with damage. But also a pit-road misplay — in which Hamlin came for service rather than staying out and trapping Kyle Larson a lap down — allowed the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver to extend his series lead by fighting back to second place, earning a record fifth-straight top-five finish to open the postseason.

RELATED: Cup Series standings | Charlotte weekend schedule

“Had I known that Larson was a lap down and he would have got his lap back by me pitting, I would have never turned down pit road. I don‘t care what the crew chief says. I would have never turned down pit road,” Hamlin said on his podcast, posted Tuesday night. “I think if you had time to think about it and all the things, I think there‘s no question that we do something different next time around.

“We took our eye off the ball for just a brief period of time, and then I took my eye off the ball at the end of that stage.”

Hamlin fired to the lead on Lap 1 after winning Saturday‘s Busch Light Pole Award, pacing the first 34 laps before stopping for four tires and fuel under green. Kyle Larson, who entered Las Vegas with a 26-point advantage over Hamlin atop the standings, started sixth but plummeted eight spots during the opening stint of the 267-lapper, necessitating a lengthy green-flag stop for major adjustments. Larson spent 26 seconds in his pit stall while the Cliff Daniels-led team worked on the right-front, and once the pit cycle was complete, the defending series champion fell a lap down.

The first caution flew when Zane Smith spun in Turn 4. Hamlin, who had returned to the lead, elected to pit again for right sides only. That decision let Larson take the wave around and return to the lead lap, and he capitalized.

MORE: Hamlin talks Las Vegas

Because Hamlin was the only lead-lap car ahead of Larson, staying out would have prevented the one-lap-down cars from taking the wave-around. Instead, Larson returned to the lead lap and capitalized with 36 points on the afternoon.

But at that moment in time, Hamlin said he was unaware of Larson‘s early handling issues and did not know he was a lap down. He did not place blame on his team, either.

“You got to give my team a break, too, and I got to give my team a break because they are focused on helping me get the fastest car that I can get on that day,” Hamlin said. “They‘re focused on ‘what is his feedback, what are the tools we got in the toolbox to make his car as good as we can,‘ and that‘s what they‘re focused on. They‘re calling my race, they‘re not sitting on the couch listening to the announcers breaking down the 5 car‘s race. In the bubble of the race track, it‘s really hard to put all that in perspective.”

Hamlin restarted ninth after the caution and drove back to third while eventual winner Chase Briscoe controlled the race. He was admittedly pressing, trying to capitalize on crucial stage points. With three laps left in the frame, Hamlin‘s Toyota snapped around in Turns 3 and 4 despite battling a tight condition, coming to rest near the entrance of pit road. Initially, Hamlin and crew chief Chris Gayle believed the car was undamaged. But on the next restart, Hamlin felt something was significantly wrong with his No. 11 machine on the next restart, and discovered damage to both ends after the race — likely suffered when he slid over the apron.

“At the time, I didn‘t think there was anything wrong with the car,” Hamlin said. “I heard it that something underneath scraped the bottom as I‘m spinning coming down the track, but I realized very quickly once we got back, I knew that it wasn‘t just traffic. We had a major problem with the car … It just took all the potential out of the race car out and just never could get it remotely competitive after that.

“I‘m not throwing water on anyone, but there was no one that was going to run with me … I know what my car needs to feel like to win. It was definitely a race-winning car.”

MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights

Hamlin crawled back to 11th before the final-stage re-fire, saying he felt the car still had decent long-run pace but struggled in dirty air on restarts. But just before taking the green, his car cut out with a brief fuel-pickup issue, dropping him back outside the top 20. He was not sure why that happened, but the issue did not persist the rest of the race.

Hamlin finished 16th, earning just 22 points and marking his fourth finish of eight or worse in five Chase races. He lost 14 points to Larson as his deficit grew to minus 40, failing to capitalize at the track he had won the previous two Cup races. Vegas marked his first finish outside the top five on a 1.5-mile track since Charlotte Motor Speedway last May.

As the back half of The Chase arrives, the scene shifts to Charlotte this Sunday (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) — a track that could make or break Hamlin‘s hopes of finally lifting the Bill France Cup.

Through five races of The Chase presented by Mobil 1, Larson has yet to finish outside the top five, with a mind-melting 2.2 average finish and 54.6 points per race.

Sunday was Larson‘s grittiest performance yet for the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team. With crew chief Cliff Daniels leading the rally, Larson charged back from a 26-second pit stop, falling off the lead lap and wading through abysmal early handling to contend for the win before finishing second.

RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Las Vegas

Just when it seemed like Larson was due for his first day of postseason trouble, he, Daniels and Co. found a way back toward the top of the mountain all over again — spelling further trouble for his fellow Chase contenders behind him.

“We‘ve done it before, so it‘s not like a surprise,” Larson said of his rally. “Because of that, I was confident that we could dig ourselves out of it and potentially get a win out of the day, and we almost did that. So yeah. I wish our balance had been closer to fire off just because we left so many stage points out there. We‘re plus-40, and it could easily be plus-50. So a little bit of a missed opportunity, but definitely a great rebound, so yeah, happy with the fight.”

Another man satisfied with Larson‘s resilience was Jeff Gordon, Hendrick Motorsports‘ vice chairman, legendary four-time Cup champion and NASCAR Hall of Famer.

“Just so proud of you guys, man,” Gordon told Larson on pit road. “That was a hell of a battle. I know that wasn‘t fun at the beginning, but …”

“It was not,” Larson said, “but it was fun at the end.”

“That‘s championship-caliber effort right there, man,” Gordon said.

Gordon knows exactly what that looks like.

The NASCAR Hall of Famer exuded it for a decade before his own protégé, Jimmie Johnson, joined Hendrick Motorsports with crew chief Chad Knaus in 2002 and began rewriting NASCAR history. During Johnson‘s unprecedented stretch of five consecutive Cup Series championships from 2006 through 2010, his best five-race start in The Chase was a 3.2 average finish in 2009. But something about how Johnson‘s No. 48 team operated always stood out: even in the throes of adversity, Johnson and Knaus could overcome anything.

A prime example came during the 2008 edition of The Chase. On a day when Johnson was penalized and lapped early, Carl Edwards led 98 laps and stormed to the win at Atlanta Motor Speedway (now EchoPark Speedway), putting his elation on display in Victory Lane as he looked to chip into Johnson‘s point lead. But mid-interview, Edwards learned Johnson had rallied all the way back to second place — and the dejection that crossed Edwards‘ face summed up the No. 48 team‘s peak.

“Man, Jimmie‘s magic,” Edwards said in disbelief.

The same sentiment was shared nearly 18 years later by Sunday‘s race winner, Chase Briscoe. Briscoe swept both stages en route to the win, collecting 75 points and slicing 39 points from his deficit to Larson. He leaves Las Vegas 84 points behind the championship leader. But there in his shadow was the No. 5 car anyway — a team that has direct roots to the old No. 48 team, on which Daniels served as a race engineer from 2015 through 2018.

“I could see like a glimmer of like neon yellow (in the rearview mirror), and I couldn‘t tell if it was Blaney or Larson,” Briscoe recalled. “I kept thinking, ‘man, if that‘s Larson, he‘s got to be really, really good to be able to go from the back, drive all the way back to the field.‘ And yeah, obviously I saw kind of a peek of him at like 10 to go. I‘m like, ‘yep, that‘s the 5.‘ And yeah, I mean they‘re a championship-caliber team. I mean, they won the championship last year. They‘ve won them in the past, and that‘s what ultimately championship teams do. They can rally from stuff like that.”

WATCH: Briscoe zeroes in on Larson, No. 5 team | NASCAR video highlights

This time, the comeback began with a Stage 1 setback. Larson qualified sixth but quickly dropped to 14th in the first 33 laps. Daniels, in his ever-diligent, never-panic demeanor, crafted a plan for significant adjustments under green-flag conditions that ultimately led to a 26-second pit stop as the team adjusted the front ride heights and crossweight of the vehicle.

“In talking with our front tire changer Jafar Hall and Jesse (Saunders), our car chief, we thought it could go a little quicker,” Daniels said. “The reality is, it‘s a really tough space to get in to be able to make that adjustment. So even to say, ‘man, I was hoping it would have gone faster,‘ it is really difficult to execute, and I thought Jafar did really well in the moment. I was ready to bail on the change, and he stuck it through and got the change. Like I said a few minutes ago, we had to eat the pain early, knowing that that was probably going to put our car‘s overall balance in a better spot to build forward from there. So it‘s a tough call to make; not proud that we were that far off, but glad we got the adjustment in, and we were just able to kind of chip away at our race from there.”

Larson admitted he didn‘t think the stop or fix would take that long and worried the team had found something broken during the stop. Instead, while he did lose a lap in the process, he was able to take the wave around when the caution flag waved at Lap 45 for a crash by Zane Smith. Larson got back onto the lead lap, stayed there through another pit stop and eventually had a car capable of competing for the win.

“It took so long that, yeah, we came out behind the leaders, and I was like, ‘Damn, this is not good,‘ ” Larson said. “But that caution coming out with minimal laps on our tires to do the wave really kind of saved our day.”

And in the process, Larson and Co. delivered dejection to the rest of his competitors.

Tyler Reddick, a five-time winner this season, has battled plenty of issues with his 23XI Racing team through the second half of the season. That continued Sunday at Las Vegas as the No. 45 Toyota dealt with voltage gremlins and the team had to swap out its battery during the Stage 1 break. This time, though, Reddick was able to storm back to a third-place finish — even after Larson bounced off the wall and contact between the two sent Reddick spinning coming to the checkered flag.

“I mean, gotta have complete races if we want to win them. That‘s the deal,” Reddick said. “And yeah, we‘ve had multiple issues. We had multiple issues today, and it was nice fighting back from them. But played part in coming up short. I mean, we‘ve got to win these races. We know that. So I mean, still not getting it done.”

MORE: Dramatic finish for Larson, Reddick | Bell reflects on frustrating day

Christopher Bell ran the final half of the race without power steering. Crew chief Adam Stevens speculated that the power-steering cooler was cracked, allowing water into the system and boiling the power-steering fluid out of the car.

“Never fun running without power steering,” Bell said. “But I don‘t know, I got into a pretty good rhythm where I could just kind of roll around, and my car was handling good enough that I could just roll around and do OK. Just disappointing to have a great opportunity in front of us and not come away with it.”

Sitting third in points, Bell is still very much in contention for the championship, trailing Larson by 55 points. But a 19th-place finish at Gateway and a 23rd-place finish Sunday hinder those title hopes.

Briscoe has climbed to sixth and whittled his margin to 84 points, but he sees time running out.

“You‘re just getting to the point where there‘s not enough races left to make up that many points,” Briscoe said. “And look, it‘s still going to be extremely, extremely difficult. But I at least kept myself in the ballgame. If you‘re 120 out with five (left), I mean, it‘s mathematically possible, but it‘s just so hard to do that. So yeah, just kept ourselves in the ballgame and that‘s ultimately all you can ask for when you‘ve had kind of the start that we‘ve had.”