Nail-biting championship battles are hard to engineer, but according to Motorsport.com, NASCAR is finally getting the grandstand finish it has chased for 34 years since the legendary 1992 Winston Cup season finale. Following a chaotic Sunday at Phoenix Raceway, seven drivers sit within one race of the lead with three rounds remaining, heading straight into the wild unknown of Talladega Superspeedway.
The math at the top is tighter than a drum. Kyle Larson leads the standings, with Christopher Bell sitting five points back in second. Chase Briscoe is 24 points behind, Denny Hamlin trails by 31, Ryan Blaney is 40 back, Joey Logano is 44 adrift, and Tyler Reddick rounds out the group at 56 points off the lead. As Denny Hamlin aptly put it after the race: “One win and you’re right there.”
The good part is that we were fast and led a bunch of laps and won two stages,
Kyle Larson entered the weekend sitting on a comfortable 49-point advantage, but completely torched it with a machine that simply lacked pace from the get-go. Admitting honestly that he sucks at Phoenix Raceway, the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 pilot struggled outside the top 25, missed out on stage points entirely, and ultimately suffered a brutal tire failure that launched him into the wall and out of the race. “We’re not good here,” Larson said outside the infield care center. “It was a tough day. We just weren’t good.”
That disaster opened the door wide open, yet all of Larson’s closest pursuers failed to properly capitalize. Hamlin grabbed 12 stage points and looked poised to snatch the championship lead before his own tire failure while running fourth dropped him off the lead lap to a 28th-place finish. Tyler Reddick actually went on to win the race, but remains a long shot without a mountain of outside help. Meanwhile, Joey Logano, Christopher Bell, and Chase Briscoe all held golden mathematical opportunities to take the points lead with a win, but fell just short.
Logano dominated parts of the afternoon by winning both stages and leading a bunch of laps, but a pit road hiccup ultimately relegated him to a sixth-place finish. “The good part is that we were fast and led a bunch of laps and won two stages,” Logano said. “The bad part is that we gave away a win.” Christopher Bell put in a solid shift to finish fourth, though he admitted his car's performance tapered off as the afternoon wore on.
For Hamlin, the frustration is mounting after misfortune or mistakes struck in five of the first seven races of the playoffs, leaving him to lean heavily on his regular-season buffer and a 25-point start to the Chase. Yet the veteran remains unfazed by the chaos. “Some things are meant to be and some things are not meant to be,” Hamlin said. With the infamous Talladega Big One looming next weekend, survival and victory are the only currencies that matter as this historic chase roars toward its conclusion.
