The Cup Series field at Phoenix Raceway in 2024. Photo: Serrity / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Cliff Daniels did the cautious thing at Phoenix. The crew chief told reporters the No. 5 team ran a full pound more air pressure than it did in last year’s Championship 4 race at the same track, where Kyle Larson also lost a tire. “I thought we had margin in the tank there,” Daniels said, “and obviously we didn’t.”
That missing margin cost Larson 46 points to Christopher Bell in one afternoon. Larson arrived at the Freeway Insurance 500 with a 49-point lead in the Chase. On Lap 281, with 31 laps left, his right-front let go on entry to Turn 1. He was classified 34th, banked three points and now leads Bell by five with Talladega, Martinsville and the Homestead-Miami finale still to run.
Tyler Reddick won the race. Larson’s air pressure is the story.
One pound, two problems
Tire pressure is the cheapest grip a Cup team can find, and the most dangerous. Run less air and the contact patch grows, the car turns better and lap time drops. Run too little and the sidewall flexes more, the tire builds heat it can’t shed, and eventually it fails. Goodyear’s minimum recommended right-front pressure for this race was 30 psi on the D-5256 right-side tire, the same construction Cup cars ran at New Hampshire in August. The minimum is a floor, not a target, and every crew chief in the garage is trying to live just above it.
Phoenix makes that floor matter more than most short tracks. The front straight feeds a heavy braking zone into Turn 1, and that’s where the right-front carries the most load on the lap. Larson described the failure from the cockpit: he hit the brakes, “the right front was down,” and he was a passenger into the wall.
The uncomfortable part for Hendrick Motorsports is that the extra pound didn’t buy speed either. Larson qualified 22nd while his main title rivals swept the top five starting spots. He was 22nd at the end of Stage 1, fell a lap down in Stage 2 and only got back on the lead lap with a wave-around under the Lap 157 caution. Daniels called it “a terrible day” and said the car was “way off” despite heavy simulator work. Larson’s version: “I didn’t expect to be good, but I didn’t expect to be that bad either.”
That’s the worst combination available. A slow car with a conservative pressure is supposed to be a safe car that grinds out a 15th. Instead the No. 5 was slow and still broke. Either the car was working the right-front harder than the team’s models predicted, or a pound wasn’t the fix for last year’s failure. Daniels didn’t claim to know which, and neither should anyone else until Hendrick looks at the tire.
Larson wasn’t the only contender undone by rubber. Denny Hamlin pitted on Lap 221 with a shredded tire, then caught a speeding penalty, and finished 28th. He said he was “just right there with the 19” of Chase Briscoe before it went. Hamlin dropped from second to fourth in the standings.
How Reddick turned two tires into a win
Reddick’s day was the opposite gamble. On the last caution, the No. 45 23XI Racing crew bolted on two tires instead of four, gained track position, and Reddick passed Briscoe a lap after the Lap 294 restart. Briscoe, stuck on older tires, faded to eighth. Reddick led only the final 18 laps and beat Ryan Blaney to the line by 0.801 seconds.
It was Reddick’s sixth win of 2026, his first at Phoenix, the 14th of his career and his first since mid-April after a 23-race drought. It also came on a day when the cars that controlled the race didn’t collect. Bell led a race-high 85 laps and finished fourth. Joey Logano swept both stages and led 84 laps before finishing sixth, and summed it up bluntly: “The bad part is we gave away a win.” Bubba Wallace led 52 laps and looked in control of the final stage until a speeding penalty under caution sent him to 17th.
For 23XI, a team that took NASCAR to court last year, a Chase win at the track that used to host the title race is a useful reminder of what the operation is built to do. Reddick gained 58 points on Larson, more than any other Chase driver, and sits seventh, 56 back.
Why five points is basically zero
The new format is why this hurts so much. The Chase has no eliminations. The title goes to whoever has the most points after Homestead, and a win pays 55 points, 20 more than second place. Under the old knockout system, a bad round could end a driver’s season outright. Under this one, Larson’s 49 points were real money, and he spent almost all of it in one afternoon. As we noted when the math tightened after Las Vegas, a cushion in this format only lasts until the next bad day.
Here’s the table with three races left:
| Pos. | Driver | Team | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kyle Larson | Hendrick Motorsports | Leader |
| 2 | Christopher Bell | Joe Gibbs Racing | -5 |
| 3 | Chase Briscoe | Joe Gibbs Racing | -24 |
| 4 | Denny Hamlin | Joe Gibbs Racing | -31 |
| 5 | Ryan Blaney | Team Penske | -40 |
| 6 | Joey Logano | Team Penske | -44 |
| 7 | Tyler Reddick | 23XI Racing | -56 |
Seven drivers are within 56 points, which is about one race win. Three of them drive Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas, so Larson is no longer protecting a lead against one rival. He’s protecting it against a whole engineering department. Bell’s own assessment after Phoenix gives Hendrick a little hope: he said his car’s performance “tapered off a little bit as the day went on.” Still, Bell gained 46 points on a day when he didn’t think his car was at its best.
This also wasn’t the old Larson in a slump. Before Phoenix he had averaged a 2.8 finish over the first six Chase races, with four straight top fives. One DNF pushed his Chase average to 7.3. When we previewed Phoenix, he looked like the driver who could absorb a bad day. He did absorb it, barely, and now the margin is gone.
What to watch at Talladega
The YellaWood 500 is next Sunday at 2 p.m. ET on NBC and HBO Max, and it’s the worst possible track for a driver who wants control back. Superspeedway pack racing doesn’t care much about setup or tire pressure. It cares about where you are when the big one starts. A five-point lead can flip on one stage result.
- Stage points: At 10 for a stage win, a single stage at Talladega is worth twice Larson’s current lead. Expect the No. 5 and the Gibbs cars to race the stage ends hard.
- Toyota cooperation: With three JGR cars and Reddick’s 23XI Toyota in the hunt, watch whether Toyota drivers draft together. That’s a numbers advantage Hendrick can’t match on its own.
- The real tire test: Martinsville on Nov. 1 is a braking-heavy short track, which makes it the next real test of whether Hendrick understands what happened to the right-front at Phoenix. Homestead decides the title on Nov. 8.
Daniels said he was “just waiting to see a sign of life” from the car. He also credited Larson for “not cussing me out or quitting.” That’s a good relationship to have heading into Talladega. It just isn’t a points cushion.
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