Stock photo by Alfred GF via Pexels (free license); not from the Phoenix race.
Kyle Larson arrived at Phoenix with a 49-point cushion. He left with five. A slow car was part of it, but the decisive piece was a right-front tire, and his crew chief has said the team ran the air pressure too low. Tyler Reddick won the Freeway Insurance 500, but the result that rewrote the Chase is a 34th-place finish worth three points.
Confirmed vs. analysis: everything in the first sections below comes from NASCAR’s own race reporting and series rules. Anything that is my reading of those facts is labeled Analysis.
What happened at Phoenix (confirmed)
Reddick, in the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota, beat Ryan Blaney by 0.801 seconds on Oct. 18. It was his sixth win of 2026, his first at Phoenix and his 14th in Cup, ending a 23-race winless run. He took the lead after a restart on Lap 294 and led the final 18 laps. Chase Elliott, Christopher Bell and Corey Heim completed the top five, with Joey Logano sixth.
Larson started 22nd in a car that lacked speed, scored no stage points, and lost his right-front tire about 30 laps from the finish, hitting the Turn 1 wall. He was classified 34th and scored three points. Reddick scored 61. Denny Hamlin, running in the top five with under 100 laps to go, had a right-rear tire go down, then was caught speeding on pit entry, which cost him the free pass back onto the lead lap. He finished 28th.
The swing in numbers (confirmed)
Before the race Larson led Hamlin by 49 points. After it, Bell is five back and every one of Larson’s 15 Chase rivals gained at least 12 points on him. Reddick gained 58. NASCAR’s own count has seven drivers in contention with three races left.
| Driver | Points behind Kyle Larson after Phoenix |
|---|---|
| Christopher Bell | 5 |
| Chase Briscoe | 24 |
| Denny Hamlin | 31 |
| Ryan Blaney | 40 |
| Joey Logano | 44 |
| Tyler Reddick | 56 |
| Chase Elliott | 149 |
Even Hamlin, who finished 28th after his own tire problem, gained 18 points on Larson, because Larson’s day was so much worse.
Why Larson’s tire failed (confirmed, then analysis)
Crew chief Cliff Daniels said the team ran its tire pressure too low, roughly a pound less air than it used in last year’s Championship 4 race at Phoenix, where Larson also had a tire failure late. Daniels said the team believed it had margin and did not. The NASCAR report does not carry any statement from Goodyear.
Analysis: lower starting pressure generally buys grip early in a run and spends safety margin to pay for it. The team does not publish its pressure numbers, so the size of that trade is unknown. What is known is that this was a repeat of a failure from a year earlier, at the same track, and the explanation came from inside the team. It is fair to ask whether a car that qualified 22nd and was short on speed pushed the pressure window harder than a comfortable one would have. NASCAR’s reporting does not say that, so treat it as a question, not a finding. Because the explanation is about the team’s own pressure choice, not a reported defect, it is a process question for Larson’s team.
How Reddick won it (confirmed, then analysis)
Reddick took a two-tire call on a late caution. On the Lap 294 restart he cleared the leaders, then passed Chase Briscoe for the lead a lap later, setting Briscoe loose into Turn 3. Briscoe slid back to eighth on older tires. Bell had led a race-high 85 laps and finished fourth. Logano swept both stages, led 84 laps and lost track position on pit road before finishing sixth. Blaney started from the pole, dropped to eighth after a four-tire stop in the first stage break, and recovered to second.
Analysis: the late caution was the whole race. Tire age mattered less than being at the front of the restart order when it counted, and the two-tire call put Reddick at the front of the restart order. Bell and Logano led 169 laps between them and finished fourth and sixth. Reddick led 18 and took 55 points for the win. That is the Chase math in one sentence: leading laps does not pay by itself, and the win is the prize.
Why the format kept Larson alive (analysis)
This is the first year of the revived Chase. There are no eliminations, points are reset once, and the champion is whoever has the most points after the finale. A win pays 55 points and second pays 35, according to NASCAR’s published breakdown, with stage points of 10 for first, 9 for second and so on down. By my reading of those values, a perfect race pays 75 points: 55 for the win plus 10 for each of the two stage wins. Larson’s 49-point cushion at the start of Phoenix was smaller than one perfect race, and so is the 56-point gap between Larson and Reddick.
Under an elimination format, a 34th-place finish at a race this late could have ended a season. Under this one, it ended a lead. That is the argument for the format, and Phoenix is the case study. For more on how the points work with no eliminations, see our look at the Chase standings after Las Vegas; Briscoe’s Las Vegas win already showed that a driver can take a full race’s worth of points and still lose ground to the leader. Our Phoenix preview pointed at the same 49-point cushion and the three Gibbs cars behind it. It lasted one race.
What to watch next
- Talladega, Sunday, Oct. 25. A superspeedway can erase a five-point lead in one pack-wreck, so Larson cannot control his own margin. The stage breaks and rules package are different here; our look at Talladega’s spoiler trim and stage-break changes covers what the cars will do.
- Martinsville, Sunday, Nov. 1. A short track where pit-road discipline and track position decide the race. Hamlin and Wallace each lost ground to speeding penalties at Phoenix, so pit-road speed lines are worth watching.
- Homestead-Miami, Sunday, Nov. 8. The finale. The driver with the most Chase points after this race is champion.
- Reddick’s math. At 56 back, he is inside the 75 points a perfect race pays, so one more big day from him and one more bad one for the leader would flip the standings.
Analysis: the question for Larson is not speed; it is whether his team trusts its own tire margin again, because the same failure has now shown up twice. If that margin changes at Talladega, we will know soon.
Sources and method
Race facts, standings gaps and quotes from the team come from NASCAR’s own reporting: the Phoenix race recap, Larson’s tire-failure report, Hamlin’s report, and NASCAR’s explainer on how the Chase works. The 2026 schedule dates come from NASCAR’s schedule release. Lap numbers differ slightly between NASCAR’s reports (the recap puts Larson’s tire failure at Lap 283, his own report at Lap 281), so this article says “about 30 laps from the finish.” The 75-point maximum is my own arithmetic from NASCAR’s published values, not an official figure.
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