Shriners Children's 500
(⏰ Sunday, 3:30 p.m. ET | FOX | MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio)
Weekend schedule | TV schedule | Weather tracker | NASCAR 101
Location: Avondale, Arizona Track length: 1 mile Cup Series race purse: $7,806,252 Race distance: 312 laps | 312 miles Stages: 60 | 185 | 312 -- Starting lineup: Hamlin charges to 41st career pole Pit stall assignments: Where drivers will pit Sunday Defending winner: William Byron, March 2023 Key things to watch Friday and Saturday sessions Toyota shined in Friday's extended 50-minute practice session, with six Toyota Camry XSEs claiming top-10 spots in single-lap speed and posting five of the seven best 10-lap averages. Fastest overall in the session was Joey Logano, whose No. 22 Team Penske Ford Dark Horse Mustang has qualified on the front row in each of the three NASCAR Cup Series races so far this season. | Read practice recap Toyota's speed carried into Saturday's qualifying session as Denny Hamlin rocketed to his 41st career pole and the manufacturer's 150th at the Cup level. The No. 11 car was P2 in Friday's practice and will be joined by sophomore teammate Ty Gibbs on the front row. Toyotas make up four of this week's top six starters. | Read qualifying recap Big story line Will Sunday provide a preview of the 2024 championship fight? Exactly eight months from Sunday, the NASCAR Cup Series will return to the Arizona desert with a championship on the line. But will anything teams learn from a race in March apply when they return for the season finale on Nov. 10? Joey Logano, the 2022 Cup title and finale race winner, argues there is a "fair amount" that teams can take from Sunday that could inform what we see come November. "The cars don't change that much," Logano said Saturday. "Obviously, with the new rules package, we'll take more from it. And you have practice at both of these races, so you take some of that with you throughout the year, but I don't think it'd be that different when we come back." In the spring race of 2023, all of the eventual Championship 4 finished sixth or better: William Byron won ahead of Ryan Blaney with Kyle Larson fourth and Christopher Bell sixth. That wasn't lost on Tyler Reddick, who finished third -- the only top-four finisher that day who didn't return to Avondale in the title hunt. "I was in the mix," Reddick said. "I was excited about that if we could make it back here in that fight. We obviously didn't but yeah. ... If you looked at the closing laps of this race, you know, three of the top four were the championship contenders." Even with 245 days between Phoenix races -- the most between a track's two events on the schedule -- 2012 champion Brad Keselowski believes data learned from the spring is perhaps more valuable now than ever. "With this car, a lot more translates than what translated with the old car," Keselowski said. "With the old car, I felt like you were always in a development cycle ... and things were always changing. ... With this car, just by the nature of how its governed and amalgamated and so forth, you don't have that, at least especially not in the third season of this car. So I think it's probably a better indicator than it used to be and what to expect." [caption id="attachment_423561" align="aligncenter" width="1300"]• Hendrick Motorsports is three laps led away from 80,000. • There were 10 speeding penalties at Phoenix last March, the most in a race last season. • 23XI Racing is the only team to have a car finish in the top five in each of the first three races this year.