AVONDALE, Ariz. — Early on in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway, Ryan Preece rocketed through the field with superhero-style strength. With his No. 60 RFK Racing Ford equipped with softer, high-grip “option” Goodyear tires, he charged from 33rd place to 10th in just 11 laps, reaching third and harvesting extra points at the end of the brief 60-lap first stage.
That’s when Preece, in his first season with RFK, almost had a pivotal early moment in the chemistry-building process with his new crew chief.
“Good driving, driver,” veteran Derrick Finley called out over the No. 60 radio.
“I know we passed cars,” Preece replied. “I don’t want a kiss, though.”
“Good,” Finley shot back. “I didn’t want to.”
The jokingly offered incentive was a callback to the previous week’s race at Circuit of The Americas, where Finley tried to coax his driver to make up ground on the front-runners. That was a one-week offer, Finley said with a laugh later, but a bigger reward than a smooch was on the No. 60 team’s mind.
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Preece and Co. were the first to alter the script to Sunday’s Shriners Children’s 500, making the first lunge for the option tire with the red-lettered sidewalls. The effect was a sudden jolt into the scoreboard’s upper reaches, and though the strategy later came undone, both the 15th-place finish and the 34 laps led were season bests.
“So a 15th, that wasn’t phenomenal, but certainly with the situation that was playing out with being off sequence, you know what, after the past three weeks, it’s been a real kick in the nuts,” said Preece, who opened the season with finishes of 32nd, 18th and 33rd. “So it felt good to actually have a good points day.”
Sunday’s 312-miler was the Cup Series’ third-ever race and first this year that provided teams with two Goodyear tire choices — a baseline “prime” tire with traditional yellow lettering on the sidewalls, and two sets of the soft-compound reds or “option” tires that produced far better grip and speed at the expense of higher wear at the end of a green-flag run.
Ten caution periods — the most at Phoenix in five years — threw a variable into how some strategies might develop. The No. 60 team pounced on the first one after a Lap 10 stack-up, fastening up reds and collecting stage points in the process.
A late-race tire gambit also nearly found pay dirt. Finley didn’t go for option tires when the rest of the top 15 did for the start of the final stage. A caution flag with 97 laps to go opened the door for another alternate route, and Preece zoomed from 13th place to the lead in 12 laps on the team’s last set of reds. That’s where the No. 60 group stood with a nearly three-second advantage when another yellow flag for debris on Lap 268 foiled their hopes for a green-flag run to the end.
“It was kind of a cat-and-mouse game,” Finley told NASCAR.com. “Depending on how the cautions fell was going to basically determine your race. We saw that, for us, we were going to go for something big and we did. So we kind of got on the opposite side of what people were doing, so I thought that was an easy thing to do, but it’s not because you’re trying to predict what the other guys are doing. I was trying to do the opposite of that. Had it played out differently, who knows? But as it was, we’ll take the stage points and the 15th and know that we were going for something big.”
A similar tack was employed by the No. 22 Team Penske Ford team and defending Cup Series champion Joey Logano, helping them try to preserve a solid finish after an early-race penalty for a restart violation. Logano began Stage 2 in 24th place after the punishment, but with option tires bolted on, the No. 22 team radio brimmed with optimism: “No reason why we can’t win this stage right here.”
Logano led big chunks of Stage 2, bypassing eventual winner Christopher Bell to complete his rally. Bell eventually slipped back by Logano for the stage victory, regaining the top spot once the No. 22 Ford’s tires gave out. Like Preece’s team, No. 22 crew chief Paul Wolfe had hoped for a long green-flag run to round out the day, but the remaining flurry of cautions left Logano to fight for a 13th-place result. Even then, Wolfe appreciated the challenge that the tire-choice format presented.
“The tire worked well. I mean, it did exactly what I think NASCAR was going for, so kudos to NASCAR and Goodyear for that,” Wolfe told NASCAR.com. “You know, we just obviously got behind the 8-ball when we had the penalty, and they gave us the option to get back up there. But then it was a question, when do you use that second set? You know, not understanding how the cautions would fall at the end of the race, we probably could have done something a little different at the end to maybe get a little better finish, but overall, I thought the tire part of it worked out well.”
Preece also shared in the commendations, not just from a competition standpoint but also in how it transformed a race where he started a deep 28th in the 37-car field.
“These races have just become so tough to get off sequence, and it creates options,” Preece said. “And if you look at it, the way this race played out, we used a set early. We were taking our lumps. Luckily had a caution. Then we used them off sequence, wished the caution didn’t come out. And then those last two, three runs, there were cautions and you were wondering, ‘when’s that red going to give up?’ And to be honest with you, it gave up on some of them. So that was a lot of fun, and I applaud Goodyear and everybody in NASCAR for doing this, because it’s taking a risk.”
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Risk-taking also suited Finley, who helped Preece to a six-spot jump in the early Cup Series standings.
“From a crew chief perspective, especially an old one like me whose nerves are about shot, it’s kind of crazy,” Finley said. “But I do like the fact that it mixes up. All the teams have gotten to the point where they play their statistical game, where everyone has their races mapped out, and everything’s pretty ho-hum, and what it does do is it adds that sense of, ‘hey, there’s something new you can do. There’s something different you can try.’ So from that aspect, I enjoy it. It brings back more of the old school that way.”
Goodyear officials indicated there are no immediate plans for another tire-choice race on the schedule, but haven’t ruled out the possibility. A tire test scheduled Monday at the 1-mile Arizona oval is framed around the objective of developing a single tire that keeps tire management and wear in the equation for Phoenix and similar tracks.
Should option tires make another appearance, the risk vs. reward factor will be along for the ride — just so long as the reward doesn’t involve puckering up.
“I’d rather just … you could just thank me,” Preece said. “So yeah, it’s fun.”
