AVONDALE, Ariz. — NASCAR Cup Series teams may take some measure of comfort in the familiarity of this weekend’s Goodyear tire setup at Phoenix Raceway. It’s the same configuration that was used here four months ago, when the circuit crowned Kyle Larson as champion in the 2025 season finale.
While there’s comfort, there’s also the challenge posed by aggressive strategies in the ongoing quest for speed.
Crew chiefs anticipate pushing the boundaries of performance and durability in Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 500 (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, FOX One, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at the Phoenix 1-mile track, the first bread-and-butter oval of the Cup Series season. After two drafting-style races and a road-course event, the schedule turns to a six-race stretch of more traditional ovals, starting with Sunday’s 312-lap go.
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The familiarity is a welcome note for the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet team, which is already facing a substantial variable with Anthony Alfredo filling in for ailing driver Alex Bowman this weekend. That said, crew chief Blake Harris says teams will often stretch the limits of tire reliability in search of a competitive advantage.
“It gives us a little more faith, too, to have something consistent, a baseline to start off with, with Anthony just getting in the car for the first time,” Harris told NASCAR.com. “So I think a lot of good knowns, I like the tire a lot. I think anytime we have the opportunity for a good deg (degradation) on a short track, I think that gives us mixed-up strategies, gives us chances to instead of just running a full fuel stint out if we need to split it, how do we want to carve that up based on the tires that we have?
“So I know Goodyear has a challenge, always with the durability, but we’re also our own worst enemies, where we figure out how to make the cars go fast and get grip on them. We’re gonna flirt with disaster at times, and I think you saw a lot of teams do that, but we’re definitely … we have a full scope of a weekend, right? So we’re smarter than we were in the fall, and we’ll try to play our cards right to get the maximum amount of grip and pace with hopefully no failures.”
Three teams faced tire trouble during Saturday morning’s practice sessions, with RFK Racing driver/co-owner Brad Keselowski taking the most sizable hit with the No. 6 Ford and forcing him to a backup car. Tire issues also hobbled teammate Chris Buescher’s No. 17 RFK Mustang, plus the No. 35 Toyota of 23XI Racing’s Riley Herbst.
The problems were a near repeat of the rubber repercussions from last November’s finale, when several teams were hampered by failures that crept up in practice. Buescher’s issue struck first Saturday after just 16 total laps.
“Yeah, there’s some concern, something we’ve got to figure out and dive into,” Buescher said. “Knowing the issues we had here the last race, I thought we took steps to correct, so we’ll dive into that a little bit further. I would say that where we fired off in balance and long-run speed – if you call 15 laps long run — was fairly happy with our car, just at the end of it needed it to last a little longer, right? So yeah, we’re going to certainly dive into it. We’ve got our post-practice meetings coming up here, so we’ll try and figure out if we can diagnose if it’s something specific to us or if it’s another Phoenix.”
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Cup Series points leader Tyler Reddick also spun in practice without sustaining damage, but crew chief Billy Scott confirmed that the loop-around was unrelated to any tire trouble on the No. 45 23XI Toyota.
“So far, the fall-off looked pretty similar,” Scott told NASCAR.com after selecting the team’s pit stall for Sunday. “I haven’t had a close look at it yet, but it seemed reasonable to what we expected. The same thing on pressures and camber; we know where we’re at, and that held up still. We fortunately didn’t have issues before and didn’t today.”
Scott & Co. have another thing on their side — the intangible factor of momentum. Since Reddick rolled to a crown-jewel victory in the season-opening Daytona 500, there’s been no let-up with wins coming in successive weeks at EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta and the Circuit of The Americas road course just last weekend in Texas.
Reddick has rocketed to the top of the Cup Series heap, and 23XI teammate Bubba Wallace has had his own performance uptick in the standings. The effect of the early spurt of success has been noticeable across the board, but there’s been no laurel-resting, either.
“It’s been incredible. It’s spread to the whole team,” Scott said. “I mean, Riley’s had some great races, Bubba’s had a couple stage wins and contending for wins, too, second in points, and then our historical start. It’s just a lot of energy, and we just keep challenging everybody to stay focused and keep remembering that we have to go out each week and do it again, and nobody has gotten complacent either. Nobody’s let it kind of get an ego and think that we’ve made the corner here. We have to continue to fight to do that every week, and doing that with a lot of celebrations and free lunches and stuff in between is a great problem to have.”