AVONDALE, Ariz. — Team Penske knows what Phoenix Raceway demands. The organization captured three consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championships in must-win scenarios in the Sonoran Desert, but this time, a victory would merely keep its title hopes alive.
With three consecutive top-five finishes for the first time in 2026, 2023 Cup Series champion Ryan Blaney leads Team Penske in the standings in fifth, 85 points behind Kyle Larson. Three-time champion Joey Logano sits one position behind his teammate, trailing the No. 5 team by 92 points.
Blaney has doubled down on collecting the checkered flag in the last two visits to Phoenix. This weekend, he feels the pressure of needing to win Sunday’s Freeway Insurance 500 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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“You’ve only got four (races) left and the points that we’re out, I think you do kind of have to treat it as a must-win,” Blaney said during a press conference on Saturday. “It’s gonna be really hard if you only gain four or five or six points on (Larson) this weekend. You know that’s hard, so you need to try to take a big chunk with the 20 (bonus points for winning), and then you hope you outpoint him in the stages too and just keep chipping away.
“I would kind of categorize this as a big championship moment weekend for our team of if we can win this weekend, I think we can hopefully keep chipping away at it. If we don’t win this weekend, the job is exponentially harder going into the next three weeks.”
No. 12 crew chief Jonathan Hassler shares his driver’s mindset, knowing it’s time to tap into Penske’s flat-track prowess at Phoenix and make a significant dent in the No. 12 team’s points deficit.
“I think we need to win to gain enough to feel like we can get ourselves into contention,” Hassler told NASCAR.com. “I think if we don’t win, it gets a lot harder, especially if someone else we’re racing does manage to win.”
Don’t count the savvy Logano out. While 92 points back seems like an uphill battle, the No. 22 team went on a summer surge, rocketing from 20th to eighth in the regular standings in less than two months. But he, too, knows that it’s going to take wins to have a chance at banking a fourth Bill France Cup.
“If we’re going to make up 90-plus points in four races, you have to win,” Logano said. “It’s a must-win scenario — and probably multiple times to do that. If we want to win this whole thing and do it without wishing bad luck upon somebody, we’re going to have to win.
“Desperate people do desperate things, and we’re at that desperate level. It feels to me a bit of a cutoff-race scenario. That’s where we are.”
Logano acknowledged that the No. 22 team’s sluggish start to the 2026 season has left the Paul Wolfe-led bunch playing catch up down the stretch. Still, the three-time Cup champion has a proven track record at Phoenix, where he owns four victories — tied with Las Vegas Motor Speedway for his most at any track on the circuit.
The feeling of having to win isn’t ideal. Logano went as far as saying “it sucks,” with a wide chuckle. But the Penske teammates have had their backs up against the wall in prior Phoenix visits during the Championship 4 era, coming out on top in half of the six championship-deciding races at the 1-mile oval.
“Winning when you have to win is one of the most rewarding things you can do,” Logano said. “The fact that we’re still in the hunt and still have a chance is something we should be proud of. We have that, and we’re on a pretty good recovery compared to where we were earlier in the year.”
Said Blaney: “You try to win every week, and I think coming here, being a part of the Championship 4 in those years was kind of the mindset like, ‘We’ve probably got to win the race to win the championship.’ We ran second when we won the championship in ’23, but you treat it as like a must-win, so I feel like we’ve been in some of those situations before. I look at Martinsville in ’24; that was a must-win for us to get here, and I thought we faced that challenge head-on and did a very good job, so we’ve been in these spots before. Hopefully, we have some experience, and we can lean on that.”
The Penske duo recognized Larson’s historic 2.8 average finish through the first six Chase presented by Mobil 1 races, the second-best stretch in postseason history. Neither driver expects the No. 5 team to falter down the stretch, emphasizing they’ll have to make up ground in the standings through their own performance rather than waiting for Larson to make a mistake.
“We’re not waiting on him to make a mistake,” Blaney said. “We want to capitalize on running well and winning races.”
Both Blaney and Logano will have prime real estate for the 312-lapper in the desert. They swept the front row in qualifying, with Blaney earning the pole and Logano set to roll off second at Phoenix.