NASCAR.com’s Pat DeCola ranks the 16 Cup Series drivers in The Chase presented by Mobil 1 after Tyler Reddick’s win at Phoenix Raceway and before Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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Analysis: Well, there goes the cushion. Six races of near-perfection built Larson a 49-point championship lead entering Phoenix, and one afternoon in the desert reduced it to five measly markers. Worse, this wasn’t a case of the No. 5 running up front until a tire failure ruined everything. Larson struggled from the jump; he qualified 22nd, scored no stage points, fell off the lead lap and was already looking at a miserable result before a right-front tire finally gave way and sent him into the wall, landing 34th. His worst Chase race by a mile, and one that suddenly makes the remarkable 2.8 average finish from the first six feel like ancient history. We’re keeping Larson atop the rankings because that larger body of work still matters (and it’s still his to lose), but the championship no longer looks anything close to secure. And now comes Talladega, where he finished 40th in April after getting swept up in the massive Lap 115 crash. If there’s a worse place to arrive with a five-point lead and a whole lot of uncertainty, it’s hard to imagine where.
Analysis: Five points. That’s all that separates Bell from the championship lead after spending most of The Chase lurking just outside the spotlight while Larson seemingly ran away with the thing. Bell was excellent again at Phoenix, leading a race-high 85 laps, finishing third in both stages and coming home fourth. Add that to his near-miss against Briscoe at Charlotte Motor Speedway (where he lost by 0.029 seconds), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue that anybody has consistently brought more speed these last few races. The wins haven’t followed, but the points certainly have. There’s an interesting Talladega wrinkle, too: Bell led a race-high 31 laps there in April before a final-lap crash left him 17th, another result that obscured how competitive the No. 20 actually was. He also finished eighth there last fall. Bell has spent much of 2026 looking capable of something enormous, and now the championship is practically sitting in front of him. The question is whether Talladega lets him reach for it.
Analysis: The winning streak ended, but Briscoe somehow came away from Phoenix with another pretty significant reason to celebrate. He finished eighth after running up front, scoring 15 stage points and briefly controlling the lead on the final restart before Reddick charged through. Not exactly the follow-up to consecutive victories that makes headlines, but consider the larger picture: Briscoe has erased 99 points of Larson’s advantage over the last three races, and now he’s only 24 behind the championship leader with three remaining. That’s a remarkable reversal from where things stood before Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and the No. 19 still looks plenty capable of adding another win to the pile. Better yet, we’re heading back to Talladega, where Briscoe stole the fall race last year with a last-lap pass and a tremendous assist from teammate Ty Gibbs. The hottest stretch of Briscoe’s Cup career has turned him into a genuine championship threat. Now he gets another crack at the track where he made his title aspirations legitimate a year ago.
Analysis: Four consecutive top-five finishes, and they’re getting better: fifth, fifth, third, second. Blaney’s slow-burn Chase is becoming one of the more compelling developments in the championship fight, particularly given how badly the first few races went despite the speed being there. Phoenix was another strong afternoon, with the No. 12 starting from the pole, leading 51 laps and finishing runner-up to Reddick after another pit-road setback interrupted his day. A third consecutive Phoenix victory would’ve been nice, but second still helped erase 45 points of his championship deficit, leaving him just 40 behind Larson. That’s no longer a number requiring much imagination to overcome. Talladega? Blaney has won there three times, so this isn’t exactly unfamiliar territory. He was collected in April’s massive crash, but if we’re ranking championship contenders by the combination of speed, recent form and the ability to deliver under pressure, Blaney’s case has become awfully convincing.
Analysis: Remember Reddick’s assessment of gaining five points after finishing third at Vegas? “Whoop-de-doo.” Phoenix ought to make him feel a little better. No. 45 finally returned to Victory Lane at Phoenix after going winless since April, making a bold four-wide move on the final restart before eventually taking the lead from Briscoe with 18 laps remaining. It was his sixth victory of 2026 and, much more importantly for the championship, helped cut his deficit to Larson from 114 points to 56. The No. 45 team spent much of the summer looking completely incapable of recreating its remarkable early-season form, but the last three races have changed that conversation considerably. Talladega isn’t exactly a bad place to try extending the comeback, either; Reddick won there in 2024 and was running well before getting caught in multiple incidents this April. The championship is still a long shot. It suddenly doesn’t feel like a lost cause, though.
Analysis: Now that looked like the Joey Logano we’ve been expecting to see when the championship gets serious. He started alongside teammate Blaney on the front row at Phoenix, swept both stages, led 84 laps and appeared capable of taking the whole thing before a vibration and pit-road complications helped derail the winning opportunity. Sixth place certainly undersells that afternoon, but the 20 stage points did plenty of damage to Larson’s advantage on their own. Logano entered the weekend 92 points back and left down just 44, a remarkably successful result considering he didn’t even finish in the top five. It’s not difficult to envision another significant jump at Talladega, where he’s won three times, even if April’s visit ended with the No. 22 getting swallowed by the enormous multicar wreck. We spent a good portion of this season waiting for Logano to start behaving like a three-time champion again. The last few weeks suggest strongly that the wait might be over.
Analysis: Of all the drivers who needed to capitalize on Larson’s Phoenix disaster, Hamlin might have had the most frustrating afternoon of anybody. The No. 11 was running fourth when a right-rear tire went down with fewer than 100 laps remaining, forcing an unscheduled stop that became considerably more expensive when Hamlin was caught speeding on pit entry. That cost him the free pass when a caution followed shortly afterward, and a potentially excellent afternoon became 28th in a hurry. The particularly maddening part? He still gained 18 points on Larson, reducing his deficit to 31, but fell from second to fourth in the championship as the other contenders cashed in; not exactly the kind of progress Hamlin had in mind. The No. 11 remains one of the strongest cars in the field, and the regular-season standard is absolutely still in contention, but this is the shakiest his 2026 title hopes have felt to date.
Analysis: Well, look who’s finally showing up near the front again. Elliott’s third-place finish at Phoenix was easily his best of The Chase and came after starting 16th, giving the No. 9 team its strongest afternoon in weeks. That doesn’t erase a postseason in which sustained momentum has been frustratingly elusive, but there’s something to be said for finding speed as the schedule starts running out. The problem, of course, is that Elliott remains 149 points behind Larson with only three races remaining, so the championship is still an awfully steep climb. Here’s where it gets interesting: Elliott finished fourth at Talladega in April and has won twice at the superspeedway, making Sunday one of his more inviting opportunities left on the schedule. He has spent much of this Chase watching his Hendrick teammate control the championship conversation, but Phoenix offered a reminder that the No. 9 can still be part of it, even if the larger math isn’t particularly encouraging.
Analysis: Nineteenth at Phoenix wasn’t exactly the follow-up Cindric wanted after his promising intermediate-track stretch, and it leaves him 130 points behind Larson with three races to go. But this is where the schedule gets considerably more interesting for the No. 2. Remember, Cindric won at Talladega last spring, edging Ryan Preece in a 0.022-second finish, then returned this April and finished eighth. That’s some pretty useful recent history for a driver who spent much of 2026 looking for something to build on before the Kansas-Vegas breakthrough. Phoenix wasn’t good enough to extend that momentum, but it hardly erased what had come before it. And now the series returns to one of the few tracks where Cindric has already proven he knows how to finish the job. If the No. 2 is going to make one more significant appearance in the championship conversation, this would be a pretty appropriate place.
Analysis: There have to be less gut-punching ways to lose races than whatever Wallace has been experiencing lately. One week after getting collected in somebody else’s accident while running fifth at Charlotte, the No. 23 showed up at Phoenix looking capable of winning the whole thing. Wallace led 52 laps, took the lead late and had put together a genuinely impressive afternoon before a pit-road speeding penalty wrecked his chances during the final round of stops. Seventeenth was the eventual result, which obviously doesn’t illustrate the pace the car actually showed. The speed is undeniably there, and this rankings jump reflects it, but the championship deficit is now 162 points with three races remaining. Talladega offers another interesting complication: Wallace was leading there in April when a push from Ross Chastain triggered the massive 26-car crash that effectively ended his day. There’s no shortage of evidence that the No. 23 can run up front. The deficit is in afternoons that actually end that way.
Analysis: Finally, a top 10. Gibbs started at the rear at Phoenix after an alternator change, worked his way back into contention and ultimately finished 10th, snapping a three-race stretch of 17th, 17th and 34th. It wasn’t the afternoon he needed to meaningfully change the championship picture, but after the way things have gone lately, stopping the bleeding is something. He’s still in rough shape compared to how he started The Chase, but Talladega comes with a particularly interesting bit of history for the No. 54. Gibbs finished third there last fall and supplied the crucial final-lap push that helped teammate Briscoe win the race. This April was much less cooperative, with damage from the massive Lap 115 wreck eventually sending him hard into the wall and leaving him 34th. Gibbs has spent most of 2026 establishing that he belongs among the sport’s strongest contenders, but the last few weeks have tested that argument rather severely. At least Phoenix gave him something better to build on. 
Analysis: If anybody in the lower half of these rankings has reason to be excited about the next stop, it’s probably Hocevar. Phoenix was relatively straightforward — from green flag to checkered flag, at least — with the No. 77 climbing from 28th to 12th, but now comes the place where he scored his first career Cup victory. And it wasn’t just some lucky superspeedway escape act, either. Hocevar led 19 of the final 37 laps, survived three late restarts and held off Chris Buescher by 0.114 seconds, a performance that was every bit as convincing as it was entertaining. Plenty has happened since April, of course, including a Chase that has been equal parts genuine speed and frustrating outcomes. He’s 158 points behind Larson, which isn’t exactly championship-friendly territory, but the confidence should be considerably higher than that number suggests. Talladega can undo an entire afternoon in about half a second. Hocevar already knows it can make a career just as quickly. 
Analysis: The 13th/14th-place streak is officially over, and Suárez finally has something a little more interesting to show for himself. He finished seventh at Phoenix, his best result of The Chase, after working his way back through the field despite a pit-road speeding penalty that threatened to ruin the afternoon. That’s a meaningful improvement for a No. 7 team that has spent most of the postseason looking capable of surviving races without doing much to alter them. Of course, he’s still 188 points behind Larson, and we’re well past the point where a seventh-place finish can be mistaken for championship momentum. But this season has already demonstrated that Suárez can produce a spectacular result from seemingly nowhere, and Talladega certainly isn’t a place where conventional expectations mean much. His last two starts there both ended in 12th, but there’s at least a little reason to wonder whether something bigger could come. 
Analysis: Here’s the frustrating thing about Buescher coming into the weekend and being mostly out of title contention — we already know he can put together an excellent Talladega race. He did exactly that in April. The No. 17 led 22 laps, finished top four in both opening stages and came within 0.114 seconds of beating Hocevar for the victory. It was one of his strongest afternoons of 2026, and considerably more encouraging than the 22nd-place finish he just produced at Phoenix. Buescher has spent too much of The Chase hovering around the middle of the field, occasionally looking like something more is possible without actually delivering the result. Now he’s 204 points behind Larson and essentially out of meaningful championship contention without something extraordinary happening, even if he does win this weekend.
Analysis: Remember when Byron was quietly putting together one of the more encouraging Chase recoveries in the field? Four consecutive top 10s had started to repair the damage from his disastrous Darlington opener, only for Charlotte’s wreck to leave him 39th and Phoenix to follow with a thoroughly unremarkable 21st. The No. 24 did collect Stage 1 points in the desert, but little else about the afternoon suggested the turnaround was ready to resume. He’s now 190 points behind teammate Larson and suddenly looks a long way removed from the driver who spent portions of 2026 near the top of these rankings — and opened the year on top of them. Talladega wasn’t much kinder in April, when Byron was collected in the massive crash and finished 35th. There are still three races left for this championship-caliber team to find something worthwhile to take into 2027, but the title hopes are rapidly becoming something to file under “maybe next year.”
Analysis: There is at least one reason to feel better about Preece’s chances this week than his position at the bottom of these rankings might suggest — Talladega has been awfully close to giving him something special before. He crossed the finish line second there last spring, just 0.022 seconds behind Cindric, before a post-race disqualification erased the result. This April, Preece returned and won Stage 1, only to get caught in a final-lap crash and finish 18th. So the speed and drafting ability have been there, even if the payoffs haven’t always survived to the official results. Phoenix was another fairly anonymous afternoon — 18th, no stage points, not much to get excited about — and he’s now 211 points behind Larson with three races remaining. That’s obviously not a championship situation anybody would choose. But Preece already won the summer Daytona race, and the idea of him producing another superspeedway surprise isn’t particularly far-fetched anymore. If there’s one place left on the schedule where the No. 60 can turn this thing around and regain some ground, Talladega is probably it.
