All weekend long, NASCAR dealt with an exorbitant amount of Goodyear tire failures at Phoenix Raceway during the championship races. They were pretty much nonstop during Sunday's Cup Series Championship 4, with the title contenders even experiencing their fair share of issues throughout the race.
But on several occasions, tire failures did not warrant a caution flag. When the driver affected was clearly able to keep his car moving back toward the pits, NASCAR stayed green.
Only on the occasions where the driver actually wrecked the car was the caution flag thrown. But NASCAR saw fit to conveniently ignore that strategy when William Byron blew a tire and only made slight contact with the wall with just over two laps remaining on Sunday.
This is one of the moments of all time pic.twitter.com/glwnFKSFgt
— Juan (@leclercelliott_) November 2, 2025
I don't even think you need a tinfoil hat to figure out why.
The Byron incident clearly did not warrant a caution, based on the precedent (a word NASCAR has shown, time and time again, they are not at all familiar with) set throughout the rest of the weekend.
nascar didn’t throw a caution for this last night but instantly threw it for Byron when he didn’t hit the wall as hard & wasn’t turning across on coming cars https://t.co/FIutLj4P4H
— Toyo (@Toyo3512) November 3, 2025
But not only did NASCAR now have an excuse for a two-lap shootout to decide the championship; they now had an excuse to keep Denny Hamlin from cruising to it.
Hamlin was going to win the championship before the caution came out, unless he ended up having a tire failure of his own over the next 40 seconds (which might well have happened; who knows?). But the reality is he was three seconds ahead and could have coasted home at that point.
To specify, that's James Dennis Alan Hamlin, who happens to be the co-owner of 23XI Racing, which happens to be one of the two teams currently in the process of suing the sanctioning body after refusing to sign the new charter agreement at the end of 2024.
Funny how that works.
Was NASCAR really dead set on capitalizing on an excuse for a two-lap shootout, or were they dead set on capitalizing on any possible way to reduce the likelihood of Hamlin lifting the Bill France Cup after he has spent the last year-plus going after the France family in court?
I'm not going to name names, because that would imply unintended disrespect toward the drivers named. But I find it hard to believe that NASCAR would have been nearly as trigger-happy as they were to call a caution when they did after Byron's issue if any one of a number of other drivers had been leading that race and leading that championship.
Alas, Kyle Larson ended up winning the championship following pit stops, an overtime restart, and a two-lap shootout for which NASCAR was seemingly desperate. Despite not leading a lap all race, he finished three spots ahead of Hamlin, who led 208 of 319 laps, to win the title.
"Debris" is only ever debris when it's convenient for it to be debris, and nobody knows that better than Carl Edwards, who abruptly retired after he was robbed of the 2016 championship in the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
It sure wasn't convenient earlier in the race (or the weekend), but it certainly was when whittling down the meaning of a 36-race championship to two laps on a Sunday afternoon in early November. And you'd have a hard time convincing fans that the fact that it was the No. 11 Toyota leading didn't make that even more so the case.