With Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe, as well as Hendrick Motorsports teammates William Byron and Kyle Larson, set to battle for the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series championship at Phoenix Raceway this weekend, one of the major storylines has been the fact that this quartet is so evenly matched.
Every single one of them has won at Phoenix before, every single one of them has won at least three races in 2025, and it's not hard to imagine any of the four coming out on top this weekend. Perhaps no Championship 4 has seen this close a group, on paper, heading into the season finale, since the format was introduced in 2014.
Yet there's this ongoing narrative that the only reason this is the case is because it was Byron who held off Team Penske's Ryan Blaney at Martinsville Speedway to punch his Championship 4 ticket. Had Blaney won that race to lock himself into the Championship 4 for the third year in a row, he would have supposedly been the prohibitive favorite.
I'm not really sure what this is based on.
NASCAR fans' Ryan Blaney championship narrative is questionable
I'm not saying Blaney hasn't been strong at Phoenix. Heck, he could very well win this weekend's race, even if he's no longer in championship contention. And even if he were in contention, I'd see no issue with him being considered the outright favorite.
But this idea that he'd be the clear-cut, runaway favorite to win the championship, had he managed to advance by winning at Martinsville, is somewhat comical, and it's more a testament to the fact that the whole "Team Penske 3-for-3 Next Gen championship" narrative has been living rent-free in fans' heads all season up until Blaney's and Joey Logano's eliminations this past weekend.
Since the Next Gen era started in 2022, Blaney does lead all active drivers with a 6.4 average finish at Phoenix. But he is not included among the track's five race winners, and that's important for a number of reasons.
Those winners include Byron, Logano (twice), Christopher Bell (also twice), Briscoe, and Ross Chastain. Blaney has led fewer laps than Byron, Bell, and Logano, and he's only barely ahead of Kyle Larson, who won the final Gen 6 race at the track in 2021, in that category.
Briscoe hasn't led as many laps, but he was also with a relatively weak Stewart-Haas Racing team for six of those seven races (and still managed to win once). Chastain is particularly intriguing, because he held off Blaney to win the November 2023 race, the race in which Blaney clinched the championship.
The Trackhouse Racing driver's victory completed a season sweep at Phoenix for Chevrolet, even though Ford and Toyota have supposedly had a leg up on Chevy at Phoenix in the Next Gen era. It also technically split up the "Team Penske 3-for-3" streak, because Team Penske only actually won two of those three races. And both times, it was Logano (2022 and 2024), not Blaney.
Let's go a step further.
Blaney is actually the only driver who made it to this year's round of 8 who has never won at Phoenix. We already touched on Bell's two wins (2024 and 2025) and two of Logano's four (2016, 2020, 2022, and 2024). Chase Elliott won there in 2020 to win the championship.
As for the Championship 4 drivers, Hamlin won there in 2012 and 2019, Larson won there in 2021, Briscoe won there in 2022, and Byron won there in 2023. Again, Blaney has been strong, but 0-for-19 is not enough to sell the tag of "clear favorite", as if this is some sort of an F1 race where his car is a rocket ship compared to the rest of the field.
I get it. He won the 2023 championship, and he did it at Phoenix. But he is still the only driver to win a championship without winning the Championship 4 race in the 11 years that this format has been in place. And yes, he ran a strong second to his teammate in 2024. But once again, he still ran second, not first.
He's a great driver at Phoenix; that's not the point. The point is that his track record there is not befitting of someone who supposedly would have been viewed as a de facto championship lock had he managed to advance.
Let's dig even deeper.
In only one of the seven races at Phoenix during the Next Gen era has Blaney been the top finisher of the round of 8 drivers, and that was the 2023 championship race in which Chastain beat him. He wasn't the top finisher in any of the final five races of the Gen 6 era, dating back to November 2019, either.
Elliott has led more laps there in fewer races. Hamlin and Logano have averaged more laps led per race over a longer period of time; Bell has done so over a smaller sample size.
Larson, despite not being nearly as dominant at Phoenix as he is elsewhere, is also right there with Blaney, and with a stronger average finish. Briscoe, as mentioned, hasn't truly been with a top team until 2025.
And Byron, despite Phoenix supposedly being a weak point for Chevrolet in the Next Gen era, led 159 laps at Phoenix during Blaney's 2023 championship-winning season. Blaney has led just 14 since the start of 2023, to this day.
Nothing against Blaney, and nothing against Blaney at Phoenix. He's good there. I get it. That's indisputable, in every sense of the word. He recorded seven straight top five finishes there before his 28th place finish back in March.
But nothing about this track record screams "dominance" like NASCAR fans want to believe, so I'm just not really sure why we're pretending like Blaney being eliminated before this weekend is the equivalent of 2023 Max Verstappen being eliminated from a four-way Formula 1 world championship fight simply because the Championship 4 happens to be located where it is.
Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 is set to be shown live on NBC, with coverage scheduled to begin at 3:00 p.m. ET. Start a free trial of FuboTV today and don't miss any of the action from the 2025 season finale from Phoenix Raceway!