Four Tires Beat Two: Logano Steals Stage 1 at Phoenix, and Creed's Saturday Collapse Still Hangs Over the Weekend

October 18, 2026

AVONDALE, Ariz.

Sunday's Freeway Insurance 500 at Phoenix Raceway was billed as the day the Chase came to the points leader. Through one stage, the race has run in exactly the opposite direction. Joey Logano won Stage 1 of the 312-lap race at the one-mile Avondale oval, leading the final nine laps of the 60-lap opening stage after a Lap 44 crash between Michael McDowell and Riley Herbst scrambled the pit cycle and handed the stage to the driver who took four tires while the leaders gambled on two. Ryan Blaney, who started on the pole and controlled the first 44 laps, finished the stage fourth after a slow pit stop. Kyle Larson, who arrived with a 49-point lead over Denny Hamlin, started 22nd, finished the stage 22nd, and scored nothing. This is a developing story: what follows is the race through Stage 1, plus the Saturday O'Reilly Series drama that had already reshaped the Chase picture in the desert before the Cup cars ever fired.

Blaney controls, until the crash that changed the stage

The opening run belonged to Blaney, and it was not close. The polesitter — fastest in practice, fastest in qualifying, winner of the last two Cup races at this track — jumped clear at the green flag, led the opening 25 laps per USA Today's live updates, and was still pacing the field when the stage turned on Lap 44. The pre-race shuffling had already claimed one contender: Ty Gibbs dropped to the rear of the field at the start after his crew changed an alternator on the No. 54 Toyota, per USA Today. Larson, in the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, had ground to make up from 22nd and made almost none of it up in the first stint — NASCAR.com noted he gained only a minuscule position before the caution. Then, with 17 laps left in the stage, the race got its incident. McDowell and Herbst rubbed doors off Turn 2, per RacingNews.co's stage report; Herbst shoved McDowell into Turn 3, McDowell hit the outside wall backwards, and Herbst was collected as the No. 71 bounced back off the wall. USA Today's account had MRN describing Herbst as having "harpooned" McDowell into the corner. The history between the two made the moment heavier: Herbst previously got together with McDowell in August at New Hampshire and suffered a concussion that kept him out of the following race at Daytona, per USA Today.

Four tires beat two: how Logano stole the stage

The caution sent the field to pit road, and the stage was decided by arithmetic. Blaney led them in but had a slow stop and dropped to eighth in the running order, per NASCAR.com. Hamlin won the race off pit road on just two tires; William Byron and Chase Elliott also took two and came out at the front, and Larson's crew tried the same gamble, sending the No. 5 out fifth for the restart. Logano's crew took four. On the restart, Hamlin and Byron ran side by side for the lead before Logano made it three wide, and the fresh rubber told within laps: Logano passed Hamlin at Lap 51, per NASCAR.com, and led the final nine laps to the stage flag. Larson's two-tire gamble collapsed the other way — he plummeted back to 22nd, exactly where he had started, and took no stage points. The Stage 1 top 10, per RacingNews.co and confirmed by USA Today and NASCAR.com: 1. Joey Logano, 2. Denny Hamlin, 3. Christopher Bell, 4. Ryan Blaney, 5. Chase Briscoe, 6. William Byron, 7. Chase Elliott, 8. Ross Chastain, 9. Tyler Reddick, 10. Josh Berry. Chastain and Berry were the only non-Chase drivers in the stage points, per USA Today. For Logano — who called this race a must-win after Charlotte, telling USA Today, "It's a must win" — ten stage points and the lead are the strongest possible answer to that math: he entered the day sixth in the standings, 92 points behind Larson.

The standings squeeze behind the stage

Larson's cushion is the only reason a scoreless stage is a storyline instead of a crisis. He leads Hamlin by 49 points, with Bell 51 back and Briscoe 65 back, per USA Today's standings rundown; Blaney is fifth at 85 back and Logano sixth at 92 back, with four races to go including this one. But Stage 1 was a small, perfect diagram of the pressure: every driver positioned to take points off Larson started in front of him, and three of them — Logano, Hamlin and Bell — took the top three stage spots while he took none. Blaney framed the weekend before the race the same way Logano did. "I think you do kind of have to treat it as a must-win," Blaney said Saturday, per USA Today, calling it "a big championship moment weekend" for his team. The Penske teammates have split the stage between them so far — Blaney the speed, Logano the points — and the Gibbs cars of Hamlin, Bell and Briscoe are stacked directly behind. There are 252 laps left. Larson's season-long speed says the race can still come back to him; Stage 1 says it will not come back on its own.

Saturday's aftershock: Creed's power failure rewrote the O'Reilly picture

The Cup race is Sunday's story, but the weekend's cruelest moment happened Saturday in the O'Reilly Series Chase race, per NASCAR.com. Sheldon Creed arrived as the points leader in the No. 00 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet, holding a two-point lead over Jesse Love — and the day started as if the lead might grow. Love started on the pole and won Stage 1, but Creed led eight laps and finished second in the opening stage, collecting nine points. Then, during the Stage 1 caution, Creed's car lost power. He stalled, needed a push from a safety truck to get moving again after his teammate Sam Mayer nudged him trying to help refire the car, and returned for Stage 2 three laps down in 37th place. A two-point lead does not survive an afternoon like that intact, and the shape of that Chase is now the weekend's open question alongside the Cup race itself. Previously covered Love's Saturday win and what it did to the O'Reilly Chase — read together, the two stories are the same afternoon seen from opposite ends of the standings.

What to watch from here

The Freeway Insurance 500 is 312 laps and 312 miles, with stages of 60, 125 and 127 laps, on USA Network, and the desert afternoon — mostly cloudy skies giving way to sun, a high near 83 degrees, per the National Weather Service forecast carried by USA Today — promises a slicker track the longer the race runs. The questions Stage 1 left are clean ones. Can Blaney's raw speed reassert itself over a full fuel run, or did the slow stop cost him the race he was controlling? Does Logano's four-tire lesson change how the front of the field plays the Stage 2 caution cycle? And how long can Larson spend in the twenties before a 49-point lead starts spending itself? This story covers the race through Stage 1 and will be updated as the afternoon develops. Follow the rest of the Chase in Previously's sports coverage and through The Ticket.