Tyler Reddick Ends the Long Wait at Phoenix, Holding Off Ryan Blaney to Win the Freeway Insurance 500

AVONDALE, ARIZONA · SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2026

Sometimes the fastest car all afternoon watches somebody else celebrate, and sometimes the car that matters for exactly 18 laps takes everything. Sunday at Phoenix Raceway was the second kind of day. Tyler Reddick, in the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota, beat Ryan Blaney to the finish by 0.801 seconds to win the Freeway Insurance 500, the seventh of 10 races in the NASCAR Cup Series Chase and the 33rd of 36 events this season, according to Heavy's race report and the full results published by The Tennessean. Reddick led just 18 of the 312 laps. He simply made sure they were the last ones that counted.

Chase Elliott finished third, 2.924 seconds back per RacingNews.co's results sheet, with Christopher Bell fourth and Corey Heim — the highest-finishing non-Chase driver, in a part-time 23XI Racing entry — fifth. Joey Logano, who swept both stages and led 84 laps, finished sixth. It was Reddick's sixth victory of 2026, the most of any driver this season, and his first at Phoenix. It was also the end of a strange drought: as The Tennessean noted, Reddick won the first three races of the season and had not won since Kansas on April 19. A driver who started the year looking unstoppable spent the summer being merely good. On Sunday in the desert, with three races left in the season after this one, he was unstoppable again — briefly, and right on time.

The caution, the call and the pass that decided it

The race turned with about 30 laps to go, and it turned on somebody else's misfortune. Kyle Larson, the points leader who had struggled all afternoon, blew a right-front tire and hit the wall, bringing out the caution that scrambled everything, RacingNews.co reported in its lap-by-lap account. Bubba Wallace led the field to pit road. Reddick's crew took only two tires, and he won the race off pit road. Chase Briscoe and a handful of others stayed out entirely, betting that track position on older tires beat fresh rubber with barely 19 laps left.

It was a reasonable bet, and it lost. On the restart, Briscoe cleared into Turn 1 while Reddick and Elliott banged doors behind him in a four-wide fight for second, per RacingNews.co. Reddick won that fight, hunted Briscoe down, and with 18 laps to go dove inside into Turn 3 and cleared him for the lead. Briscoe, on those older tires, faded to eighth. Wallace, meanwhile, was sent to the rear for speeding on pit road and finished 17th — a brutal end for the driver who had led at the final caution. From there, Reddick's job was simpler to describe than to do: Blaney, who had won the previous two Cup races at Phoenix and started this one on the pole — the qualifying story we covered earlier today in Blaney's pole run and Larson's 22nd-place start — closed to within about a second and stayed there, close enough to punish one mistake. Reddick did not make it. With six laps left the gap was one second, according to RacingNews.co, and at the checkered flag it was 0.801.

The drivers who owned the afternoon, and went home with less

If you only watched the first 280 laps, you would have picked a different winner. Bell led a race-high 85 laps, Heavy reported. Logano led 84, won both stages and banked the maximum stage points available, a haul that mattered enormously for his championship math even without the trophy. Blaney led 51 laps, including the first 44 from pole, before handling problems knocked him sideways in the middle of the race — which makes his late charge to second, on a track where he has been the man to beat, quietly one of the drives of the day. The race produced 21 lead changes and six cautions in all, per Heavy, which is another way of saying Phoenix kept shuffling the deck and daring somebody to hold a hand. Reddick held his for 18 laps. Everybody else held theirs longer, and it did not matter.

A miserable day for the points leader — who still leads

Larson's afternoon deserves its own paragraph, because it was that bad. He started 22nd after a loose qualifying lap, made little progress, and was heard on the radio complaining about a car with no grip and no turn, per Heavy's report. He scored no stage points. Then the flat right-front sent him into the wall with roughly 30 laps remaining, his team could not complete repairs, and he finished 34th, 31 laps down. Denny Hamlin's day was only somewhat better: a flat tire under green, a speeding penalty on the rushed trip to pit road per RacingNews.co, and a 28th-place finish a lap down.

And yet. The unofficial standings after Phoenix, as published by RacingNews.co, still show Larson on top with 2,370 points — because he arrived with a cushion and because his rivals took turns stepping on rakes too. Bell is second, five points back at 2,365. Briscoe sits third at 2,346, Hamlin fourth at 2,339, Blaney fifth at 2,330, Logano sixth at 2,326 and Reddick seventh at 2,314, still 56 points behind the leader despite the win. That is the honest summary of Reddick's Sunday: a trophy, a momentum jolt, and a points hole that remains very real with three races to run. Winning was necessary. It was not sufficient.

What it means

Phoenix used to end the season — it hosted the championship race from 2020 through 2025, as the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted — and there is something fitting about it now sitting seventh in a 10-race Chase instead, a heavyweight fight in the middle of the card rather than the finale. Sunday behaved like it still thought it was the finale. The points leader wrecked out and kept his lead. The stage-sweeper went home sixth. The pole-sitter, a two-time defending Phoenix winner, lost by eight-tenths of a second. And the driver who had not won since April reminded everyone why he won three straight to open the year. Three races remain, seven drivers are within 56 points, and nobody — least of all Larson — can afford another afternoon like this one. Follow the rest of the Chase, and every other score that matters, at Previously's sports coverage, and catch up on Sunday's hockey in McDavid's five-point night for Edmonton.