Cup and Xfinity qualifying sessions are scheduled Saturday afternoon. Xfinity drivers will qualify at 2:30 p.m. ET (NBC Sports App), and Cup drivers will qualify at 3:35 p.m. ET (USA Network).
The Xfinity champion will be crowned Saturday night. The final race of the Xfinity season is scheduled for a 6 p.m. ET (USA Network) start.
Joey Logano, Christopher Bell, Chase Elliott and Ross Chastain will be racing for the Cup championship in Sunday’s 312-mile race (3 p.m. ET, NBC). The driver who finishes highest among the Championship 4 will win the title.
Saturday: Mostly sunny. High of 71 with a 2% chance of rain.
Garage open
Track activity
AVONDALE, Ariz. — To a sport, he is seen as a rock star and a champion, but to Bill and Cindy Elliott, he’s just Chase, their son.
“Your babies are always your babies,” Cindy Elliott told NBC Sports of her 26-year-old son who seeks to become the 17th multi-time Cup champion in NASCAR history and break a tie with his Hall of Fame father in series crowns.
To Bill Elliott, he sees how his son has grown. He thinks back to his Brickyard 400 win in 2002 and the photos of a young Chase celebrating with him.
“It’s how fast things go,” Bill Elliott said of how time has passed. “I’m in Victory Lane at Indy in 2002 and now here you are 20 years later and here he is grown and doing his own thing.
“Life goes by so fast.”
It makes Bill Elliott think about days gone by.
“I still think the most fun times we had together are the things we did when we lived in Colorado and he was go-kart racing out there,” Bill Elliott said of his son’s early days racing. “It was just kind of a great time. I think it was a fun series we ran. There wasn’t a lot of pressure. I kind of still see him in that. Times have gone on, he’s grown up and he’s his own person.”
That also was a special time for Chase Elliott.
“We did a couple of fun years out there,” Chase Elliott said. “Dad was, I guess, thinking he was retired at the time. Just enjoyed being dad, enjoyed going to the racetrack and us racing together, working on the go-karts, cleaning trailers, all the things that come along with it.
“Yeah, they were special years. Certainly glad I have them to look back on.”
Cindy Elliott sums up such experiences by saying: “Enjoy and embrace every moment.”
Sunday marks the third consecutive year Elliott has made the Cup championship race. He won the 2020 title and finished fourth last year. Should he win this year, Elliott would become the second youngest driver to win multiple Cup crowns, trailing only Jeff Gordon.
Cindy Elliott says that this weekend will be “just as nerve-racking as it was last year and the year before.”
One thing that is different is how inconsistent Elliott and his No. 9 team have been in the playoffs.
He won at Talladega in the Round of 12 but that is one of only three top-10 finishes he’s had in the playoffs. Elliott started each round as the leader based on the playoff points he collected in the regular season but faltered in the first race in each round.
“I feel like we have as good of an opportunity as anybody,” Elliott said of Sunday’s title race. “Yes, our playoffs has been up and down, probably more down than it has been up really for how we ran leading into it.
“But when I sit back and I look at this weekend, the way this format is, the way the final four works, if you’re in, you have a shot, number one. Number two, we haven’t wrote the ending yet, right? The narrative is there for you to make it whatever you want to and however you execute your day into being.”
Not every champion was the favorite entering the season finale.
Kyle Busch was not viewed as the favorite in 2019 but emerged the champion, winning his second crown.
In 2018, Joey Logano was viewed as the underdog and quipped that it was “The Big 3 and me.” He won the championship, beating Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch that season.
Jimmie Johnson was not headed for his seventh series title in 2016 until a late caution changed that race and led to Johnson joining Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt for most series crowns.
So anything is possible in one race for a championship.
“His confidence is high,” car owner Rick Hendrick said of Elliott. “I think he’s so competitive, he just wants to be there for the team and the organization and for himself. He knows how good he is.
“I’ve talked to him several times this week. He’s ready for this race. He wants to win another championship.”
While Elliott’s playoff has proved challenging, it was during this time that the sport took notice when he spoke up at Talladega about safety concerns with the Next Gen car. It came after teammate Alex Bowman suffered a concussion at Texas the previous week. Elliott was among high-profile drivers who discussed the issue. It gained attention because Elliott typically does not interject him into such discussions, but he felt it was important then.
With changes being made to the car for next season to help drivers, the focus for Elliott has returned to playoffs and now a championship.
But he also knows these are the days he’ll look back upon sometime in the future.
“I want to do well,” Elliott said. “I want to do my job. I think you have to mentally be where you need to be to do that. I think sometimes that can take away from being able to enjoy certain moments or certain instances.
“But I try really hard to because I know you’re not going to get this time back, you’re not going to get these years back. I certainly respect that aspect of life and how fragile it can be, frankly.”
His father takes a moment to look back and he thinks about celebrating his Indianapolis win with his son 20 years ago.
“Kissing the bricks,” Bill Elliott said, “ he’s standing there like, ‘What are you doing?” He’s got that look of what are you doing down there? I don’t think he got it.”
Winning, though, his son gets.
AVONDALE, Ariz. — Gavin Grubbs and Joey Logano have been friends so long that Grubbs says it’s hard to remember when the champion driver wasn’t a part of his life.
They first met in 2010 when Grubbs was 8 years old and Logano was 19. That meeting was arranged by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Logano flew to Harrisburg, Arkansas, to meet Grubbs, diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when he was 6 months old, and invite him to the Daytona 500.
Their friendship grew. Grubbs attended test sessions in Memphis, Tennessee, when Logano’s Penske team was there. Gibbs and Logano texted and talked often. They spent more time together.
“You want to surround yourself with just good, wholesome people,” said Logano, who will start from the pole in today’s Cup championship race. “That’s what I want around me, somebody that’s real.”
Grubbs served as a groomsman in Logano’s wedding, was at Homestead-Miami Speedway when Logano won the 2018 title and surprised Logano by introducing “my friend” at the NASCAR banquet in Las Vegas after that season. Grubbs also attended the 2020 championship race in Phoenix Raceway when Logano fell short of winning the crown.
While Grubbs will be back at Phoenix for today’s race, another family impacted by Logano will watch NBC’s broadcast (3 p.m. ET) and hope he wins a second Cup championship.
These are among the special connections with Logano that saw encounters with him turn into bonds that resonate years later. It makes Sunday’s title race even more meaningful to those families.
“I pray they win,” Jodi Rupp says of Logano and his No. 22 team.
She is the mother of Ashleigh Hunt, who was diagnosed at age 19 with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer.
“It kept getting a little bit worse and a little bit worse,” Rupp said of her daughter’s condition. “Then she was told maybe you need to start focusing more on quality of life than quantity.”
That’s when her daughter started to come up with bucket list items she wanted to accomplish and posted them on Facebook. Her list included items such as a trip to New York City, zip lining and attending concerts, sporting events and NASCAR races.
Logano found out about the list and provided Hunt and her family with a private jet to New York City and accommodations in 2016. Ashleigh and her family saw a Broadway play, attended “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon and visited Central Park, among other things. The memories remain special to Rupp.
Ashleigh passed away April 5, 2018, at the age of 24.
Logano and his foundation built a park in June 2018 in Louisville, Kentucky, and although Ashleigh was from Ohio, a bench was dedicated to her in that park and included her picture.
When he won the Cup title in November 2018, Logano wore a hat during part of his celebration that had “Prayers for Ashleigh” on it.
“As a parent, I want to keep her memory alive, but for somebody else to do that, it means 10 times more,” Rupp said. “(Joey and wife Brittany) have meant so much to our family. I really don’t know how to express that.”
Mindy Grubbs relishes the friendship between her son Gavin and Logano. She struggles to find the words to explain what it means for people to see her son for who he is instead of someone confined to a wheelchair.
“(Logano’s) parents raised him in a way that made him emotionally and intelligent enough to understand that there were people who were different and there was value in all different kinds of people,” Mindy Grubbs said.
That her son and Logano are friends isn’t surprising to her.
“Their personalities are so very similar,” Mindy Grubbs said. “Both are really quirky, little bit nerdy, extremely intelligent, extremely driven and very observant and perceptive about the people around them.”
Logano said knowing Gavin Grubbs and others that he’s interacted with through the years, has made an impact on him. As he spoke, he wore a team cap that was signed by Jonah Williams on the inside of the bill. Williams attended race day with Logano in 2017 at Charlotte Motor Speedway as part of the JL Kids Crew program through the Joey Logano Foundation.
“It’s been fun to see (Gavin Grubbs) grow up,” Logano said. “Also him just handling his challenges, it’s enlightening. It’s a perspective that’s different. I’ll never understand. You think of just his life and the challenges that come his way by being stuck in a chair.
“Also, his attitude that goes along with it. That’s what I take from it. He doesn’t want to be treated any different than anybody else. Unfortunately, people do. With us, he doesn’t get treated any different, I promise you that. We give him a hell of a time. He wants that, right?
“It’s just like you are with any of your friends, you give each other a hard time, joke with each other.”
Gavin Grubbs, now 21 and a junior at Arkansas State University, will give as good as he takes with Logano.
“I don’t think either one of us realize the impact the other one has made on the other because it’s felt so normal as life-long friends,” Grubbs said.
But what if they hadn’t met? Make-A-Wish children often are asked for multiple wishes just in case their first wish can’t be fulfilled. Grubbs’ first wish was to meet Logano in 2010. His second wish? A trip to Alaska.
Had the Alaska trip been his first wish or the one that could be fulfilled, Grubbs admits his life would have beeb different. He’s gotten to know several people in the Cup garage – from competitors to officials and media members – and wants to be involved in the sport after graduating from college.
“I wouldn’t have any of the friends I gained from NASCAR,” Grubbs said of what life would have been like had his wish been the Alaska trip.
“I want to do something in sports media, hopefully in NASCAR, partially because I know so many people that are involved in it, that I feel at home when I go to the racetrack. This is what I want to do the rest of my life.”
AVONDALE, Ariz. — That Ross Chastain even has a chance to be a Cup champion Sunday at Phoenix Raceway is, perhaps, more remarkable than if he wins the title.
He wasn’t born into racing royalty as Chase Elliott. He wasn’t viewed as a generational talent as Joey Logano. He wasn’t groomed by a manufacturer as Christopher Bell.
Instead, Chastain relied on lessons from his family of watermelon farmers to climb from underfunded rides to the top of NASCAR’s premier series.
When Chastain shifted into fifth gear, drove his car into the wall and rocketed around Martinsville Speedway’s final two corners last weekend in a desperate bid to make the title race, he was merely following the edict of farm life. And the name of his family’s watermelon operation in Florida: JDI Farms. The JDI stands for Just Do It.
“The thing is, you just do it no matter what the job is,” Ross Chastain’s brother, Chad, told NBC Sports about the family’s motto and business name. “You just do it.
“One of our big things here in Florida is we’ll get these pop-up showers and it will dump two or three inches of rain on you an hour. You have to get that off (the fields) right away. So you don’t have time to freak out or panic and worry about it. You just have to go and do your job and get the water pumped out of the field, so you don’t lose your crop.
“I think growing up, doing that, being up with our dad at midnight when it’s pouring and we’re running around on tractors and we’re calling each other on the phone … it’s something that definitely prepared us for the pressure of racing and life in general.”
There was no grand plan for Ross Chastain’s racing career. After success in the short track ranks, Chastain looked to move up to NASCAR. A deal was put together for him to run a Truck race in 2011 at Indianapolis Raceway Park.
“That was it,” he said of the one-race effort. “That was the plan.”
Chastain finished 10th. It led to a few more rides that season and a full-time effort in 2012 in that series. He moved to Brad Keselowski Racing’s team in the Truck series in 2013 and ran 14 of 22 races. The following season proved more challenging. Chastain ran only three Truck races and seven Xfinity races.
But it was his performance in the Truck season finale that caught the attention of Xfinity Series owner Johnny Davis. Chastain started third and finished 11th.
Davis was looking for a driver for the 2015 Xfinity season, but there was a catch. The ride would be a start-and-park effort, meaning Chastain would not get to run many laps before pulling the car into the garage because of lack of funding.
Davis let Chastain to race in the 2015 season opener at Daytona since speedway racing provides more teams a chance for a good result. Chastain finished ninth.
“We had a legitimate shot to win the race,” Davis told NBC Sports. “I said, I can’t start-and-park the kid like this. This kid’s got talent. We need to help him showcase it.”
Chastain did not start-and-park any race that season. Daytona was the first of 142 races over five seasons with Davis. Chastain scored 13 top-10 finishes in that span. It’s not an impressive record but the team was more of a mid-pack operation and the focus was on not wrecking cars. Still, Chastain showed skill. He also showed a level of determination.
What he didn’t show at a key moment was confidence.
In 2017, a sponsor came to Davis with some extra money for a race and he decided to channel it into a Cup ride for Chastain with team owner Jay Robinson. The catch was the race was at Dover, not the easiest track for drivers, let alone someone without Cup experience.
“I went to Ross and said this is what we’re going to do,” David said.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to get in a Cup car,” Chastain told him.
“Boy, you’ve been ready to get into a Cup car,” Davis said. “I’m not asking. I’m forcing you.”
Chastain recalls that moment vividly.
“I just never thought I was ready for Cup,” he said. “I’m glad that they were stern with it. Because if they would have given me my choice, I wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t have gone to Dover for my first Cup race. No way.”
Why?
“It’s scary,” Chastain said. “It is. It’s Cup racing. It’s hard. You see the guys that do it. Put them on the highest pedestal that I have.
“I just (didn’t) view myself as ready for that. That’s me. I don’t really know how to answer your question other than that was my thoughts and I still don’t believe that I was ready until I actually got in the race. Practice and qualifying, I wasn’t ready. I got in the race, it all clicked.”
Chastain finished 20th.
His journey was just getting underway.
In 2019, Chastain completed a weekend trip that included a Greyhound bus in his commute from one track to another.
He drove his camper from Pocono to Watkins Glen for the next Xfinity race. But he had a midweek Truck race at Eldora Speedway. He decided against flying because of cost of a commercial plane ticket and took a Greyhound bus from upper New York to Columbus, Ohio.
His father picked him up at the bus station. After the Truck race, they piled into a van and drove back while Chastain slept. The van had a flat a few miles from Watkins Glen, but Chastain made it to the track on time.
Chastain’s break came in 2018 when he got to run three races for Chip Ganassi’s Xfinity team. Chastain won at Las Vegas in his second start with the team.
He was set with a full-time ride for Ganassi’s Xfinity team in 2019, but that changed a few days before Christmas. The FBI raided DC Solar’s headquarters and the CEO’s home. The company was to have sponsored Chastain in 2019.
Without a sponsor, Ganassi shut the team down on Jan. 4, 2019. Chastain was suddenly without a ride.
“From the night I found out the raid happened, which was a day and a half later to Jan. 2, in my head I was done racing in NASCAR,” Chastain said. “Jan. 2, I decided to try it again.”
What did he mean he was done with racing?
“In my head, once that (ride) was gone, I just never thought I’d have another opportunity like that and I wasn’t mentally ready to go back and run scuffed tires (for underfunded teams),” he said. “Ultimately, I decided to go back and run scuffed tires.”
It led back to Ganassi but to the organization’s Cup team in 2021. When Justin Marks bought Ganassi’s Cup operation that season, he kept Chastain.
In their first year together, Chastain and Trackhouse will vie for a Cup title Sunday (3 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock).
“This is wild,” Chastain said.
Just like his ride to this moment.
AVONDALE, Ariz. — A video game move sent Ross Chastain to the Cup championship race, but it was a video game that helped start Christopher Bell on the path to Sunday’s title event at Phoenix Raceway.
A 5-year-old Bell was enamored with racing but after his parents bought a junior sprint car and collected sponsorship for it, Bell’s first race almost didn’t happen.
When it was time to climb into the car for the first time, he didn’t want to do so.
“I remember just being super nervous about the situation and not wanting to drive,” Bell said.
But his mother made a deal with him.
“I’ll buy you a Nintendo game if you get in one time,” Kathy Bell said.
Bell got into the car immediately.
“As soon as I got in, I fell in love with it,” he said, recalling the memory more clearly than what Nintendo game he got.
After he completed his first practice run, he exited the car and ran to his mom.
“Did you see me hit the wall?
“Yeah.”
“That was so cool!”
Bell never again questioned getting into a car.
When Bell climbed from his car after winning last weekend at Martinsville, his first words were “Mom and Dad we did it!”
They’ll be here at Phoenix to see if their son can win the Cup championship in his first appearance in the title race (3 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock).
When Bell mentioned his parents after the Martinsville race, it was as much for the counsel they had provided during the playoffs, which have seen him twice fall so far back in the standings he had to win the final race of a round to stay alive. He did so at the Charlotte Roval and then at Martinsville to earn his spot at Phoenix.
But the trials and tribulations of the playoffs wore on Bell.
“The biggest thing that hit me in that moment (at Martinsville) was they kept telling I was going to do it,” Bell said of his parents. “‘You’re going to make Phoenix. You’re going to make the Final.’ … So when I won the race, that was the only thing that I could think of, my mom and dad were right and we did it, we made the Final 4.”
Bell often keeps his emotions in check so such outbursts are rare, but Martinsville was special.
As they rode back home after the race last Sunday night, Bell’s wife, Morgan, was jolted by a sudden exclamation from her husband.
“He’s in the backseat going through all of his text messages and going through this phone and out of nowhere he just screams at the top of his lungs,” Morgan told NBC Sports.
Bell said it was “just the adrenaline” that elicited the reaction.
“It was a big moment, winning at Martinsville, and advancing where I am today is probably one of my biggest moments of my life,” Bell told NBC Sports. “That just goes back the lowest of lows going into Martinsville and … getting right back to the top.”
But Bell’s performance in pressure situations is a trait of the 27-year-old from Norman, Oklahoma.
“He has always been very, very good under extreme pressure,” Bell’s father, David, told NBC Sports.
David Bell saw it when he coached his son in youth basketball and their team played in the finals. While the team lost, Bell’s performance stood out, his father recalls. It carried through Bell’s dirt racing experience. He won the Belleville Nationals midget race in 2013 and won the Chili Bowl Nationals in 2017, ’18 and ’19.
He also won the Camping World Truck Series title in 2017 and made the Xfinity Series championship race in 2018 and ’19.
He faced more pressure Friday at Phoenix when practice didn’t go as well — he was 20th on the speed chart. It was as if the team had the rest of the field right where they wanted.
“That’s right,” crew chief Adam Stevens said with a smile. “We’re just setting the trap.”
Bell starts Sunday’s race 17th. With the way these playoffs have gone for him, it’s not surprising he would face challenges in the finale.
After a first round that saw him be the only playoff driver to score top-five finishes in each of those three races, things have been much more difficult.
He blew a tire on two different occasions at Texas, the second such incident causing him to hit the wall. At Talladega, he spun and was penalized for speeding on pit road, putting him in a must-win situation at the Charlotte Roval. Aided a four-tire pit call by Stevens late in the race, Bell charged to the win to move into the third round.
Bell called that the defining moment of his season to this point.
“I think that really says a lot about our team because it would have been very easy to give up going into the Roval, which we knew was not going to be a great race for us,” Bell said, noting the struggles of Toyotas on road courses this season. “As it turned out, it was not a great race. We were back half of the top 10 car. The yellow flag came out, and we were able to perform how we needed to perform to win.”
Those good feelings didn’t last.
Problems returned the following week at Texas in the opening race of the Round of 8. When Bubba Wallace retaliated and wrecked Kyle Larson, Bell was hit by Larson’s car and was done for the race. A week later, Bell finished 11th at Homestead. He entered Martinsville 33 points out of the final transfer spot. Again, a late four-tire pit call by Stevens helped Bell win to advance to Phoenix.
“I’m fully aware that I have the right guy on the pit box, absolutely,” Bell said.
This is just as Bell pictured when he was a child.
“He never wavered,” Kathy Bell said of her son’s desire to race. “That was the only thing he wanted to do, a professional race car driver. His dad said, ‘You need a Plan B, son,’ but he never got a Plan B.
Kathy admits she didn’t want her son to race but that changed one day.
“I was just praying about him,” Kathy said. “We had two older girls and I had wanted this little guy forever. So I finally got my little guy and he’s wanting to get in a race car. I really didn’t want him to do that. I was praying about it. … I heard clear as a bell this is my destiny for him. So I gave in and Dave said let’s do it. So we let him start racing.”
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