AVONDALE, Ariz. — There are at least two certainties heading into this weekend’s NASCAR season finale that will decide the 2025 Cup Series champion: Rick Hendrick or Joe Gibbs will be the owner of the winning car, and the driver will be in either a Chevrolet or a Toyota.
Beyond that, Sunday afternoon’s showdown at Phoenix Raceway is a guessing game with no obvious favorite among Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe from Joe Gibbs Racing or William Byron and Kyle Larson of Hendrick Motorsports. The highest-finishing driver of those four will be the champion.
Hamlin leads the Cup Series this season in points race wins (six), while Briscoe is the leader in pole positions (seven) and top-five finishes (15). Byron was NASCAR’s regular-season champion and led a series-high 1,278 laps, while Larson has the second-most top-10 finishes (21). Byron and Larson are tied for the series lead in stage wins (10).
The 44-year-old Hamlin is probably the sentimental pick. The three-time Daytona 500 winner is already regarded as the most accomplished driver to never win a Cup Series title, an unwanted moniker previously held by Mark Martin, who still found his way to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, getting inducted in 2015 into the motorsports shrine in Charlotte, North Carolina.
With 60 wins in his Cup Series career — he got the milestone three weeks ago at Las Vegas Motor Speedway — and at least five blown opportunities to win the title, Hamlin has seized the bridesmaid role away from Martin.
“Mark Martin didn’t have nearly the same amount of misses as me, there’s just no way,” Hamlin said before rattling off a list of bad luck, bad decisions and bad timing that has affected him over the year.s
In 2010, he entered the season finale leading the points race in the Chase format, but when he spun early in the race, it damaged his car and he wound up second to Jimmie Johnson in the title hunt. Hamlin has also fallen short four times as one of the four title-eligible drivers in the season finale, a format introduced in 2014. Now he’s one of those final four for the fifth time, though the first time since 2021.
Larson, 33, is the only driver in the field with a Cup Series title, winning it in 2021 in his first season driving for Hendrick. He was the runner-up in 2023, but this is just his third appearance as one of the final four.
Byron, a 27-year-old Charlotte native who opened this season by winning the Daytona 500 for the second year in a row, is back in the final four for a third consecutive year after winning last Sunday’s race at Martinsville Speedway to grab one of the two open title-eligible slots. Larson took the final spot on points over JGR’s Christopher Bell, who just missed out on giving NASCAR Hall of Fame team owner Gibbs three shots at the title.
Briscoe, 30, is in his first season driving for JGR and is in the final four for the first time in his career. He did race in this format for the second-tier Xfinity Series championship in 2020 when he won a series-high nine races, but Austin Cindric took the title by winning the race.
“I guess when I was a little kid I dreamed about winning a NASCAR championship, but it was just a pipe dream, you know? It wasn’t something I thought I’d ever actually get a chance to do,” Briscoe said. “My goal was to just race one race in NASCAR — at any level. Just being able to do that was already a dream come true.”
It is the second time in four years that the championship field is an even split between the two winningest playoff teams in NASCAR history. Hendrick got the win the first time, in 2021 when Larson defeated teammate Chase Elliott, as well as JGR drivers Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr.
“We’ve got one race. We know what we’re up against, somebody that’s really, really good,” Gibbs said. “Two cars in there for them. Two for us. Hopefully this will be good for the fans and everybody and the excitement. Probably won’t be good for me. I’ll be so nervous.”
Team Penske won the past three championships with Joey Logano (2022, 2024) and Ryan Blaney (2023), but when both failed to win at Martinsville, Logano lost a shot at going for the fourth title of his career and Ford was locked out of the final four. That means Chevrolet can win its first title since 2021, and Toyota has a chance at its first since Kyle Busch won driving for JGR in 2019.
Hamlin, Briscoe and Byron all won playoff races the past three weeks to advance this far, but Larson hasn’t won a Cup Series race since his victory at Kansas Speedway on May 11. That was his third triumph in a seven-race stretch, and it a week before — for the second year in a row — he attempted and failed to complete the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day.
“There’s a lot of races he was leading the race, and a caution came out and something happened,” said Hendrick, noting that Larson was in first place when he ran out of gas at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway two weeks ago and Briscoe got the victory and the automatic berth in the final four.
However he made it, when the green flag drops Sunday on the flat one-mile oval at Phoenix, he’ll be racing for the title just as much as Briscoe, Byron and Hamlin.
“I think he’s got the bit in his teeth right now,” Hendrick added of Larson. “The guys have worked hard on our flat-track, short-track program. Kyle’s ready, and so is William. I’m looking forward to this weekend and trying to get another championship.”
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