The 16 contenders for the Cup Series championship are now 12. The next three races will relegate four more drivers to watch the battle for the season’s top prize instead of being part of it.
At the start of the playoffs, I predicted Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Michael McDowell and Tyler Reddick would not make it past the first round. I had two out of the three correct.
I ranked Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Ross Chastain and Bubba Wallace as medium-high probabilities for elimination. A crash took Logano out of contention.
Kevin Harvick’s first-round elimination surprised me, but who could have predicted his bad luck at Darlington and a mystifyingly bad car at Bristol? Those intangibles are why predicting anything in NASCAR is difficult.
The Tracks
The Round of 12 offers a low-tire-wear intermediate oval (Texas), a superspeedway (Talladega) and the Charlotte Roval. Because anything (good or bad) can happen at Talladega, drivers should focus on finishing well enough at the other tracks to offset potential disaster there.
Texas remains a black box for prediction because its sole race with the Next Gen car was marred by tire problems. Sixteen cautions beat Texas’ old record for most cautions in a race by three.
There’s also only one race worth of data for the Charlotte Roval in the Next Gen car. With stage breaks back in play, crew chiefs will have to weigh points (and playoff points) with track position.
Round of 16 productivity
The reseeded rankings don’t reflect driver performance in the previous round. There is again a 36-point difference between the points leaders (Willam Byron and Martin Truex Jr.) to Wallace. Fourth-place Kyle Larson is only 15 points ahead of 11th-place Blaney.
The graph below shows the points (in green) and playoff points (in yellow) each driver earned in the Round of 16. Playoff points are critical because they renew with each round for drivers still in championship contention. Eliminated drivers are shown with hatched bars.
Larson earned the most race points in the first round with 146. His six playoff points are second only to Hamlin, who earned seven. Hamlin starts the Round of 12 in third, just four points back of Truex and Byron.
Although Truex shares the top seed, he survived the Round of 16 only because his 36 playoff points vaulted him ahead of Harvick, Logano, Stenhouse and McDowell.
With this data and the current seedings in mind, here are the four drivers I think are in the most danger of being eliminated in the second round.
Bubba Wallace
Wallace finished seventh, 32nd and 14th in the first round, for a 17.7 average finish. A similar performance won’t be enough to get out the Round of 12, especially with no playoff points.
Wallace has not won this year and his last top-five finish was in the Coca-Cola 600 at the end of May. Talladega might seem to be his best hope for moving forward with a win; however, his average across three races in the Next Gen car at Talladega is 20.3 with a best finish of 16th.
Ross Chastain
Chastain’s fifth-place finish at Darlington was his first top five since the Nashville win that qualified him for the playoffs. It was only his second top-10 finish since Nashville. Chastain finished 13th and 23rd at Kansas and Bristol, for a 13.7 average finish in the first round.
Statistically, Texas is Chastain’s best chance for a win. The problem is that this is true for a handful of the remaining drivers and many of them have much better records at Texas. Chastain finished 37th at the Roval last year and has never finished better than 22nd in four starts.
The team seems to lack the spark that helped drive them into the Championship 4 last year. The 30-year-old Chastain will have more chances in the future, especially as Trackhouse Racing expands and strengthens.
Ryan Blaney
Three of the four drivers eliminated in the Round of 16 — including defending champion Joey Logano — drove Fords. The season-long weakness of non-RFK Racing Fords puts Blaney in the eliminated column.
Blaney has two strong tracks in this round. He came in fourth at Texas last year and won the All-Star Race. He also won at Charlotte, a comparable track to Texas, this year. His 5.0 average at Talladega in the Next Gen car over the last three races is admirable but not bulletproof.
Blaney had ninth-, 12th- and 22nd-place finishes in the first round of the playoffs for a 14.3 average finish. He hasn’t earned a top five since his win at Charlotte.
Kyle Busch
Kyle Busch has just one top-10 finish in the first three playoff races for an average 12.7 finish. That’s better than much of his competition, but Busch has five DNFs and multiple unforced errors. Minor mistakes have a huge impact in the playoffs when the lower half of the field is so close.
Statistically, this ought to be strong set of tracks for the No. 8 team. Busch has a 4.0 average finish at Charlotte and a 7.0 average finish at Las Vegas in the Next Gen car. He won Talladega in the spring and has an 8.0 average finish there in the Next Gen car. He finished third at the Roval last year.
But statistics don’t tell the entire story.
Busch’s world turned upside down last year when he couldn’t come to an agreement that would let him stay at Joe Gibbs Racing. He and his new owner, Richard Childress, agree that Busch has initiated a lot of positive change at his new home. But even with the recent switch of pit crews, the team still has a way to go before achieving perfect execution more often than not.
When I listen to Busch speak, he exhibits the frustration of a virtuoso musician playing a piano in need of tuning. I think he’ll win another championship, but not this year.