Five thoughts after Sunday night’s Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season finale …
1. Taking Stock
A regular season that began in February has now concluded, and the 10-week NASCAR playoffs are upon us. So with everything we know so far, who will ultimately prevail and stand on the Phoenix Raceway stage as the 2024 Cup Series champion?
Well, it’s anyone’s guess. This has been yet another wide-open, unpredictable, parity-filled season. In each of the past two years at this time, few would have picked Joey Logano or Ryan Blaney to make a championship run — but they did, showing that getting hot at the right time during the playoffs matters more than anything in modern NASCAR.
The manufacturers have practically an even split of cars (Ford six, Chevrolet five, Toyota five), and there are eight different teams accounting for the 16 playoff spots. You could argue there are some easy outs in this field, and you’d probably be right. But after three of the four post-Olympics races had shocking upset winners, can anyone truly be sure of their picks?
That said, here’s my guess for how the playoffs will unfold.
Round 1 (Atlanta, Watkins Glen, Bristol): A superspeedway, a road course with a new tire and an unpredictable short track. This round could be a recipe for some big names getting eliminated because simply having three clean races (i.e. top-15 finishes) should be enough to get through to Round 2. Multiple playoff contenders will wreck at Atlanta, someone will get burned by the high-falloff tire at Watkins Glen and Bristol is … Bristol.
That said, it’s difficult to picture a path for Harrison Burton after he finished last in the point standings. I also don’t love Daniel Suárez’s chances in this round, and Logano’s crash-tainted results this summer don’t offer much reason for optimism. There will also be a surprising elimination this round due to a wreck; I’ll go with Chase Elliott to have the unlucky break, as he doesn’t have enough playoff points to overcome much of a setback.
Out: Burton, Suárez, Logano, Elliott
Round 2 (Kansas, Talladega, Charlotte Roval): Another tricky round with major upset potential, but this one at least has the straight-up race at Kansas in addition to another superspeedway and road course. This is the type of setup where a darkhorse could really make some noise and reach the final eight thanks to good results at two wild-card types of tracks (particularly drivers who are good at both drafting and road racing), while at the same time eliminating some key names.
Denny Hamlin’s championship curse is ripe to rear its ugly head in this round, as he no longer has the playoff points needed to give himself a full mulligan. Austin Cindric and Martin Truex Jr. also bow out in Round 2, along with William Byron’s shocking elimination.
Out: Hamlin, Cindric, Truex, Byron
Round 3 (Las Vegas, Homestead, Martinsville): This pure battle of a round offers the best remaining drivers a chance to truly narrow the field down to four worthy title contenders.
Chase Briscoe’s magical run comes to an end here, while Alex Bowman, Brad Keselowski and Ty Gibbs also see their title hopes disappear for 2024.
Out: Briscoe, Bowman, Keselowski, Gibbs
Championship race (Phoenix): That sets up a final four of Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, Ryan Blaney and Tyler Reddick. This is where Bell can really shine, as he won Phoenix in the spring (coming from 20th on the final restart) and then repeated the feat on a similar track this summer at New Hampshire.
Bell will be making his third straight Championship 4 appearance, but this time he’ll close it out to win his first Cup Series championship.
Champion: Bell
Christopher Bell, in the Championship 4 each of the past two seasons, is a real threat to win the title in 2024. (James Gilbert / Getty Images)
2. Fastest Car Tracker
With a new “takeaways” format coming next week for the start of the playoffs, our regular-season experiment wraps up with yet another victory for “Other Cars.” Briscoe showed tremendous grit in scoring the Southern 500 win, but he wasn’t the fastest car; that belongs to Larson, who led a season-high 263 laps before settling for fourth place.
What did we learn from this tracker during the regular season? Frankly, it’s not a surprise to realize the fastest car in a NASCAR race doesn’t actually win on a regular basis. NASCAR, with its stage breaks and caution-generating action and double-file restarts and overtimes and free-pass rules, is set up in some ways to thwart the fastest car from stinking up the show. That unpredictability accounts for much of the entertainment value in NASCAR, because fans must stay tuned to see how the actual race unfolds.
Bell had the fastest car most often this season, followed by Larson and Hamlin. There was a significant dropoff after that, though 11 different drivers accounting for this statistic in 28 races seems like further evidence of Next Gen parity.
Fastest Car Score: Other Cars 17, Fastest Cars 11.
Fastest Cars by Driver: Christopher Bell 6, Kyle Larson 5, Denny Hamlin 4, Tyler Reddick 2, William Byron 2, Joey Logano 2, Michael McDowell 2, Martin Truex Jr. 1, Todd Gilliland 1, Ty Gibbs 1, Shane van Gisbergen 1, Unclear 1.
GO DEEPER
2024 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs: All 16 drivers and their chances to win the title
3. Q&A
Q: Does a season-long points format have a place in today’s NASCAR?
There’s a heated debate whenever the topic of season-long points gets brought up, because the pro-playoffs camp likes to argue the closeness of the points is a mirage. Drivers and teams would race completely differently if the system didn’t reward winning like it does, they claim, rendering the overall points at season’s end irrelevant.
But that same argument can’t be applied to this time of year, when NASCAR’s top drivers have been scrambling to get as high in the standings as they can in order to secure more playoff points. That makes the first 26 races a true points battle, and this year’s regular-season championship was particularly close.
Reddick ended up winning the regular season title by one point over Larson and 29 over Elliott. And had Hamlin not gotten his fluke penalty, he would have been 30 points out.
That’s four drivers within 30 points of each other with 10 races remaining. And even Bell, at 77 behind, would still be within striking distance if he got hot.
So … would it be such a bad thing if that was the actual championship format? NASCAR created the Chase, and later the elimination playoffs, to drum up interest and drama during NFL season. The idea was to increase ratings and attention; arguably, that has not worked.
We don’t know what the ratings would be otherwise, but certainly the downward trend during much of the Chase/Playoffs Era hasn’t offered evidence to suggest more people tune in because of this format.
Meanwhile, more than a decade into the elimination-style system with a one-race championship, the credibility of the format and the champion is still often discussed (even by drivers themselves, many of whom continue to push back on the one-race concept). But in a season-long format, there would be no argument the eventual champ didn’t deserve their title.
Sure, you could have some blowout years in which the championship is decided with several races remaining. On the other hand, there’s more parity than ever these days — which means it would be much harder to run away with a points lead.
The playoffs can be exciting, and here’s hoping for a fun 10 weeks. But they also feel artificial and forced at times, and when the champ isn’t someone reflective of a full-season performance, it remains a bit odd. So perhaps given how close the cars are in today’s NASCAR, could a season-long format be worth another look?
Ryan Blaney got hot at the right time in 2023, winning two playoff races and earning the championship with a second-place finish at Phoenix. (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
A: Is it possible to identify the Championship 4 contenders at the halfway point of the regular season?
That was the question posed here after the Darlington race in May, which marked 13 races down and 13 to go until the playoffs. At the time, the top four drivers in the standings were Larson, Truex, Hamlin and Elliott.
Except research revealed that in each of the previous Next Gen seasons, only one of the eventual final four drivers were in the top four of the standings at the halfway point. So we wrote at the time: “If that pattern is to be believed, then three of these four drivers — Larson, Truex, Hamlin, Elliott — won’t make the championship race. That’s how wild that is.”
Well, actually, it’s not that wild now. Larson is the only one among that group who seems like a solid Championship 4 bet; Hamlin and Elliott have some work to do, while Truex doesn’t seem like he’ll even get close.
Meanwhile, eventual regular-season champion Reddick wasn’t on the radar yet at the halfway point (he was sixth in the standings, 90 points behind Larson) and Bell was 15th (yes, 15th!) after a miserable start to the season.
That’s worth keeping in mind for next year, because while it’s tempting to make conclusions based on early-season performance (Byron winning three of the first eight races, for example), it can ultimately be quite misleading.
4. NASquirks
To set the record straight, Reddick did not soil himself during the race. Nor did he vomit inside the car, despite saying at one point on the team radio he did both of those things.
Hey, let’s cut the guy some slack. Racing at 200 mph with a stomach bug in extreme discomfort, strapped into a searing hot and humid cockpit for four hours, can make strange words come out of a person’s mouth.
Here’s Reddick to clarify what he meant: “I held on for dear life all night. I thought it was going to happen, but … I actually really just wanted to get it out because it was really, really bad. I took some Imodium at the infield care center earlier. That was the worst thing for me because I couldn’t get anything out that I wanted. It was just a rough night.”
Thankfully for Reddick’s interior mechanic, there was no biohazard waiting to be cleaned out of the seat on Monday morning. His firesuit didn’t get soiled like Tony Stewart’s after his mid-race potty break during a 2004 Watkins Glen win.
But you know how memories work: A few years from now, the lore will be that Reddick actually did get sick inside the car from both ends. Either way, it was Reddick’s equivalent of the “Flu Game,” and he somehow endured all of that to win the regular-season title by a single point — with Michael Jordan himself watching on.
5. Five at No. 5
Our mini power rankings after Race No. 28/38 (including exhibitions):
1. Kyle Larson (last time: 2): You can’t always judge a night by the results when there are late cautions, and Larson’s 263 laps led at a crown jewel race — his most laps led in more than three years — show the No. 5 team is ready for another deep playoff run.
2. Tyler Reddick (last time: 1): Stomach bug aside, Reddick didn’t have as fast of a car as he would have liked, which was surprising considering the heater 23XI Racing has been on lately.
3. Christopher Bell (last time: 4): Bell enters the playoffs with four finishes of sixth or better in the last five races. As long as he survives the first two rounds, he’ll be a major championship threat.
4. Kyle Busch (last time: not ranked): Despite missing the playoffs, Busch went 4-2-2 in the final three races of the regular season to at least give himself a shot. His Richard Childress Racing cars suddenly look better since the Olympic break.
5. Ryan Blaney (last time: 3): Getting taken out by someone in back-to-back weeks has no relevancy to overall speed, and Blaney was 11th or better in seven of eight races until the recent cold stretch.
Dropped out: Hamlin.
GO DEEPER
23XI Racing sends a resounding message at Darlington — ‘We’re coming’
(Top photo of Chase Briscoe celebrating his win Sunday at Darlington: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
