Welcome to NASCAR knockout round!
Helpful Hint: Don’t call it Chasing. And dare not call it Playoff, singular. That’s what they did in college football, where only four teams entered the College Football Qualifiers field. Here in the car nation, there are 16 teams in the title war, but like the CFP and the season, those 16 teams share their post-season with a host of other teams vying for the title. victory, but not for the championship.
Confused? You are not alone. But that’s why we’re here. To answer your car inventory questions, whether you’ve watched NASCAR since Richard Petty vs Bobby Allison or you don’t know the difference between Chase Elliott and Chase Briscoe.
How does NASCAR post-production work? Who is staying? Who’s out (but still on track)? How do we get here? Where we are going? Who is most likely to stand on Victory Lane to lift that huge Cup Series trophy 10 weeks from now? Get a greased pencil and read it first.
How did we get here?
At the end of the 26th easiest “regular season” race since NASCAR’s so-called “Epoch of Elimination” began in 2014, 15 of the 16 riders who made it past the lap also won the race. win a race, and it will be all 16 winners at Kansas Speedway Kurt Busch was not disqualified at the end of July by an ongoing match with concussion-like symptoms.
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The final opening point is inconclusive Ryan Blaneywho overcame the former Cup Series champion Martin Truex Jr. at least three points, but only because Austin Dillon was able to weather a giant Big One crash at Daytona and go on to win the race with a time of 0.128 seconds ahead of a pair of race winners this season. If they win, Truex will also enter the Playoff; or if Truex, who finished eighth, got past a few cars ahead of him, he’d be there and Blaney would be out. That’s how close it is.
This season is only the third season in NASCAR’s nearly 75-year history to feature 16 different winners in the first 26 races of the year. The gold standard for competitive seasons in the modern era remains 2001, when 19 drivers won 36 races. Considering we had five winners for the first time this year, Blaney and Truex are yet to win, and a handful of other drivers have had close calls but have fallen short (Bubba Wallacesecond in the Daytona 500; Chris Bueschersecond at Sonoma; Corey Lajoiebattle with Elliott in Atlanta, etc.) still has a chance to compare or maybe break that mark.
Who is staying?
New, reset NASCAR Qualifiers Rankings:
If you’re scoring at home – and we are – it’s five former Cup Series champions, just one former multiple-time champion, plus four playoffs rookies and one real rookie on the Daytona 500 winning team. Austin Cindric. For car manufacturers, Chevy leads with eight entries, followed by Ford (5) and Toyota (3).
What happens now?
The next 10 races will eliminate 4 riders every 3 weeks. If the driver wins against one of those three, he automatically advances to the next round. The remaining positions are determined by the points ranking.
That’s 16 riders competing in the first three races, 12 remaining in the next three, nine maintaining title hopes in the next three, and four racing for the title at season finale at Phoenix Raceway on November 6. The top finisher out of those four is your NASCAR Cup Series champion. Easy, right? Unless you’re one of those four.
“You thought it would be the same, just take care of your business and race and move on, right?” speak Joey Logano, who made that final quarterfinal list four times. “But there was a definite sense that the pressure was on. We made it to the finale feeling like the favorites and we made it feel like underdogs. All of those things. What I know is, however you got there, when that green flag came out and there were 300 laps to race for everything, for the whole season, like, ‘God, this is real right now. hours!’ “
Round 16 kicks off this weekend with NASCAR’s oldest and most extreme track event, the venerable Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, a race and venue that has been on the Cup Series calendar since the off-season. second in 1950. The knockout races for each of the Playoffs were equally challenging. The Bristol Night Race marked the end of lap 16, Charlotte Roval finished lap 12, and the Martinsville half-mile flat bull run, the last remaining track from NASCAR’s first season in 1949, will decide. four will compete for the Cup next weekend.
Round 16
Darlington Raceway
Kansas Expressway
Bristol Motor Expressway
Round 12
Texas Motor Speed Highway
Talladega Superspeedway
Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval
Round 9
Las Vegas Motorway
Homestead-Miami . Expressway
Martinsville Expressway
Championship Race (Round 4)
Phoenix Racetrack
Who are the favorites and who will suffer?
The good news for Dillon is that his impressive knockout round was due to the screenplay. Same goes for Cindric and his first-time winners. The bad news is that since the Era of Eliminations started in 2014, those who barely got to play have also often started playing early, and even if they do take a break from elimination for a while, they don’t make it to the next round. final four teams at the end of the season. In the previous eight versions of the format, the racer with the deepest record started the knockout stages and went on to win the title as seventh, finished by Kevin Harvic in 2014 and Logano four years later. Meanwhile, four of the eight champions started the post-season right where they finished, at the top of the table.
With that in mind, it’s hard to bet on Elliott, who has somehow turned 2022 of this near-historic defiance and unpredictability into a game, winning the regular-season championship with how 130 points difference like Snake River Canyon through Logano.
The wise men agree with that assessment. Going into the knockout stages, BetMGM has Elliott listed as the favorite with a score of 3-1, exactly where it had him when the green flag waved over the Daytona 500. It has Kyle Larson at 7-1 and Denny Hamlin 8-1. It’s not surprising that people behind desks in the desert value age and experience, like the halls of future celebrities who have struggled through great periods of time. this season, like Kyle BuschLogano and Harvick, are both among the top eight favorites 12-1 and better.
There’s a playoffs breakdown that sportsbooks love right now, even if they don’t return in February. Congratulations to anyone who put their salary in Ross Chastain in February. Back then, the Watermelon Man was placed on the 150-1 roster to hold the Cup this fall. He is now 8-1, the fourth best among those in the knockout stages.
2021 champion Larson explained: “I think experience matters. “For me, the first time you’re in a playoffs situation, it’s like the first time you go to a track you’ve never been to. You need time to get your spirits up. The next time you come back, you feel You think it’s just going to be, ‘Hey, let’s race and don’t worry about it.’ But it’s different. It’s also fun. I’m ready to go.”
