This isn’t the final chance to make the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs for those not already qualified but it is the last realistic opportunity for those who haven’t shown themselves capable of winning a race to this point.
That’s one subplot to the Coke Zero Sugar 400 on Saturday night at Daytona. The other is the absolute dogfight on the cutline to advance on points and there’s a non-zero chance that the former storyline could provide a wrinkle to the latter.
First, here’s the race to make the playoffs on points with Saturday and the Southern 500 at Darlington next week remaining before the Round of 16 reset.
Martin Truex Jr. +77
Ty Gibbs +39
Chris Buescher +16
Ross Chastain +1
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Bubba Wallace -1
Buescher, Chastain and Wallace are in an absolute duel and every stage point and result over the next two races matter tremendously, an uneasy place to be in when one of those two races are a superspeedway pack race.
Wallace was above the cutline until he crashed out on Monday at Michigan, in an incident not of his doing, Kyle Larson crashing ahead of him and collecting several other drivers.
“Just, got to manage our race and our expectations and try to come out with a solid finish,” Wallace said.
Chastain was well above the cutline before overtime last week, and then he got crashed on the penultimate restart, and coughed up about 15 points in the process. He says he doesn’t think about points until the day is done … for good or for bad.
“I could give you an example of last week at Michigan because it’s fresh in my mind was I had never thought about when I was in the car until I was stuck in the grass, and at that moment I said oh, no,” he said. “It came flooding in the thoughts of all the cars no longer around me that I had been racing with, so it won’t be in my mind while I’m racing. You can’t do that; it’s not possible for me. We’ll just go race and win.”
Kevin Harvick called out Chris Buescher earlier in the week for saying he doesn’t count points in this scenario, that he is completely indifferent to it until they are added up, but the defending winner of this race doubled down on that sentiment.
“I can assure him it’s not BS,” Buescher said. “It is not something that we’ve put any focus on throughout my career, especially not until it’s absolutely necessary. At this point, there are thoughts of what our point situation is and discussed it a little bit today and last week.
“The last couple of weeks haven’t gone our way, so we don’t start the race thinking about points and how do we just put points up and play conservative. I promise, that’s not what’s going on here, but we’ve had some rough go’s for a couple of races and we haven’t been in a spot to compete for a win at the end.
Yes, at that point, the team has made me aware of struggles of some of the other cars we’re racing on that cut line, and it’s just information. It’s not telling me to do anything different. It’s just, ‘so you know, we’ve had two cars that we’re racing that have had failures or wrecked out.’
“That’s just information for me to say, ‘Do I really want to go four-wide into turn one at Pocono, or three-wide may be my number.’ That’s all it is. Yeah, at that point you think about it. If you don’t truly believe you’re going to have a shot to win the thing, you’re not going to go do something crazy and lose 30 points on the day. I’ll defend that one pretty adamantly. I can assure him it’s not BS and we’re not coming here to points race. We’re coming here to win races.”
Then there’s Martin Truex Jr. and Ty Gibbs, both well above the cutline. Gibbs, unlike Buescher, is counting points a little bit.
“We’re looking at the big picture, it’s really hard to win one of these,” Gibbs said. “And I think at the end of the day, it’s down to the luck of the draw what position you are in and where you’re at.
“I think you have to play it safe, but it’s a hard one because you really just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
At 77 points above the cutline, Truex would basically have to crash out of the next two races early to have a shot at missing the playoffs so is he just in crash avoidance mode on Saturday night?
“I feel like if you race that way here, that’s how you end up in a crash,” Truex said. “So, we’re just going to go race hard and try to win. With these cars here now, you just need to race hard and try to stay near the front.
“You have to be at the front to win and our best races here were when we stayed up front and our worst races came when we lost track position, had a bad pit stop, and that’s how we ended up in a crash. So, we’re just going to race hard and hope for the best. That’s all you can do here.”
The wild card scenario
But, there are two scenarios that could completely upend all of this.
This is a race that literally anyone could win on Saturday night, even teams that haven’t show the pace to do it in a traditional race environment and two of them are starting on the front row in Michael McDowell and Todd Gilliland.
They both need a win to advance into the playoffs too and may end up having to race each other for it on the final lap.
“We haven’t gotten to the last lap and been nose-to-tail and had a shot at trying to win the race together, but from my standpoint is the best thing that we can do for our team and for ourselves is to work together because we have fast cars and if we can work together, and we’ve seen guys do it well,” McDowell said.
“The 6 and the 17 here last year did a great job and I think if it wasn’t Chris Buescher leading that race in front of Brad, Brad would have drove that race much different that last lap. He did give himself a chance to win but didn’t ever put Chris in a situation where he wasn’t going to, if that makes sense. And I think that’s what it comes down to. I don’t want to take away a win from Todd. I want to win myself tomorrow night, but if we’re in that situation, you have to play it out to where is my move going to hurt both of us or is it going to help one of us, or both of us.
“So, you don’t know until you’re in that situation and we haven’t been there yet to know on that last lap coming off of Turn 4 what we would do, but it really is situational just like anything else. Hopefully, we’re in that spot. Hopefully, we can get to the last few laps of these races and put ourselves in position because as you guys know so much can happen in this race in particular. There’s a lot that can happen, so hopefully we get to that point to feel and see what we would do.”
The same holds true for 2023 Daytona 500 winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who could turn his entire season around with his third win at Daytona and fourth on a superspeedway.
“For us, the stages don’t matter so we just need to make sure our car is capable of winning the race on that last stint,” Stenhouse said. “We’re going to manage our fuel so we can take as little as possible before that last stint.
“But everyone is in that same boat too. Keeping track position is going to be super important and trying to pit with a large group of cars so you don’t lose the draft.”
Josh Berry, Noah Gragson, Ryan Preece, Chase Briscoe, Zane Smith, Corey Lajoie or literally anyone in the field could win their way into the playoffs on Saturday and if they do, it would move the cutline up by one.
There is also the looming Austin Dillon final appeal, which while unlikely, could still be overturned and that would move the cutline up another spot too.
So even with two races remaining in the regular season, literally everyone still has a chance to make the Round of 16 once the playoffs start in three weeks.