For all the talk of luck when it comes to the current NASCAR Cup Series playoff format, most everyone involved will tell you they make their own luck from round-to-round, and that success ultimately comes down to executing in the moments that matter the most
Ryan Blaney wasn’t lucky in winning Talladega to advance to the Round of 8 and he surely wasn’t lucky in winning at Martinsville on Sunday to advance to the Cup Series championship for the first time in his eight-year career.
So, when a reporter after the race suggested that Blaney had found some luck, he pushed back big time.
“What’s been lucky about it,” Blaney responded. “I don’t think anything has been lucky about it. The last three weeks, we’ve been running amazing. We ran up front in Vegas. We had a chance to win at Homestead. We won today. I don’t think there’s any luck that goes into this. There may be lucky moments, but I don’t think a horseshoe is really true at all.
“We’ve worked really hard to get to the point that we need to with speed, and our group has executed very good races. They deserve to be here. You can interpret luck how you want. The performance side, you still have to bring fast race cars, race cars capable to win.”
Then there was Denny Hamlin, who in finishing third on Sunday, came up eight points short to William Byron for the final transfer spot. He suffered a mechanical failure last weekend at Homestead that was largely the difference and he says a degree of luck has played into his eliminations the past several seasons.
“We performed fine,” Byron said. “Luck is a factor. When you use small sample size to crown champions, sometimes when luck doesn’t fall your way and you get left out, it just feels like I have been unlucky in the playoffs.
“I have never felt like, over the years, that we weren’t good enough to make the final four. What’s this, five straight years finishing top-five in points, so I have an incredible team but we just keep crapping out in the playoffs.”
His crew chief, Chris Gabehart, rejects that because he believes ‘we make our own’ luck with their mechanical failure last weekend.
“The things that happened last week, you guys are never going to know the details about them but I do, and ultimately, there’s no luck in that. Luck is for weak people. That’s the way I truly believe it.”
There are exceptions to that, of course, but there was no luck in the No. 11 team being left out either.
“This X factor, black cat crap, I can control having a car that is capable of leading every lap and I can control having a power steering failure,” Gabehart said. “And when I say ‘I,’ that’s the whole team, we have to be better.”
No one knows more, for good and bad, about the rewards and trials of this format than Jeff Gordon. The four-time champion arguably had the team to beat in 2014 but was famously eliminated due to a crash in the final three-race round with Brad Keselowski.
He made it to the championship race the next year by winning Martinsville, but only after Matt Kenseth retaliated against Joey Logano for a prior incident, destroying the latter in the process.
“You race the format,” Gordon told Sportsnaut after the race. “I certainly feel like my style was better under the season long format, and we can debate it, but I do think this format is the best thing for our fans and to grow the sport.
“It makes it tough. Larson was almost eliminated in the last round. You have to survive the ROVAL and Talladega and that’s not ideal. … I regret that I didn’t win a championship under this format because that’s what it’s about, surviving on the bad days and capitalizing on the good days.”
For example, some will say there was luck in how Byron survived to a 13th place finish when running around 20th all day. They will say that it was luck that some teams broke in front of them or crashed out. The other side of that coin is that Byron entered the playoffs as the regular season co-top seed and executed enough.
He survived a bad day after capitalizing on a lot of good this past summer.
“It was kind of hell in a bottle,” Byron said. “I’ve never been so mad in a race car, I’ve never wanted to get out so much, I’ve never been so frustrated at the car and how loose I was, how tight I was in spots. I just had no grip. It’s tough to do that. But a lot of people raced me with respect; I appreciate that. I feel like we do that and vice versa, and a lot of people took care of me. I’m just really thankful for that.
“We just really deserve it. We deserve to go to Phoenix. It’s nice to see it pay off.”
Martin Truex Jr., the regular season champion, was eliminated because they had a 19.0 average finish over the first nine races of the playoffs. That’s not luck.
It wasn’t good luck qualifying on the pole. It wasn’t bad luck getting hit with a pit road speeding penalty halfway through the second stage. It wasn’t bad luck not being able to drive through the field.
“We’ve had some bad luck,” he said.
They, collectively, did not execute over the past nine weeks no matter how much it sounds like misfortune.
“Like I said, some years it feels like it’s your year, some years it feels like it’s not,” Truex said. “I just feel we couldn’t do anything right. If it was ever a 50/50 call, it always went against us. A blown engine, a flat tire, you name it — problem after problem. Just kept setting us back, and we couldn’t get no momentum. I think we did a great job today. It was a tiny little error, 0.2mph can ruin your whole year, unfortunately.”
Blaney and Byron will join Christopher Bell and Kyle Larson in the championship race next weekend at Phoenix Raceway, not because they were the luckiest over the past nine weeks, but because they responded the most to a playoff format that rewards meeting the moment.
They made their own luck.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.