Objectively, Martin Truex Jr. has failed upward over the past six weeks.
Truex, the 2017 NASCAR Cup Series champion, captured the regular season championship with three wins over 26 weeks and was the co-top-seeded contender alongside William Byron at the start of the playoffs.
Since then, it has been a disastrous stretch of races for the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team with literally zero finishes better than 15th since the playoffs began.
- Darlington, 18th
- Kansas, 36th
- Bristol, 19th
- Texas, 17th
- Talladega, 18th
- ROVAL, 20th
So remarkably, not only is Truex still in contention, but he is once again the second-ranked contender with three races left to decide the final four who will race for the championship at Phoenix Raceway in November.
Truex keeps surviving these awful rounds, the byproduct of equal parts bad luck and bad performance, only because he entered the playoffs with 33 playoff points by virtue of his three wins, three stage wins, and his regular season championship.
Those playoff points are added to the base reset total at the start of each round, combined with whatever drivers earned during the previous three-race round, meaning that Truex gets everything right back as long as he survived.
The system is designed to reward regular-season success alongside the small sample-size dramatics of a playoff format, but Truex will no longer be able to backdoor his way to the championship race because the standings are too tight now that there are just eight left.
“I didn’t create the system. We used it to our advantage,” Truex said after advancing again on Sunday evening at the Charlotte ROVAL. “That won’t get us through the next one. The next one, you’ve got to be running up front. Two winners of the next three races are probably going to be playoff guys that are still going.”
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History has shown that the teams most likely to win over the next three races are the eight still in contention for the championship and Truex hopes his team can recapture the performance and good fortune from the first two-thirds of the year.
Truex has won at the last three race tracks that set the final four — Vegas, Homestead, and Martinsville. He will be excited to not see a superspeedway or the ROVAL, the latter of which has plagued him to the tune of three consecutive finishes outside of the top-15.
“I’m definitely excited we’re not coming back here again,” he said. “This track has just been a thorn in our side. Feel good about moving on and feel good about what we can do in the next three races. Some good tracks for us and hopefully we can get something going. It’s been a pretty tough playoffs so far.”
Updated playoff grid
William Byron +20
Martin Truex Jr +15
Denny Hamlin +11
Kyle Larson +3
—
Chris Buescher -3
Tyler Reddick -8
Christopher Bell -8
Ryan Blaney -10
How it works
The next three races will cut the championship eligible drivers from eight to four in advance of the championship race on November 5. To advance to the championship race, the remaining eight drivers need to either win one of the next three races at Las Vegas, Homestead or Martinsville or to avoid being amongst the lowest four drivers in the standings out of the eight by the end of the final race in the round at Martinsville.
In other words, if one of the final eight drivers wins one of the next three races, the points and standings don’t matter to them anymore. They automatically advance no matter what happens. But if they don’t win, they need to be above the cutline by the checkered flag at Martinsville.
The four drivers that advance will be the only championship eligible drivers at Phoenix. That race will feature a full field of drivers but the highest finishing driver of the four championship eligible drivers by the end of that race at Phoenix is crowned the champion.
In all nine years of this format, only championship eligible drivers have won the final race, and therefore won the championship so it more or less a must-win race for all four. With that said, it is theoretically possible for a non-championship driver to win the race but then it reverts to the highest finishing driver of the final four contenders.
The favorites
Truex is the perfect case study for why the intensity of the playoffs ramp up in this final round. Simply put, there is no margin of error.
Where Truex and William Byron entered the first round with a 29-point advantage over the elimination cutline, which was 12th at the time, it’s now just a 20-point advantage for Byron over fifth place and 15 for Truex.
There is no more failing upwards and one bad race without a win to overcome it spells certain elimination for most everyone except Byron because of his season’s worth of playoff points.
Byron and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 team have been consistently the squad to beat all year, with a slight exception to a five race stretch near the end of the regular season where they finished no better than 14th.
- New Hampshire, 24th
- Pocono, 14th
- Richmond, 21st
- Michigan, 35th
- Indianapolis GP, 14th
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It’s easy to see that flat tracks, short tracks or otherwise single groove or lower downforce tracks were their weakness near the end, which is why Byron feels better about Vegas and Homestead than Martinsville.
“I’m a little apprehensive about Martinsville but I feel like we’ve developed a good package for the low downforce races where we’ve struggled to get our car to turn and do what it needs to do,” Byron said. “But definitely feel good about our higher to mid downforce package speedway races.”
But if there is anyone left in this thing who can afford one bad race, it’s the 24.
Then there is Hamlin and Larson, who both have some immediate breathing room but also a very friendly slate of tracks that suit both their respective organizations and driving syles.
God knows Larson loves Homestead and he won at Martinsville in the spring.
“I feel really good about the next round,” Larson said. “Vegas, we were super strong this year and our stuff has gotten better. Homestead has always been one of my favorite tracks and we won at Martinsville and got better there for whatever reason.
“We’re definitely putting a lot of emphasis on Vegas and Homestead for good or solid points days.”
Needs a win or perfect round
Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson enter the final three-race round above the cut line but everyone from third on back are kind of in a similar place in that they absolutely cannot afford a bad race without then needing to win their way out of it.
Technically, any of the remaining eight could crash on Lap 1 of the first two races and then win at Martinsville to advance to the championship but that’s not optimal. Bell says Sunday at Las Vegas will set the tone for everyone once teams see where they stand in the rankings.
“The round of 8 is not going to be a cruise through the races round for us,” Bell said. “We’re below the cutline now and we’re going to have to have three spectacular races if we’re going to make it to the final four.”
At the same time, following a round that had the ROVAL and Talladega, this round is a three-race set featuring tracks that largely allow the teams to control their own destiny. Even Martinsville, under the current rules package, doesn’t allow for a lot of crashing or wackiness.
It’s a track position race now.
“I love the Round of 8 schedule because it’s three tracks that are all in the team’s control and should see the best teams through,” Bell said. “Vegas is a high-speed, high-grip intermediate and then you go to Homestead that is a low-grip intermediate and then the most iconic short track in Martinsville.”
The intermediates are still the bread and butter of NASCAR scheduling and everyone, according to 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick has saved their best stuff for Vegas and Homestead to start on the right foot.
“We’ve had our sights set on the Round of 8 for a while,” Reddick said. “I know it’s a process to get to the Round of 8, but when I look at the tracks we’re going to, the mile and a halves have been good to us and Toyota.
“We have Vegas, which believe it or not, I’m more excited about than Homestead.”
It is hard to believe because Reddick won back-to-back Xfinity Series championships with wins at Homestead in 2018 and 2019.
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But don’t count anyone out because in the words of Hamlin, ‘where did Joey Logano come from last year, do you even remember that he won the championship,’ which is a fair assertion because he had only two wins to this point last season.
It just takes getting to the Round of 8 and getting hot, which Logano did with wins at Las Vegas and then Phoenix to win the championship, something his teammate Ryan Blaney hopes to replicate this year.
Blaney has wins at Charlotte in the Coca-Cola 600 and then Talladega earlier in the month to make it to this point but industry chatter has Ford saving something for both Buescher and Blaney.
“Shit, I haven’t heard,” Blaney said. “Whatever it is, I hope they pull it out.”
They certainly did for Logano last year after, again, a season that looked similar for Blaney in that the No. 12 car has been moderately consistent but lacking to date the ability to win en masse.
But who does these days in the NextGen era?
“We haven’t had the pace that we expect to have and I can see us definitely not being one of the favorites,” Blaney said. “The 24, 19, 45, and 11, those guys have been fast all year but we’ve been super consistent and disciplined.
“You never know and this is the perfect time of the year to peak, and we’re peaking.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.