For the second time in three years, Kyle Larson will race for the NASCAR Cup Series championship at Phoenix Raceway, his ticket coming from winning the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
It’s a significant accomplishment, not only because he is the first to punch his ticket into the championship race but because the championship contender to win the first race in the Round of 8 has gone on to win the championship in four of the last seven years.
That includes Larson in 2021 and Joey Logano in 2022.
So, when making a list of winners and losers from the race, there was no bigger winner than the actual winner as Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels now has almost a month to prepare a car for Phoenix while the seven other contenders race for their championship lives at Homestead and Martinsville.
Winner
Kyle Larson, advanced into the Championship Race
Again, this is where every team wants to be come mid-October, the first of the elite eight to punch their ticket into the championship race. Larson no longer has to care about playoff points, stage points, or performance. He could literally start each of the next two races, immediately come down pit road, and start an autograph session without consequence. He will race for his championship at Phoenix on November 5, and his team can spend three weeks placing their entire operation capacity behind that one goal.
From here, it’s hard to say anyone else was really a winner because literally, no one else did much to improve their standings in the championship battle. In fact, literally everyone else lost ground above or below the cutline since Larson entered the round fourth overall and jumped everyone to the top.
Updated playoff grid
Kyle Larson, Win Advanced
William Byron +11 (was +20)
Denny Hamlin +4 (was +11)
Martin Truex Jr. +3 (was +15)
—
Christopher Bell -3 (was -8)
Tyler Reddick -15 (was -8)
Chris Buescher -23 (was -3)
Ryan Blaney -56 (was -11)
See why there was only one real winner here? The next two weeks at Homestead and Martinsville are going to be a terrifying crapshoot for everyone not associated with the Hendrick 5 team, and it’s fairer to break down everyone else into neutral and losers categories than anything else.
Neutral
Christopher Bell, lost by 0.082
Sure, the No. 20 team technically gained ground on the cutline, but 0.082 could prove to be the entire difference between racing for a championship or not two races from now. If Bell doesn’t advance, it’s not because of how many points he did or did not score, it was wherever he could have found 0.082 over that final green flag run, and he knows it too.
“I feel like that was our chance,” Bell said. “Our chance to make Phoenix this year. (sigh) It slipped away from us. We have two more chances, and I feel good about those tracks, but to be this close stinks.”
William Byron, lost 11 points to the cutline
The Round of 8 is always close, but that’s especially true this year, and it shows in top-seeded William Byron, who only scored six stage points and then finished seventh. In any other universe, that’s a really nice day, but Larson leapfrogging everyone just condensed the standings and now it’s going to be a dogfight. The No. 24 team didn’t even have that bad of a day where five more points here or there would have completely changed the narrative.
“Long runs were the story of our day because that made it tough for us to get stage points and then points at the end,” said Byron, the defending race winner. “We have some work to do now. We just have to put everything together now.”
Denny Hamlin, lost nine to the cutline
Like Byron, Denny Hamlin scoring 11 stage points and finishing 10th would feel like an accomplishment on any other day, but not under the small sample size pressure cooker that is the Round of 8. He ran better throughout the day, but the end just got away from him, and those lost points could prove pivotal.
“I didn’t have a very good restart the second to the last, got split three-wide and lost two spots,” Hamlin said. “We pitted and the adjustment didn’t work with the car and add the lost track position, and we were just too tight and couldn’t do much. I tried to do the best I could with it and I’m disappointed because 10th isn’t what we had all day for sure.”
Martin Truex Jr., lost 13 to the cutline
On one hand, Truex finally looked poised to contend for the first time since the playoffs began, and his seventh-place finish was his first finish better than 15th since the chase for the championship began literally seven weeks ago. Truex finished fifth in stage one, earning the six stage points that come with it, but then stayed out on old tires, a move that cost them a ton of track position. As a result, they didn’t score any second stage points, and that again could prove costly in two races.
“(Crew chief James Small) told me pretty late in 3 and 4 (to stay out) and my gut reaction was ‘don’t do it, don’t stay out,’ but I like to listen to my crew chief because they know more about what’s going on than you do and it’s we’re generally wrong when we go against the crew chief.
“So, I went with it but didn’t like it. 10 laps here is a lot on tires. We could have got a quick caution with the lead and it would have worked out great. We didn’t and once we were in dirty air, we just dropped like a rock.”
Tyler Reddick, remained -8 to the cutline
This is so redundant, but an eighth-place finish with eight stage points earned is a good day, yet good is no longer enough in the Round of 8 when the standings are so tightly contained.
“Yeah, we missed it a little bit on the handling, unfortunately,” Reddick said. “We were really loose and it kind of boxed us in unfortunately. To get an eighth out of it, that was probably a better finish than we had on pace, so to get that finish is good for us. You look at it – yeah, we lost ground on the cutline, but how our car drove today, it should have been a lot worse than it was. We got something out of it and kind of minimized the bleeding.”
Read more: Riley Herbst makes NASCAR Xfinity statement and steals playoff spotlight
Losers
Ryan Blaney, disqualified
NASCAR disqualified Ryan Blaney and the Team Penske No. 12 for a left front shock that did not meet the length specified in the NASCAR Cup Series rule book. The infraction means, if any appeals are successfully made, that Blaney will absolutely have to win one of the next two races to advance in the Cup playoffs.
Related: Ryan Blaney disqualified after Las Vegas NASCAR race
Chris Buescher, lost 20 points below the cutline
There is no other way to put it beyond it was a disaster of a day for the RFK Racing No. 17 team. It’s not just that they finished 11th, worst of the playoff contenders, and with no points, but they also ran this poorly on a day where teammate Brad Keselowski led laps and ran up front throughout the race.
“There will be plenty to dive into and study, but we’re a pretty open book so we’ve got a lot of info going back and forth between the groups all the time,” Buescher said. “We’ll figure out how to be better for next week.”
Buescher never had track position, lost more of it at the drop of the green flag, and just couldn’t get out of the midpack.
“We had a fast race car,” Buescher said. “We had a restart there today in the middle and lost track position and it was hard to get it back. It got a little strung out there at the end and was able to start picking them off one by one. I guess you could say we ran out of time. It was a decent day. It’s good to be upset with 11th, I guess, but we just needed to outrun a lot of cars that we didn’t, and that’s going to make the next two weeks that much more difficult.”
Buescher isn’t in a must-win scenario yet, and says this could have been worse, but it certainly could have been better.
“A worst-case scenario would have been in the garage 38th with a handful of the others that made big mistakes, so it’s not that,” Buescher said. “It just wasn’t good enough compared to the guys we’re going to be racing, so it was a great day in a lot of ways, but just not good enough.”
There was a lot of that going around.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.