Prior to officially unveiling the Chase for the Championship format in January, NASCAR and Racing Insights conducted over 25,000 simulations to predict how the format could potentially play out.
The findings:
Overall, drivers won the championship 85 percent of time when seeded inside the top six and 69 percent of the time from the top three. There is a pathway to the championship all the way through the 16th seed but the math doesn’t lie about who the favorites are.
The Chase Grid
Denny Hamlin
Ryan Blaney -25
Tyler Reddick -35
Ty Gibbs -40
Chase Briscoe -45
Christopher Bell -50
Kyle Larson -55
Chase Elliott -60
Joey Logano -65
Chris Buescher -70
Daniel Suarez -75
Carson Hocevar -80
William Byron -85
Bubba Wallace -90
Austin Cindric -95
Ryan Preece -100
The schedule
Cook Out Southern 500 — Darlington Raceway (Sept. 6)
Enjoy Illinois 300 — World Wide Technology Raceway (Sept. 13)
Bass Pro Shops Night Race — Bristol Motor Speedway (Sept. 19)
Hollywood Casino 400 — Kansas Speedway (Sept. 27)
South Point 400 — Las Vegas Motor Speedway (Oct. 4)
Bank of America 400 — Charlotte Motor Speedway (Oct. 11)
Freeway Insurance 500 — Phoenix Raceway (Oct. 18)
YellaWood 500 — Talladega Superspeedway (Oct. 25)
Xfinity 500 — Martinsville Speedway (Nov. 1)
Championship Race — Homestead-Miami Speedway (Nov. 8)
The favorites
Denny Hamlin, with four wins and a series best 8.2 average finish, is no doubt the favorite to win his elusive championship. When asked if his fellow Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing stablemates were the steepest challengers, Hamlin agreed with a caveat.
“If you would use numbers, you would say yes,” Hamlin said. “But there are drivers that I believe step up in these scenarios in the playoffs, in the Chase. So, I don’t believe that the advantage is quite as steep as maybe as what it was.”
That is of course a reference to second-seeded Ryan Blaney above all else. Despite a season in which Ford and Team Penske is overall down on speed everywhere but on flat short tracks, the Jonathan Hassler led team has had the second fastest car on ‘speed’ according to Racing Insights.
Toyotas have had a clear advantage on intermediate tracks this year and Blaney believes that could be where this championship is decided.
“The mile-and-a-halves are a place to where we know we have to continue to improve, and I feel like we’ve made steps from Chicago,” Blaney said. “Indianapolis isn’t a mile-and-a-half, but it’s a bigger track and (Joey Logano) had a heck of a run there, so that really shows me that we’ve made a step in the right direction.
“I’m just curious to see when we do get those – Charlotte, Vegas and Kansas – but then I think all of the other places we’ve had really good runs, but you can’t rely on that. You have to continue to try to improve, no matter if it’s your best race tracks or forms of tracks or tracks maybe you’ve struggled at. It’s all week to week type stuff, but I think we feel good about it. It’s just a matter of who can put the best 10 together and someone is going to do that. Hopefully that’s us.”
So, is this a Blaney versus Toyota playoff run?
“I wouldn’t say that,” Blaney said. “I think there’s a lot of other guys that can go out there and do it. All 16 teams in this thing, I think, are very, very good and can really go on runs, but the Toyotas are incredibly fast. We’ve seen that all year. I think the Fords, for myself and (Joey Logano) and (Austin Cindric), and (Ryan Preece) and (Chris Buescher), I feel like we’ve had a really good last two or three months and closed the gap there.
“I’m curious to see where we’re at on the mile-and-a-halves, where we have those three in a row. That’s going to be a huge sign of seeing where we’re going to be and how we stack up with the Toyotas. And then you know (Kyle Larson) and (Chase Elliott) are incredibly good, too. So, I don’t think it’s us versus the Toyotas. It’s us versus 15 other people. That’s how I look at it.”
Maybe it’s just his manufacturer pride talking but Christopher Bell was decisive in his answer.
“Yes. I believe that the champion will be a Toyota,” he said.
Bell is the sixth seed but has yet to win this season. In fact, his most recent win was nearly a year ago in the Bristol Night Race.
“Can we win a championship? Yes,” Bell said. “Without winning, right? Can we win a championship without winning a race? No. That’s my answer. I don’t believe so.”
Outside of Hamlin, all the other Toyotas have tangible questions going into the final 10. Bell has the closest championship pedigree as Hamlin but just hasn’t won. Ty Gibbs has won twice but is the youngest of the top seeds. Chase Briscoe was 17th in standings through 12 races but has been a contender ever since.
“Last year, we were not a strong and dominant team until the playoffs started, and what it did, we were arguably one of the best teams,” Briscoe said. “So yeah, last year, when we started together, I felt good about what we could be but I didn’t know what our true potential was.
“Now I know we are more than capable of winning the championship. Like just internally, I would say myself, James (Small, crew chief), the entire team, we feel way better about this year than we did last year just because we kind of know what to expect and we also know what the expectation is now for ourselves just because we kind of do it week in, week out.”
And then there’s Tyler Reddick, who opened this season with five wins across the past nine races, but now has five finishes worse than 25th over the past 10 races. It’s been that kind of summer – one that cost them the top seed.
“It is more than bad luck,” Reddick said. “There are things that have happened that we have learned from, and most importantly how we respond and handle those moments and make the most out of them isn’t something that we need to forget or move on from.
“Yeah, ideally, it’s good to have good points days, but as much as you want to think that you will have 10 races go exactly as planned, no mistakes, no issues – things are going to happen that you are not ready for and you are going to have to fight through adversity at points. We’ve been through enough of it and ready if we have more of it.”
The midpack
Even though the math says the champion will most likely come from within the top six seeds, Reddick articulated the best how anyone could theoretically make a run.
“Points can be lost and gained in huge chunks if you perform at a very high level or perform at a very extremely bad level or have really bad days,” said Reddick, from experience. “Again, it will be really interesting to see how it plays out. With the previous format, if you get 70 points up, you are feeling super good and feeling like you are in a great spot, but you can lose 77 of them in a race, so it’s all very interesting to keep that in mind.”
The most interesting driver from this second batch is Joey Logano, whom has climbed from 20th to ninth, giving him just 65 points to make up with the reset. He’s won twice at North Wilkesboro and Richmond with a third in the Brickyard 400.
And even though this is a different championship format, Logano earned a reputation of finding another figurative gear over the final 10 races that led to his three titles under the old format.
“That’s a reputation that we’ve earned over the years, that unfortunately, during the regular season we seem to just be okay, and then it gets to game time and the 22 starts to show up,” Logano said. “So I feel confident in our team that we can do it. People think that way because we have done it and we’ve done it multiple times, so I feel like we can show up again when it matters and do it in a different format.”
Then there’s Hendrick drivers Kyle Larson and William Byron, who both haven’t won this year despite championship pedigrees.
“I’m not as confident as I’ve been, for sure, in other years,” said Larson. “But I wasn’t, honestly, sitting here that confident last year, and we were able to win the championship. I know there’s a path to do it. We did it last year without winning a race in the final 10 races, and we weren’t even really all that consistent, from what I remember. I think if we can be ultra-consistent in these final 10 races, there’s no doubt that I could see ourselves winning the championship.
“But I could also see ourselves winning four or five races in the Chase. You know, things have to go perfect, but we do have a lot of good tracks for us in these final 10. We just need to execute at a high level, and I think our team is definitely capable of that. We’ll try and do our best.”
Byron feels like nothing that came before really matters.
“I think it’s anyone’s game,” Byron said. “I mean, look at how the points have swung over the year between first and second. So, I think it’s really going to be who performs the best for 10 races. I would really love to be the first seed, but I think it’s going to come down to who races well the next 10 weeks.”
To his point, in the aforementioned simulations, the driver that scored the most points over the final 10 races won the championship in 70 percent of runs … regardless of which seed he started from.
Chase Elliott started off the year with two wins at Martinsville and Texas but has been mired in a deep slump over the summer that saw him fall from third to eighth in the standings
“You’re never as far off as you probably think you are or can think you are at different moments,” Elliott said. “I think our performance early in the year is really a good reminder of that, right? Like, you know, we had a great start, I thought, to the season.
“We had a lot of performance in the opening month, month-and-a-half. You know, we were super pumped about that and just excited that we were getting the season started off that way. We kind of had a summer stretch that we didn’t want to have to see. But we did, and we’ve seen both sides of the coin.”
Everyone else
Ryan Preece had a walk off moment in winning at Daytona to outscore Shane Van Gisbergen for the final spot in the Chase for the Championship.
He will start 100 points back, but so what?
“At the end of the day, we’ve won two races this year – one points paying and one non-points paying – but why not,” Preece said. “There’s only one place for us to go and that’s forward.”
Like Byron, Preece dismisses the notion that only the top six can win the championship.
“I don’t believe that,” Preece said. “Not at all. I think those guys are going to race the hell out of each other and if they have a couple of bad races, there’s no win and you’re in to get to the next round.
“It’s going to be tough to make up those points, so if you’re a team that puts 10 great weeks together and wins races and gets stage points, the fact that you’re in the top 16, I hate to tell you just because you’re 16th in points doesn’t mean you didn’t execute a great season.”
Ryan Newman nearly won the inaugural Playoff in 2014 and entered the Championship Race without having won that season. That has a special relevance to Carson Hocevar, who won earlier this season and is the 12th seed after reaching as high as fifth in the standings earlier in the summer.
“Our team moral or motto is we’re playing with house money,” Hocevar said. “Luke (Lambert) and Matt McCall were on that (Newman) team in 2014, and that’s how they approached it, and they finished second. I’m not going to look at the points until the end. They’ll let me know when I walk up at the banquet where I finished.”
Bubba Wallace has adopted the anyone can win mentality as well.
“The same people that say that say you can’t get the numbers lost in translation,” Wallace said. “If you put together the best 10 weeks for us and you do that better than the rest – who knows if that propels us to a championship, because we are 90 points behind, but if you outperform the rest of the group, then who knows.
“I think anybody has a shot. Now if the points didn’t reset, I think we were 300 or so points out from Denny (and) we had no shot. But we are 90 out now, and if you win a race, it’s up to 75 points, and maybe they all have a bad race. We’ll see how it goes.”
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