The shuffling of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs picture has reached its make-or-break point with this weekend’s regular-season finale at Darlington Raceway. Last weekend’s frenzied showdown at Daytona International Speedway did little to calm the waters.
Three drivers on the right side of the postseason bubble will clinch the final available berths in Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500 (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App), where a Regular Season Champion will also be crowned. That same bubble will burst for those left outside the 16-driver playoff grid at a treacherous 1.366-mile track that’s been the site of plenty of heartbreak in its 74-year history.
Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Ty Gibbs sit in the best spots among drivers provisionally in on the basis of points, with Truex up 58 points on the dividing line and Gibbs at plus-39. Right on the knife’s edge of elimination are Chris Buescher (plus-21) as the last driver currently in, and Bubba Wallace (minus-21) as the first driver out.
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Harrison Burton’s surprise victory in the next-to-last regular-season race at Daytona sealed a playoff invite for a driver ranked 34th in the Cup Series standings, tightening the window for other postseason hopefuls. Buescher grabbed 10 stage points and finished 10th at Daytona, aiming to recharge before visiting the South Carolina track where his RFK Racing No. 17 Ford contended late in the circuit’s most recent stop there in May.
“We’ll take a couple days. We’ll take a breather,” Buescher told NBC Sports post-race. “We’ll get to Darlington, time to get down to business.”
Business has already picked up for Wallace in his bid for a second consecutive playoff berth. He has already matched his total of five top-five finishes and 10 top-10 results from the previous year, but the zero in the win column that he and Buescher have in common is a stinging point.
Wallace was critical of himself in post-race interviews at Daytona, noting the disparity between his results and 23XI Racing teammate Tyler Reddick, the Cup Series standings leader.
“You got one car fighting for a regular-season championship, and another car right on the bubble. Unacceptable,” said Wallace, who finished seventh at Darlington in the spring. “I’ll take all that weight on my shoulders. Should have won multiple times this year and I haven’t. We don’t even deserve to be here and we are. Got to go win next week. That is it.”
Reddick has his own fight on his hands as he tried to retain his place atop the Cup Series points for the Regular Season Championship. That crown includes a bonus of 15 playoff points, a valuable asset that carries through the three rounds of eliminations that will determine the Championship 4 contenders.
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His primary rivals for the title are a pair of Hendrick Motorsports teammates in Kyle Larson (second place, 17 points back) and Chase Elliott (third place, minus-18). All three drivers were involved in crashes in Daytona’s 400-miler, but only Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet was running at the finish after a heavy lift by the team to repair its damage.
“I mean, our team does an amazing job to be resilient and to work through a lot of the things that we’ve encountered over the years and especially over the day,” No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels told NASCAR.com “A lot of other teams on pit road are very capable of that as well; they just had more damage than we had. So, thankful our damage wasn’t worse, and hats off to the guys for digging in the way that they always do. Showed a lot of heart, a lot of strength and yeah, we’ll go to Darlington.”
Larson’s group is actually in a better spot for the regular-season title in the Cup Series owners’ standings. Larson has competed in one fewer race than the rest of the field after missing the Coca-Cola 600 when his rain-altered Indianapolis 500 bid thwarted his travel plan, but Xfinity Series regular Justin Allgaier piloted the No. 5 Chevy to a 13th-place result in his absence in the Charlotte race.
That outcome has the Hendrick No. 5 team leading the owners’ standings, seven points ahead of the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota team that fields entries for Reddick. Larson is also the defending Southern 500 winner.
“We’ll move on from tonight quickly and get focused on Darlington, a track that we run really well at,” Larson told NASCAR.com after exiting the car at Daytona. “You know, the 45 also runs really well there also, so we’ll have to be on our A-game, but happy. I believe they said we have the owner point lead, and then I think in the drivers’ we’re still a ways out of it. But yeah, we’ll just try to execute like we have there and run up front of the stages and hopefully we’ll be in contention to win the race and see what happens.”
