Top five storylines heading into the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs
By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer
The NASCAR Cup Series playoffs kick off Sunday afternoon with one of the most grueling races of the season in the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.
That is quite appropriate. The 10-race playoffs are a grueling two-plus months of pressure for those vying for the title.
Here are five storylines to watch as the playoffs begin.
1. Can Kyle Larson continue to dominate?
Larson didn’t just win five races this year. He also won the NASCAR All-Star Race. And he dominated in many ways, leading 26% of the laps (1,566, with Denny Hamlin next best at 821) and 26% of the miles (2,351 to Hamlin’s 1,004).
As Larson enters his first playoffs driving for Hendrick Motorsports after several seasons at Chip Ganassi Racing, why shouldn’t he continue this roll of dominance into the playoffs? Maybe because he knows winning is hard.
"[In] 2017, I was really good, and I think we were second in points in the regular season," Larson said. "I felt like I was the second-favorite. And boom, we were out in the first or second round."
Still, Larson is confident this year, though he has just one win in the playoffs in his career.
"I only won six Cup races total before I came to Hendrick," he said. "I don’t think it is concerning at all. I believe our race team can win anywhere right now."
Kyle Busch, who also struggled to win playoff races early in his career, dismissed any thought that Larson wouldn’t rise to the occasion this year.
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"Being with a new team, a strong team, he’s one of the best drivers right now with one of the best teams," Busch said. "So I feel as though he’s plenty capable of being able to go out there and throw that attribute out the window."
The one thing that Larson does have is the experience of being the favorite. He has entered plenty of major sprint-car events as the top dog and has had his share of disappointments and triumphs.
"When I go to the Chili Bowl [midget-car nationals], there’s pressure on me because I’ve done a good job there year after year, and I’m expected to go there and win or contend," he said. "Because I’ve done it, I expect it, too.
"It’s a little bit different in NASCAR because I’ve never really contended to win a championship. I’ve never been expected to win a championship, so I don’t feel pressure with it yet."
2. Can Hamlin contend and win?
Hamlin led the series standings for much of the season but fell to second for the final month. He enters the playoffs ranked seventh due to the reset that gives bonus points based on race wins, stage wins and regular-season points finish.
Typically during playoff media day, Hamlin gets asked if this is his year to win the championship — he is entering his 15th playoffs and is 0-for-14.
Is it any better to be asked "When are you going to win a race?" versus "When are you going to win a championship?"
"Either of them are no good," Hamlin said with a little bit of a chuckle. "All I can ask is to be a threat. I think we are a threat. I would say the competition probably thinks so as well."
Hamlin has led the second-most laps of any driver this year and has 13 top-5s in 26 races.
"[Our standing] is not ideal," he said. "But we’re going to go out there and perform our best. I just need a little bit of something to go my way.
"We’ve been at the craps table, and we’ve rolled seven every time we’ve been leading or been up front. Just things I can’t really control has taken myself out of the race. Eventually, you keep rolling the dice, and you’re going to win."
3. Can Chase Elliott repeat?
There has not been a back-to-back champion since Jimmie Johnson won five consecutive titles from 2006 to 2010.
From 2011 to 2020, Kyle Busch and Johnson were the only drivers who won multiple titles, and there have been five different champions the past five years.
Elliott doesn’t seem too worried about that history.
"Last year was last year, and this is a fresh, new season," Elliott said. "I’ve never been one to believe that last year’s results will equal a good one this time around. That’s not how it works.
"But you can take those experiences and apply them forward."
Life as a champion, Elliott said, hasn’t been all that different.
"It hasn’t been a ton different, which probably is a good thing," he said. "My team and I have always done a good job trying to prioritize and make sure your focus is still on the race track and doing my job there."
Elliott enters the playoffs in a similar position as a year ago — fifth in the standings with just about the same amount of playoff points (21 to 20 a year ago) and two victories.
"It’s not like it gets any easier when you have won one," he said. "But I have a lot of confidence in our team."
Even though he’s the defending champion, Elliott is not seen as the top championship contender from Hendrick Motorsports, thanks to Larson’s performance this year.
"They’ve done a great job," Elliott said. "When you do a good job, you should be rewarded for it. For us, not that much is different. We’re not going about it any differently."
4. Can Kevin Harvick pull a Tony Stewart?
Back in 2011, Stewart said he didn’t consider himself a title contender when the playoffs started. He then won five of the final 10 races to win the title in a format that didn’t include the eliminations and resets instituted in 2014.
Can that give Harvick, who sits last among the 16 playoff drivers in the reset standings, some hope?
"Did anybody think that Chase Elliott was going to win last year or Joey Logano [in 2018]?" Harvick said. "You just never know. There are so many things that happen throughout these playoffs that you just don’t know the twists and turns.
"Even though Tony won half the races, there must have been something that went wrong in the other five because it was still a tie [in points] after race 10."
Harvick has had to grind out top-10s all season just to make the playoffs on points. He has led just 109 laps all year.
"This is like starting a new season," Harvick said. "We’re at Race 1 of the playoffs, and you have to see how these first few races go. You just go race, and that’s about it."
5. Can NASCAR officials avoid the spotlight?
Going back to Texas last year in the playoffs, when Harvick slid on a wet track and slapped the wall to open a semifinal round in which he wouldn’t advance, NASCAR decisions have seemed to play a big role in the outcomes of races.
NASCAR has had a couple of races this year that should have been stopped earlier than they were: once when drivers couldn’t see amid the rain at Circuit of the Americas and another when NASCAR hesitated to throw the caution as rain started on the oval at New Hampshire (Loudon).
A few other decisions — including not initially throwing the caution flag during a wreck in trucks at Charlotte and having a safety vehicle on the track before qualifying was official at Indy — have rattled confidence in NASCAR's management of races.
"We’ve definitely seen a lot of mistakes from the tower this year," Harvick said. "It’s unfortunate that stuff happens. I don’t think anybody means for it to happen."
Drivers can’t control those decisions, but they know the impact the decisions can have. Two weeks ago at Michigan, NASCAR did throw the caution maybe a little earlier than it would have in the past when it started to drizzle.
"They have been better about that the last couple of weeks," said Kyle Busch, who wrecked at Loudon on the wet track. "We had some rain pop up at Michigan. It started to sprinkle, threw the yellow, ran four laps of caution and waited it out.
"Did that screw up the end of the race and put that race into the hand of restarts at the end? Sure, it did. But we didn’t have anybody spinning out with rain on the race track or a wet race track crashing, so that’s the way it needs to be."
Brad Keselowski noted that NASCAR used to have a bigger influence before stage racing added natural breaks, giving less incentive to throw the caution for debris for a general cleaning of the track.
"Historically, the tower actually played a bigger role before the stage yellows when there were all the debris yellows," he said.
The nature of the playoffs, in which every point is pivotal in three-race rounds, makes any NASCAR call potentially championship-altering. This isn’t a seven-game series in which one call doesn’t impact another six, as the points lost in one race can be the difference in advancing.
"You put the promoter’s hat on, and sometimes it weighs a little heavier than it probably should, [instead of] leaning toward the safety side of things and doing the right thing, not just trying to force the show to go on," Harvick said about the calls of when to throw the caution when it is wet.
"Unfortunately, we were bit by it last year and saw a bunch of guys get bit by it at Loudon this year. It doesn’t take much, and when you’re the leader, you’re the first one to it."
Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass. Looking for more NASCAR content? Sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass!
