NASCAR drivers feeling confident and ready for playoffs, no matter the points
By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer
Based on the stat sheet, Joey Logano doesn’t have a reason to feel confident going into the playoffs.
He has one victory, which came at the Bristol dirt race, a surface not comparable to that of any event over the final 10 weeks.
His average finish of 13.5 ranks him eighth among the 16 playoff drivers. He has failed to finish on the lead lap nine times in 26 races, which ranks him 14th of 16.
Yet Logano seems undeterred. He’ll look at other stats, such as the fact that he ranks fourth in laps led this year.
Then he will look in his trophy case and see the 2018 championship trophy. That’s all he really needs to remember.
"Look at 2018. That’s what always keeps me going," Logano said. "I look at 2018, and we had one win going into the playoffs and won the championship.
"So you can do it with anything after doing that. Living that and being through it, I know personally I can do it. I know my team can do it as well."
The NASCAR playoffs open this weekend, and several competitors view it as a chance to make up for a regular season that didn’t meet expectations.
The past four champions — Martin Truex Jr. (2017), Logano (2018), Kyle Busch (2019) and Chase Elliott (2020) — haven't been consistent enough to establish themselves as favorites this time around, but they enter the playoffs with a quiet confidence nevertheless.
The NASCAR playoff format consists of four rounds and begins with 16 drivers who are eligible for the championship (non-eligible drivers still compete in the races). After every three races, the four drivers with the fewest points who did not win in the round are eliminated, leaving four drivers eligible for the championship in the season finale.
Drivers who advance each round will have their points reset, but they will carry over "playoff points" earned during the season for race wins, stage wins and final regular-season points position.
Only regular-season champion Kyle Larson has a comfortable buffer thanks to those points, and that has drivers such as Logano knowing they could capitalize with a solid run.
Look at Elliott last year. He entered the playoffs with just two wins, ranked fifth in playoff points with 20 and went on to win the title.
He’s in virtually the same spot this year, with two wins and 21 playoff points and sitting fifth in the standings.
Some might argue that Elliott is a favorite, but his two wins this season have come on road courses, and there is only one road course in the playoffs. Last year, he got hot at the right time, winning three of the final five races, including the last two.
"It’s not like you can just pick and choose when to be really good," said Elliott, who has led 337 laps this year, while his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Larson has dominated in leading 1,566. "If that was the case, we’d pick and choose to be really good all the time.
"It was a product of good timing, good people and a lot of hard work. We were able to execute some really fast cars to put ourselves in a good spot."
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The driver just ahead of Elliott in the standings is Kyle Busch, with two wins and 22 playoff points. Busch, the 2015 and 2019 champion, views his regular season much like the one he had two years ago.
This season, Busch and Elliott are tied for third in top-5 finishes, with 11.
"We are ahead of where we were last year," said Busch, who didn’t win a race until after he was eliminated from the playoffs last year. "I’d like to think that will help us along the way, and we can minimize our mistakes in the playoffs and do a better job of getting those playoff points."
Busch’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Truex enters quietly confident for one main reason: All three of his wins this year came at playoff tracks (Darlington, Martinsville and championship host Phoenix). At all three of those tracks, NASCAR uses a higher horsepower, lower downforce package — the package that will be used for six of the 10 playoff tracks (but only one track in the semifinal round).
"We are in a good spot," Truex said. "Good tracks are always a good sign. There is still a few tracks that are always tough, and the playoffs are tough in general with the elimination.
"You have a bad week or two, you can find yourself in a bad spot. That can happen to anyone. We’re confident in what we can do. We just need to go execute and not have any big issues."
Confidence and swagger can carry a driver and team only so far. But they can help carry them, and that's something all these champions have in common.
"Are we the favorites by points?" Logano said of his Penske team. "No, we’re not. But in our minds, we are. And I’ve said it before: All that matters is what we think.
"I feel like we’ve been fast enough to win three or four races this year. We’ve only capitalized on one. The speed is not that far off."
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Thinking out loud
There were hard wrecks and crashes that collected several cars at the end of the race Saturday at Daytona, but the reduced horsepower and the elimination of the wicker on the spoiler seemed to be small steps in the right direction for NASCAR at Daytona and Talladega.
Lap times were about a second slower than they were for the Daytona 500, which NASCAR hoped would reduce the chances of cars going airborne, not just by the slower speeds at impact but also in hopes of reducing the closing rates of cars in the draft.
It appeared that drivers could calculate blocks and make them work better than in previous races. It seemed that drivers were slightly more in control of their destinies.
The term "slightly" is significant. Drivers still raced in packs, and when a driver got turned in the pack, the damage was heavy. And the first race possibly won’t reveal any major issues; now that teams have data and have raced this package once, they could come up with plans to make the cars faster for Talladega in October.
But after what happened at Talladega with Logano’s wild flip, NASCAR couldn’t send the drivers back out with the same horsepower and downforce combination. What it did for Saturday’s race worked in my book.
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Stat of the day
B.J. McLeod’s ninth-place finish was the first top-10 in Live Fast Racing’s history. Bubba Wallace’s second was the best finish in 23XI Racing's history.
They said it
"It was no better. We all crashed on the last lap anyway. It doesn’t make a difference." — Logano on the changes to the superspeedway aero package
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!
