Independent of what NASCAR ultimately decides to do with its championship format during the off-season, history will remember this one as one of the great playoff era finishes.
Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick each effectively needed nothing short of a victory on Sunday at Kansas Speedway to stave off elimination. Denny Hamlin needs every single playoff point he can get to reach the final four in just over a month.
Christopher Bell similarly knows what its like to recently be the first driver on the outside. Chase Elliott hasn’t exactly let the world on figurative fire lately.The Hollywood Casino 400 was decided exclusively amongst them.
Wallace ran Bell up the track
Hamlin without power steering makes a run.
Hamlin squeezes Wallace into the wall
Elliott minds the gap and wins the race
There is so much to unpack there. For one, both 23XI Racing drivers needed nothing short of a win based on how last week at Loudon bled into the first half at Kansas.
It wouldn’t have broken Hamlin in the championship picture to finish second to Wallace, his employee, but he went for it nevertheless. After all, Hamlin had swept the first two stages and only found himself out of the lead due to a power steering failure.
“It’s just a massive disappointment, I don’t know how else to say it,” Hamlin said. “It’s a massive disappointment. I thought all race that I would have loved to have gotten my 60th (win) here. This is where I got my very first start. Dominated. Had the very best car. Had a bad pit stop. Got the track position and restart and not having power steering was not ideal.
“Obviously got very close to (Wallace) and I had to do it all over again, I think I would run a line lower to allow some space between us so I don’t get so tight.”
But again, once race weekends begin, Denny Hamlin is the driver of the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 and not the co-owner of the 23XI No. 23 and 45 cars.
“I was going for No. 60,” Hamlin said. “No one will ever accuse me of ever laying over for anyone for a win. Obviously, to win a championship, I have to find a way to move on. I would love to have not gotten into one of those cars but I was just too tight and chased it up the track.”
Wallace entered the race at a 27-point playoff cutline deficit and leaves at 26-below.
“So we gained a point,” Wallace said sardonically.
Watch: Wallace: ‘Hate we gave it to Chevrolet’ after last-lap scrap with Hamlin
He had defeated Bell on two consecutive restarts and led a Toyota 1-2-3-4-5 restart and none of them won.
“That’s the thing that bothers me the most,” Wallace said. “We had the top-5 and gave (Elliott, Chevrolet) a win. We’ve been working really hard at Toyota to get our program back at Kansas, played all of our cars right, and it wasn’t meant to be.”
Wallace did say ‘we’ll talk’ when asked if he and Hamlin will debrief over it.
“I’ve always been big on racing you the way you race me,” Wallace said. “No matter who you are, we race hard but respect each other. There’s a fine line and sometimes we cross it and you have to understand that. We have one more race, and for me, it’s a must-win at the Roval, but we’re going to do what we did today, which is fight hard and try to make the most of it.”
Reddick faces those same must-win odds at the Roval now.
“Obviously, there’s only one thing we can do at Charlotte and that’s what we’ll be focused on,” Reddick said.
Elliott locks himself into the Round of 8
Watch: Elliott: ‘Everything worked out perfect’ in Kansas victory
Meanwhile, Elliott joins Ryan Blaney as the only drivers who are entirely indifferent to what happens at the Roval because they’re locked-in. And in the case of Elliott, it was such an unlikely seas party scenario that created his second-win of the season too.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen going into turn three any more than anybody else did,” Elliott said.
“I’m excited to go back and watch it, honestly. You live this stuff and you live these moments. Obviously, I know what my vantage point was, and I remember the things that I was looking at when I was looking at them but I don’t have the full picture.
“So I’m excited to go back and just see what it all looked like. I was making split-second decisions based off the information I had in front of me at that time, right?”
This win was especially wild for the No. 9 team because there has bene a lot of hit-or-miss in their results and performance. They have top-5s at New Hampshire and Gateway once the playoffs began but there was also the company-wide dud in the Southern 500.
Richmond and Watkins Glen did not go particularly well either so this was a surprise in some ways to Elliott as well.
“I’m sure you all didn’t have that on your bingo card today,” Elliott said. “I figured not.
“I think that for us I’ve been very transparent about the areas we need to be better, no doubt. I thought this weekend was truthfully a really, really solid weekend, a really competitive weekend for us for how we unloaded Saturday to the opportunities that we continued to present ourselves today. That is why we ended up having a chance to win ultimately. We got our turn, as I mentioned.
“The way I’ve kind of progressed through the playoffs this year is just fight as hard as I can each week, try to earn myself and our team three more weeks, and you never know what can happen in three weeks.”
Elliott said during Cup Series Playoffs Media Day that ‘a lot can happen over 10 weeks’ and that he has to just manage the highs and lows to the best of his abilities. Toyota presented him an opportunity and he took it.
“What did I tell you — Playoffs is a long time and a lot can happen in ten weeks,” Elliott said.
“That can be the difference in somebody being mediocre to potentially getting on a hot streak or even a team collectively getting better throughout that course of time. So it’s all about buying yourself more time. If you’re not where you want to be, you’re just trying to buy yourself more time.
“Fortunately, we bought ourself three more weeks, and we’ll fight like hell until they tell us not to.”
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