Chase Briscoe win, pit road woes shake up NASCAR playoffs

It would be hyperbole to say this one single race changed the entire dynamic of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs but the Southern 500 did threaten the expected status quo on Sunday night.

For one, it’s not like Chase Briscoe winning the race was some tremendous upset because why wouldn’t he challenge for the win in a Joe Gibbs Racing car after winning last year with Stewart-Haas Racing?

But still, actually doing it and adding seven more playoff points to his second round starting point actually makes his pathway to the Final Four easier, because he may not have to win again to get there. Earlier in the week, he projected that he would need to win a Round of 8 race because he just didn’t have the playoff point advantage some of his peers do.

Now he does.

“I mean, it’s definitely nice to start off, be able to lock our way into the round of 12,” Briscoe said. “I’m way more excited about seven Playoff points for the next couple rounds, right? That’s something we were at a pretty big deficit at. To add seven, that’s a huge deal going forward. I was way more excited about that than locking into the round of 12.”

Upset alerts

Meanwhile, 10 of the 16 drivers in the chase for the championship finished 17th or worse and made it not impossible that several expected favorites could face elimination in two weeks after Gateway and Bristol.

Defending champion Joey Logano finished 20th and was a non-factor.

“This has been a good track for us in the past, but I don’t know,” Logano said. “Some of our cars were decent at times but not like we have been here. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher to try to understand. I don’t know where we are in points but it’s obviously not the day we wanted. We just did a good job of not making a bad day worse.”  

Teammate Ryan Blaney suffered splitter damage on a Lap 208 restart and his car was never the same en route to finishing 18th.

“There were multiple instances, one on pit road,” Blaney said. “We had to start in the back and then getting spun off turn four killed the splitter, and then we came from the back to 19th and then the caution came out as soon as we got to pit road and sent us all the way back again. Just about everything that could go wrong tonight went wrong. At least we recovered to where we did, which is okay, I guess. It just wasn’t a smooth night.”

The Hendrick Motorsports quartet of Kyle Larson, William Byron, Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott suffered a well-documented myriad of misfortunes.

Christopher Bell is just 11 points above the cutline after getting into a pit road collision with Carson Hocevar, which damaged his right front splitter, and relegated him to a 29th place finish.

For the most part, if you are a driver that won multiples races and scored a lot of playoff points, it’s easy to stave off elimination because there are generally two-to-three longshots in the Round of 16.

That’s the saving grace this time too because the longshots did not do what they needed to either with Shane Van Gisbergen coughing up nearly the entirety of his buffer due to a poor-performing car and getting bit by a caution right after he pit in the final stage.

‘SVG’ finished 20th at Darlington in the spring and this is his favorite oval type — low grip and needing to move around the track to find speed. 

Now, he’s going to need some help at Gateway and Bristol.

“I think so, yeah, because I don’t know next week’s track and then Bristol’s very tough,” Van Gisbergen said. “So yeah, just have to try and do our best job and hopefully we get good results in the coming weeks.”

Josh Berry qualified exceptionally, starting third, and immediately rendered it moot with a Lap 1, Turn 1 crash from the second row that left him with a 38th place finish and a 19 point deficit.

“I’m not really sure what happened there,” Berry said. “If we missed something or … but yeah, I mean, you can’t drive these things when they’re hitting the track that hard and especially on the first lap when you’re not expecting it.”

Austin Dillon finishing 23rd did little to capitalize on the misfortunes of the usual contenders for that matter as well.

Big picture, there are some names at risk, that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t miss this first round.

Updated Playoff Grid

Chase Briscoe Adv.
Denny Hamlin +43
Kyle Larson +38
Tyler Reddick +35
Bubba Wallace +25
William Byron +25
Ryan Blaney +22
Ross Chastain +21
Austin Cindric +12
Christopher Bell +11
Chase Elliott +9
Shane Van Gisbergen +3
—
Joey Logano -3
Austin Dillon -8
Alex Bowman -19
Josh Berry -19

Improved odds

Chase Briscoe, Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

Photo by: Logan Riely / Getty Images

As Briscoe alluded, bigger than simply winning is the seven playoff points he got for sweeping both stages and the victory combined because those carry over into the second round.

He started this round with 10 playoff points that go towards seeding and will start the second round with a minimum of 17. Should he win stages or another race at Gateway and Bristol, that tally will increase even further.

Briscoe said earlier in the week that he expected to make the Round of 8 but that he would have to win there because of his points deficit. Now, a pathway to make it on championship points is starting to materialize.

Does this change his internal expectations at all?

“I might have gotten taken out of context on Media Day so what I will say is we expect to make the Round of 4 at Joe Gibbs Racing but if you don’t make it to the Round of 8, that’s a huge failure,” Briscoe said.

“When you look at the sport in general, there’s 8-10 really good cars. It’s JGR and Hendrick cars and a couple of Penske cars. If you aren’t one of those top eight, it normally means you didn’t have the most successful season.

“Starting the Playoffs as a team, we feel we’re definitely capable of being Championship 4 caliber, and even the champion. It’s a matter of putting 10 weeks together. Obviously we started week one the way we need to.”

Now, if some of those Penske, Hendrick and other Gibbs cars meet a premature elimination come Bristol, that makes the pathway all the easier.