What to watch for in today’s NASCAR Cup race at Homestead

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — The sixth Cup points race of the season has a good bit of intrigue even though Kyle Larson’s bid to sweep the weekend ended on an overtime restart in Saturday’s Xfinity race.

The green flag for today’s Cup race at Homestead-Miami Speedway is scheduled to wave at 3:12 p.m. ET. The race will air on FS1.

Here are a few things to watch in today’s 267-lap race:

Familiar faces at the front

Tyler Reddick went from third to first on the last lap, passing Ryan Blaney for the lead to win last fall’s race at Homestead.

Blaney finished second (for the second year in a row at Homestead), Denny Hamlin was third, Christopher Bell was fourth and Chase Elliott was fifth.

Good chance most of those, if not all of those drivers, are at the front — along with Kyle Larson, who spun while racing Blaney for the lead late in last year’s race. Larson had the fastest average over 20, 25 and 30 consecutive laps in Saturday’s practice.

Normally, there is a 12-month gap between races at this South Florida track but it has only been about five months — including the offseason — since the most recent Cup race here. Add in the fact that there wasn’t a significant rule change to the cars ahead of this season and there’s a good chance it will be the same group toward the front today.

“The best drivers are the best drivers, so it’s hard to hold that down,” Hamlin said. “And the best teams are the best teams. … We weren’t here not too long ago, so I’d imagine you’d have the same five or six that pretty much dominated the race last time do the same this time unless someone finds something in their setup that makes things quite a bit better.”

Keep an eye on Chase Elliott

In last fall’s event, Chase Elliott led a race-high 81 laps. While he enters today’s race with three consecutive top-10 finishes, 10th-place results at Phoenix and Las Vegas the past two weeks left a lot to be desired for the No. 9 bunch.

“There’s been some high spots, there’s been some low spots,” Elliott said of this season. “I thought the first three weeks, four weeks if you include the Clash in there, were all really good. Had really fast cars and cars that did, truthfully, exactly what I wanted. We crashed the first three weeks of the season, so that was unfortunate.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Phoenix or Vegas were good because they weren’t. I know that and you know that. We just need to keep plugging away and try to find some good runs.

“I think we were really good here in the fall, probably our best Homestead race maybe ever, definitely in this new car. I hope we can recreate some of that because there was a lot of good stuff going on that weekend.”

Elliott starts today’s race 18th.

Chase Briscoe learning new system at JGR

It has been a roller-coaster start of the season for Chase Briscoe in his new ride at Joe Gibbs Racing.

After winning the pole in the Daytona 500 and finishing fourth, NASCAR penalized the team for a violation. The team later won its appeal and the penalty went away, but Briscoe has not finished better than 14th since Daytona.

It’s the second consecutive Cup race at a 1.5-mile speedway.

Briscoe, who starts fourth in today’s race, said he is having to adjust to how things are done at JGR.

“I would say it’s definitely been a bigger adjustment than I thought it was going to be,” he said. “I thought I would just get in and I would just do my normal type of driving and I would just go faster. There’s definitely still that. Everywhere we’ve went, I’ve just first done what comes natural, and I just go faster and the car drives better and all those things.

“That’s been the biggest difference is just fine tuning everything, really them making me think about ‘You need to really focus on this. You can do this different and do this different’ and that’s just something that I had to a certain extent at SHR but never to the detail that I do now.

“So these last two weeks, especially last week at Vegas, I have never driven Vegas that way in my entire life. It was like going to a whole new racetrack. Just how different in the approach and how things I needed to do different was.”

Briscoe took part in the Goodyear tire test this week at Charlotte, along with Ryan Blaney and William Byron. Crew chief James Small said he wanted to do the test, to “get more laps, work together and just understand, more (Briscoe) trying to understand how to adapt to our stuff.”