HOMESTEAD, Fla. – If this penultimate three-race round of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs continues as it started last weekend, race fans will be in store for a bold, all-bets-off Championship Four race in just two weeks.
No doubt Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway (2:30 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) has the potential to shake-up the championship standings. Again.
Two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano claimed the first of the four championship-eligible positions last weekend winning at Las Vegas – a week after the Team Penske driver was reinstated into Playoff contention following the disqualification of Hendrick Motorsports’ Playoff driver Alex Bowman.
As compelling as Logano’s dramatic victory and 2024 storyline has become, Las Vegas was an impactful race for most of the eight Playoff drivers.
Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell finished runner-up to Logano after dominating most of the race. Logano’s win is that automatic first position in the Championship Race and for Bell, his runner-up showing moved him into the points lead, by seven-points over Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson. Hendrick’s William Byron, who finished fourth at Vegas, holds the final transfer position as of now – 27 points ahead of JGR’s Denny Hamlin.
On the flip side, Regular Season Champion, 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick was involved in a multi-car crash racing up front at Las Vegas that also collected two other Playoff drivers – Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott and reigning series champion, Penske’s Ryan Blaney.
None of these perpetual three title-favorites finished better than 32nd-place and Reddick dropped to sixth in the standings, 30 points behind Byron. Blaney is 47 points back and Elliott, the 2020 series champion, is 53 points back from the cutoff line. An extraordinary points-day or a victory at Homestead-Miami may likely be the only path forward for these three – none of which have ever won a NASCAR Cup Series race at the South Florida 1.5-miler.
“Going into the Round of 8, our mindset was we’re going to have to win to have a shot in Phoenix, so what happened at Las Vegas doesn’t really change that,” said Elliott, driver of the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “It was unfortunate because our NAPA Chevy was really, really good and I think we would have potentially had a shot at it there at the end if we hadn’t got caught up in that incident.
“The fact that we had speed though gives me confidence heading into Homestead this weekend. Our team is fully capable of winning. We just need to go and execute.”
Hamlin, who also has an intimidating amount of points to make up, is the winningest of all eight Playoff drivers at Homestead with three wins and the only Playoff driver with multiple wins there. Only the defending race winner, Bell (10.0) and Elliott (10.4) have better average finishes than Hamlin (10.9), whose last Homestead win was in 2020. Logano won there in 2018, Larson in 2022 and Byron in 2021. Counting Logano’s 2018 win, current Playoff drivers have won five of the last six Homestead races.
In fact, Hamlin is easily the winningest driver among the Playoff eight at the three remaining tracks – Homestead, the Martinsville (Va.) Speedway half-miler and the Phoenix mile – combining for 10 wins at the venues (five at Martinsville and two at Phoenix). Hamlin’s average finishing position at all three tracks is better than 11th place – and that is with three times the number of starts both Bell and Byron have at each track; twice as many starts as Larson.
“I feel like we’re going to have to go to both of these races and run top three all day to get points in the stages and good points in the race,” said Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 JGR Toyota. “That’s going to be a tall task, but Homestead is straight-forward from a strategy perspective. You’re going to take four tires anytime you pit, so that will allow guys that are up front to stay up front.
“We need to be in that group and hope for a little luck from someone having a bad day or whatnot to make up that gap. Then at Martinsville, who knows with the new tire? It has traditionally been a race with mixed strategies, but we just don’t know, so that one will be a bit of a wild card.”
Practice is scheduled for 9:05 a.m. ET on Saturday followed by Busch Light Pole Qualifying at 9:50 a.m. ET. – both sessions available on MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio and the NBC Sports App. Joe Gibbs Racing’s Martin Truex Jr. is the defending pole-winner.
-NASCAR Wire
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