What to Watch: Team agendas, rallying cries on tap for playoff showdown at Kansas

Track: Kansas Speedway
Location: Kansas City, Kansas
Track length: 1.5 miles
When: Sunday, 3 p.m. ET
Where to tune in: USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App
Race purse: $9,797,935
Race distance: 267 laps | 400.5 miles
Stages: 80 | 165 | 267
Defending winner: Ross Chastain, September 2024
Paint Scheme Preview: See fresh designs for Kansas
Starting lineup: Chase Briscoe snares Busch Light Pole

RELATED: How to watch on USA Network

Total team efforts on the table for Round of 12 showdown

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The dozen drivers who still carry championship hopes represent five organizations left standing in the Cup Series Playoffs picture. For each one, their overall objectives have strong similarities, but their situations slightly vary.

Those hopes get a bread-and-butter intermediate-track test at Kansas Speedway in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 Presented by ESPN Bet (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App). The venue — a fall fixture that’s hosted a playoff event ever since the 10-race format’s debut in 2004 — has been prone to postseason heartache, a source of multi-groove racing and historically close finishes, and a domination haven in recent years for Kyle Larson.

MORE: Weekend schedule: Kansas | Cup Series entry list

All five teams with remaining championship ambitions have the obvious goals — win, survive, advance — in mind for this weekend, for the rest of the Round of 12 and for the balance of the playoffs. The nuances bear looking into in this team-by-team motto tracker and outlook meter.

Team Penske:Pour it on. The only organization with a driver who’s already secured safe passage into the next round is Roger Penske’s. Ryan Blaney secured that automatic berth with a convincing win last weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The next two boxes for the Penske group to check involve defending Cup champ Joey Logano and teammate Austin Cindric, who are on opposite sides of the playoff bubble.

Ford hasn’t won here since the fall of 2020, an occasion that marked the most recent of Logano’s three Kansas victories, but Team Penske typically finds stride when playoff times arrive. That seasonal surge would help sustain Logano (plus-24 to the provisional cutline) and could lift Cindric, who is minus-19 and has the worst average finish at Kansas (23.9) among the remaining playoff drivers in the Next Gen era. Specific to this weekend, the organization will need to find the right balance with a new Goodyear tire setup. Both Blaney’s No. 12 and Logano’s No. 22 had significant issues in practice, and Cindric brushed the wall during his qualifying run.

Hendrick Motorsports: Play to your strengths. Larson has won twice and led 498 laps in the last seven Kansas races, notching top-five finishes in five of those seven. Last year’s playoff race here was an outlier, a 26th-place effort hampered by a flat tire and wall scrub just 20 laps in, but he’s projected to add to his win total in the latest Racing Insights projections.

William Byron and Chase Elliott — Larson’s playoff-eligible teammates — are each projected for top 10s or better in Sunday’s race, though neither of them have cracked the code to winning here with the Next Gen car. Byron came closest in this race last year with a runner-up finish, and Elliott ran third in the spring of 2024. All three are double digits above the provisional elimination line — Byron plus-47, Larson plus-41 and Elliott plus-14.

Joe Gibbs Racing: Stay in contact, but not like that. The fallout from last weekend’s teammate tangle between playoff-eligible Denny Hamlin and the postseason-non-grata Ty Gibbs has lingered ever since the Cup Series haulers packed up in New Hampshire and headed to the midwest this week. The rosy story arc of a JGR sweep through the Round of 16 has teetered with Team Penske’s awakening, and Kansas feels like a ripe place to regroup.

“If you’re talking about Kansas, I think we have everything we need,” said Chris Gabehart, JGR’s competition director. “This has been a really good track for us for a long time. So I’m actually really excited about the weekend and more focused on execution than speed. But execution is no small part of it, and you certainly don’t want to make your execution more difficult, which is something that we didn’t do a great job of last week as a company, and those are the types of things that we tried to talk through this week, and I think the drivers get it.”

Hamlin is a four-time Kansas winner who most recently prevailed here in the spring of 2023. Bell lacks a Kansas win but was the runner-up here last May and has four pole-position starts. Both have some buffer to work with above the elimination line, with Bell plus-29 and Hamlin plus-27. It’s their newest teammate Chase Briscoe, who has less cushion at plus-12 but won the pole Saturday and ran fourth here in the spring in his only Kansas start with JGR.

MORE: Playoff standings before Kansas

Trackhouse Racing: Fly solo and defend. The lone driver left holding the Trackhouse banner in the playoffs is Chastain, who is also the defending race winner. The 32-year-old driver recently cited his Kansas victory last September as proof of what his No. 1 Chevrolet team was capable of. Finding that level of sustaining speed, however, has been challenging for the whole Trackhouse outfit.

Chastain sits 12 points below the bubble, currently shown as the first driver out on the provisional playoff line. If a Kansas repeat doesn’t find its fruition Sunday, he’ll be left to fight off elimination at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, where he’s expected to lean heavily on the expertise of teammate and road-racing virtuoso Shane van Gisbergen.

23XI Racing: Rekindle the magic. Kansas Speedway was once regarded as a 23XI stronghold, a place where the team won three out of four from 2022-23 with three different drivers. Bubba Wallace was on that list of winners alongside teammates Kurt Busch and Tyler Reddick, and he’s also taken note of the declining results in years since. Not helping matters, last weekend’s outing at New Hampshire, where no 23XI cars finished among the top 20.

Reddick’s average finish in the last three Kansas races is 20.7, with Wallace’s 22.3. Reversing that trend and regaining some Kansas confidence have some connective urgency. Both drivers are at the bottom of the playoff standings with Reddick 23 points back of the elimination barrier and Wallace minus-27. This week’s motivation from team co-owners Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin was fairly straightforward. “Just basically get back on the horse,” Wallace said Saturday at Kansas. “You know, one bad week isn’t going to deter us from our destiny, our path this season. So we’re still excited, still optimistic. A lot of people are looking forward to running this whole thing out to get to Phoenix and racing for a championship. So we’ve just got to work really hard and capitalize on opportunities.”

RELATED: Full Saturday recap from Kansas

From atop the pit box …

What do crew chiefs have in focus to win Sunday’s race?

As simplistic as it would sound for Cliff Daniels to just unload the No. 5 Chevrolet that Kyle Larson drove to victory here four and a half months ago with a carbon-copy setup, the veteran Hendrick Motorsports crew chief says it’s not that easy. Larson led 221 of the 267 laps back in May, but the circuit’s return trip to Kansas presents some fresh wrinkles — new right-side Goodyear rubber included.

“Certainly nice to have the notes from the spring that we can look at — and other intermediates as well,” Daniels told NASCAR.com. “I mean, sometimes it’s valuable to learn what not to do as it is valuable to learn what to do. So we’ve gone to work. Nothing greatly different than what we’ve had before, but we’ve had to push a couple areas just to try to get a little bit better. So with a different right-side tire, that’s going to be a little different variable. The temps are going to be up, so grip will certainly be a thing, and that’s kind of been our outlook, just trying to make sure we’re getting better.”

RELATED: New right-side tire for Kansas | Full 2025 schedule

The new right-side tire construction is built to provide additional durability, and Goodyear officials indicated the same setup will be used in two weeks at the similar 1.5-mile Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The additional sturdiness is intended to give crew chiefs more flexibility on air-pressure adjustments, something Daniels says the team has studied “the best that we can.”

Speaking in the Saturday morning hours before practice, Daniels said he expected the the 25-minute session to “be educational and hopefully set us up to have a more complete picture of what we need going into (Sunday), and still, even with that, the track is going to evolve as the race goes along, and I’m sure we’ll be tinkering with air pressure and balance of our car throughout the race like normal. So just got to take it all in and hopefully make the right decisions at the right time.”

Chasing that sweet spot on air pressure isn’t without its challenges. Team Penske discovered that in Saturday’s practice and qualifying sessions, encountering problems on the Fords driven by playoff standings leader Ryan Blaney and defending Cup champion Joey Logano.

“The intent is it’s more durable, so the compounds and all that stuff should be very comparable. So I don’t expect to see a big lap-time difference with it, but it’s more about the durability, and yes, how can we push the air pressure,” said Billy Scott, crew chief for Tyler Reddick’s No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota. “It’s always the big question, and we see failures here often, but you really don’t know where you’re at on that until you experience it yourself, or at least have a teammate get far enough that you start to have durability be a concern.”

RELATED: See where drivers will pit for Sunday’s race

History tells us …

ALEX BOWMAN. Falling from playoff eligibility may have shifted the 32-year-old driver slightly off the radar, but his record at Kansas Speedway is worth a strong look. Bowman has top-10 finishes in each of the last four races at the 1.5-mile track, and his average finish (7.0) during that span is second-best only to Christopher Bell’s 5.8. Bowman has 11 top 10s in his career here, his most at any track on the schedule. | See Bowman’s projected finishing position

Fantasy update

NASCAR Fantasy Live expert Dustin Albino provides insight for your Sunday lineup.

Boy, what a difference one week makes. After stomping the field at New Hampshire last weekend, Paul Wolfe‘s fear of Kansas being a struggle for Team Penske has turned to reality with a horrendous performance on Saturday. With Ryan Blaney‘s wreck in the opening minutes of the second group of practice, followed by Joey Logano‘s flat tire later in the session, assessing the long-run pace of the field is more challenging than most weeks considering multiple cycles on the same set of tires. With their recent Kansas dominance, it‘s no surprise that Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin appeared to be among the best cars in the field. No changes to my lineup this weekend, though I flirted with replacing Alex Bowman for either Bubba Wallace or William Byron.

Lineup: Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Chase Briscoe, Ross Chastain
Garage: Alex Bowman

MORE: Lineup advice in Fantasy Fastlane

Speed reads

Our biggest pieces of the week — get covered for race day from all angles.

•NASCAR at Kansas: Key info, qualifying reports and more from doubleheader weekend | Read more
• Racing Insights: Hendrick’s hopes ride high in projected Kansas results | Read more
• Bubble Watch: Inside the playoff subplots for the Round of 12 | Read more
• At-track photos: Trackside sights, scenes from the Sunflower State | View gallery
• Memorable moments: Rich history of racing through the years in KC | Read more
• Turning Point to Kansas: After Toyota’s first-round sweep, automaker balance tilts | Read more
• Neil Paine: Analysis leans toward a Kyle Larson upswing in Kansas | Read more
• Playoff Pulse: Who’s hot, who’s not ahead of Kansas | Read more
• Power Rankings: Sizing up where playoff drivers stand | This week’s ranks

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