The Chase for the Championship is back and that means having a good points day is back in vogue but also questions about the standings for drivers who are not off to the start they intended.
That includes Kyle Larson, who leaves the back-to-back drafting track races 21st in the standings.
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“And …,” Larson said tersely when told that fact outside the infield care center on Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
There were several reasons to bring this up. For one, Larson has a well-documented checkers or wreckers driving style that has served him well over the years, especially under a format where whole races could be thrown away with enough wins and playoff points.
The Chase for the Championship encourages a little more finesse that Larson hasn’t needed to apply in a long time.
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“It’s just two races man …,” Larson said back.
Kyle Larson crash damage, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet
Kyle Larson crash damage, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet
Larson is right to minimize the sample size, but being 48 points behind the leader also has consequences because playoff seeding is now set by the final regular season points and the regular season champion has a significant advantage heading into the final 10 races.
Why it matters
Two races outside of the top-15 to open the campaign could prove the difference between starting The Chase in first or second or second and third, which again has consequence when everyone is points racing again.
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There are also more immediate challenges for everyone off to a bad start. Qualifying. The qualifying order each week is set by a metric that includes 70 percent of the race result the previous week and 30 percent owner points position.
In other words, bad finishes compound, and the track is faster as qualifying goes on most weeks, so it hurts to be lower in points that way too. It’s part of why you see drivers who used to make The Playoffs from outside the top-20 in points suddenly start qualifying better once they had their points position adjusted.
They get better pit selections too, so all of this is to say that the championship standings aren’t totally inconsequential after two weeks.
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The standings are also just an interesting visual after two races. Some highlights:
23XI Racing drivers Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace lead the standings over Chase Elliott. That all tracks. But Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith are also in the top-5 and that’s novel based on the NextGen status quo.
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And under the old format, it would be easy to write off Hocevar and Smith because they would still most likely need to win their way into the Round of 16 as drivers would need to be well inside the top-10 to advance without a win.
Surviving two of the most chaotic races of the regular season provides both a pathway to hang in there to make the top-16 in points over the next 24 races.
“I sound like a broken record saying it, but consistency is going to be everything this year,” Smith said last week. “I feel like those days of guys who maybe have a ton of speed every week and then wreck and not really care because they can, I feel like those days are just long gone.
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“I’m trying to take advantage of that and just maybe try to be smarter and make my bad days not so bad and making my good days good, where we get some stage points like we did and putting ourselves in contention. I feel like that’s all I can do. I would love to be a name in this Chase, but, at the same time, we’re taking it one week at a time and just trying to roll with them on that.”
So far, so good.
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Kyle Busch is 24th in the standings one spot ahead of Josh Berry. Austin Cindric, who has three times won his way into the playoffs, is 26th one spot ahead of Denny Hamlin. Christopher Bell, Alex Bowman, Ty Gibbs and Austin Dillon are all outside of the top 30.
Again, it’s early but it’s not completely inconsequential that they are off to a bad start in this format.
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“Yeah, in this style of racing I think all of us just want to make it out with a decent finish,” Berry said. “We were able to do that last week and we were able to do that in the Duel, but not so lucky this time.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. fell from sixth to 21st with one bad DNF and this is a driver that hovers around what will be the cutoff now.
“You’re not going to have many mulligans,” Stenhouse said after being released from infield care. “Especially for us, these are tracks we run really well at, you want to get stage points. Starting where we started, not getting stage points, I’m not thrilled because that was a lost opportunity for us to get some.
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“We’ll just have to keep our head down and keep digging.”
And as an antithesis to Larson dismissing two races worth of sample size, Hamlin says everyone is watching the points now.
“I can assure you that all drivers are looking at the standings week in, week out now,” Hamlin said. “There is no, ‘well, I’ll check it ten weeks from now, five weeks from now.’ Everyone is looking. It matters, and it certainly will be a good mental check for them knowing that they’ve got this year started off on the right foot.”
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