With two races to go before the Playoff field is set, the battle is still wide open as the series heads to Daytona and Darlington. The payoff is a nice trophy and a nicer 15 Playoff point bonus; second place gets ten and third place gets eight, with diminishing point totals given out down to tenth in the standings.
With his win at Michigan, his second on the season, Tyler Reddick assumed the lead of the regular season standings, with a ten-point buffer over Chase Elliott. Despite the reward, though, Reddick isn’t about to change how he races to secure it.
“I mean, I’d say our approach to speedways all year has kind of been similar. As far as I know, nothing’s really changed on our end for this one,” he said of Daytona.
“And Darlington, we want to go win there. If we finish good here [at Daytona], that will help us get a good [qualifying] metric for Darlington, that’s really important, that really set me up to get a good shot at the pole and capture that in the spring. So, I think for us, having a solid race here will just make Darlington a little more smooth.”
He certainly rejected any suggestion that he intends to point-race rather than make aggressive moves or potentially deploy aggressive strategies targeted at getting the win.
His main competitor was equally reluctant to call the fifteen Playoff point bonus the end-all-be-all.
“It depends on how good or bad you run,” Elliott said when asked how valuable those Playoff points are.
“They can totally not matter if you’re winning your way through the Playoffs, or like us in 2022 we ran absolutely horrendous for nine races there and we had a bunch of Playoff points banked and that was what got us to Phoenix. So it totally depends on your performance in the final ten and whether or not you need them.”
Elliott and Reddick are both on the top of the table as a result of impressive consistency. While Reddick has two wins, fewer than multiple other drivers at this point in the season, Elliott has just one.
But rather than being pleased with his consistency, though, Elliott sees that statistic as evidence that he’s missing out on potential winning opportunities.
“Yeah, I feel like we’ve been solid,” he acknowledged. “I feel like there’s still areas where we I would like to see us do better at, and certainly I would like to have more wins at this point in the year, but I feel like our pace over the last month or so has been improved and we’ve been in the mix more often and had ourselves in good positions for that final run.
“I don’t really look at it that way as much as I do what can we do to be better, and I think the good news for us is we still have room for improvement. You can look at that a few ways but I think that’s exciting because there’s still some season left and I think we’re in a good position to improve and to trend the right way.”
The nearest competitor to the pair is Kyle Larson, 32 points shy of the points lead. Earlier this week, Denny Hamlin had occupied that third-place position, but a penalty awarded to him by NASCAR took him down to sixth with the loss of 75 regular-season points.
Hamlin also lost 10 Playoff points separately and incurred a $100,000 fine because the engine from his Bristol win wasn’t presented to NASCAR for inspection but was instead rebuilt by TRD, the engine builder for all the Toyota teams. TRD put out a statement admitting full responsibility, apologizing to Hamlin and his Joe Gibbs Racing team, and promising to revamp its procedures so such an oversight won’t happen again.
While Reddick, who drives for a team co-owned by Denny Hamlin, said he certainly felt for his team owner, he understands the points loss..
“I mean, it happens that way for sure. These things happen sometimes. Certainly, it’s not very common. Hate it for everyone involved, but unfortunately there’s rules for this sort of thing and they laid down the hammer.”
As it turns out, the regular season championship is turning into a fight between two drivers who are more concerned with other things entirely.
