NASCAR: contenders and pretenders
While everyone in the NASCAR industry was busy drooling over the Roval at Charlotte Motor Speedway — and to be fair, the early indications of TV ratings say they had every right to be — something else got lost in the shuffle.
We’re just seven races away from crowning the next Cup Series champion.
And while Jimmie Johnson, Erik Jones, Denny Hamlin and Austin Dillon were all eliminated Sunday during the first round of playoff cutdowns, there are still 12 very capable, very hungry drivers gunning for that title.
Which of those 12 are true contenders? And which are merely hanging on for dear life?
We’ll excuse the Big 3 of Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick for the purpose of this exercise, as it’s clear from their performances this season that they’re all worthy of a second Cup Series championship. But as for everyone else? Well, let’s sort through some of the biggest names:
Pretenders
— Clint Bowyer: Before Bowyer’s third-place finish on the Roval at Charlotte — again, with two serious collisions in the last 10 laps — he’d only recorded one Top-5 finish since the first weekend in July. That’s ... not awesome. And on top of that, his second win of the year at Michigan only came because the race was called on account of weather. That race keeps going, with Harvick’s easily stealing that win from his Stewart-Haas Racing teammate.
Has this been a redemption season of sorts for Bowyer, who hadn’t won a race since 2012? Yes, absolutely. But the consistency of contending for race wins just hasn’t been there over the second half of the season.
— Joey Logano: Logano’s one win this season? Talladega. And which race comes right after Dover this weekend? That’s right — Talladega.
— Ryan Blaney: Listing the most-recent race winner as a pretender may seem harsh, but even Blaney acknowledged after his win Sunday night that he had mixed feelings about his first victory this year. Knowing that two other drivers spun out and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time, he said, wasn’t how you’d want to win a race.
Contenders
— Brad Keselowski: OK, so maybe this is cheating a little bit. Keselowski won three straight races to end the regular season and open the playoffs, putting him right there in the conversation with Truex, Busch and Harvick. Some people even contemplated changing the Big 3 to the Big 4 to accommodate a new contender.
— Kyle Larson: You’ve got to feel for Larson at this point. The man has five runner-up finishes this year and still no victories to show for it — and that doesn’t even include the Roval, when he was among the leaders before a late crash torpedoed his afternoon.
— Kurt Busch: Busch may not fit into the trendy groups currently dominating NASCAR’s marketing campaigns — at 40 years old and with just one win, he doesn’t fit into the young guns or the Big 3 — but his results speak for themselves.