Here are the NASCAR drivers on the points bubble after Thursday’s race

Denny Hamlin’s fifth win of the year didn’t come as much of a surprise. The No. 11 driver has dominated the field since the first race of the NASCAR season at Daytona, and did so again Thursday at Kansas.

“We can win any given week and that’s something that is really hard to come by,” Hamlin said.

Other drivers, including Hamlin’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch, should know. The reigning Cup Series champion still has not won a race in 2020. Busch, who finished 11th at Kansas, falls above the playoff cutoff based on points, and is not quite in jeopardy of missing the postseason, but at least one Cup champion now is.

Seven-time Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson, ranked 15th in points before the race, fell below the 16-driver cutoff for the postseason after crashing out at Kansas. Johnson was involved in a mid-pack wreck in the final stage of the race, suffering yet another unpredictable blow during his final season of full-time Cup racing.

“There’s just a lot of challenges that we weren’t expecting,” Johnson said on NBCSN before the race. “But we, as a group, need to do a better job working with those challenges and bring some faster cars to the track.”

“I can say the last couple weeks I have had those cars, I just haven’t gotten the car to the finish line,” the Chevrolet driver added.

Johnson finished 11th in the first stage and raced in the top-three off a two-tire call before the restart to close Stage 2. He couldn’t hold the momentum through the stage finish, but ended up in ninth place for some points.

Bad luck struck Johnson late again, though, when he was caught up in a wreck sparked by a Joey Logano flat tire. The damage from the crash eventually forced Johnson out of the race and 18 points behind William Byron, the last driver to make the playoff cutoff, into the 19th slot.

“Just one of those racing deals...” Johnson tweeted along with a video of the impact between Austin Dillon’s No. 3 car and the right front of Johnson’s No. 48 after the race. “I didn’t have anywhere to go.”