4 midseason NASCAR surprises
When the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season came to a screeching halt in March after just four races because of the coronavirus pandemic, no one knew what the rest of the schedule would look like or if it would even happen.
But NASCAR established a plan to try to keep its competitors safe, and racing returned after a 10-week break.
And, thanks to some doubleheaders and midweek races, NASCAR made up for lost time, and Sunday’s race at Texas Motor Speedway marked the halfway point in the 36-race schedule.
However, there are just eight regular-season races remaining for drivers to qualify for the 10-race playoffs starting in September. And with 10 different race winners automatically securing their places in the playoffs, only six spots remain.
So, we’re breaking down four big ontrack surprises halfway through the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season.
1. Kyle Busch still has not won a race.
This is, undeniably, the biggest surprise of the NASCAR season so far. The reigning Cup Series champion has not yet won a race and is, therefore, not yet locked into the playoffs this fall to defend his title.
It would be truly shocking if Busch has to sneak into the playoffs based on points in the standings, rather than by taking a checkered flag.
But his season so far suggests that’s a realistic possibility - though it still seems unlikely.
“It’s tough,” Busch said Wednesday after finishing second to Chase Elliott in the NASCAR All-star Race.
“We’re struggling right now. There’s just no speed in our race cars for some reason. I don’t know what’s going on. It seemed like [Wednesday], even when we were mired in 10th, I was driving 110 percent, giving it everything I had just to maintain where the hell I was. And that’s not going forward. That’s normally not indicative of us, Joe Gibbs Racing, Toyota, whatever.”
However, two of Busch’s three Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr., have each won at least one race, and Hamlin in particular is having a dominant season (but more on that later).
Through 18 races, Busch has eight top-5 finishes and 10 top-10s after salvaging a fourth-place finish at Texas on Sunday. Those are impressive stats, making it that much more surprising that he hasn’t driven to Victory Lane yet when he’s among the top-5 finishers almost 50 percent of the time.
But he’s only led 150 laps and, without any stage or race wins, he has zero playoff points. He’s finished second three times - at Auto Club Speedway, Darlington Raceway and Atlanta Motor Speedway - and is currently 10th in the driver standings.
To compare, at the midway point in the schedule last season, he’d already won four of his total five checkered flags for the year and led 769 laps.
“It’s certainly been frustrating this year,” Busch said Wednesday. “It seems like any time I fall into a rhythm, I back up myself just a little bit to 90, 95 percent, I’m going backwards. I’m getting passed, I’m getting slowed down. You can’t run at 100 percent all the time every lap. When you do, you start making mistakes.”
2. It’s largely been a two-man show between Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick.
Harvick and Hamlin have at least twice as many wins as the next drivers. Each.
With four wins apiece, it seems like every weekend these two are running up front even if they don’t end up in Victory Lane. Harvick has 11 top-5 finishes and 15 top-10s after coming in fifth at Texas, while Hamlin, who was 20th Sunday, is at nine and 10 in the same respective categories.
Both drivers are perennial championship contenders, so their success is hardly a surprise. But they’re so significantly separated from the field when drivers like Busch, Truex, Brad Keselowski or Joey Logano might normally be able to (or try to) keep pace with them for checkered flags.
Could this finally be Hamlin’s first championship year? Or will Harvick earn his second title?
At this point, it’d be surprising if these two don’t end up in among the Championship 4 drivers yet again. And their advantage with playoff standings certainly doesn’t hurt as the only two with at least 20 playoff points.
“I know if we keep winning, the points will keep adding up,” Harvick said after winning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway earlier this month.
3. Cole Custer became the first Rookie of the Year candidate to win a race in years.
The Stewart-haas Racing driver stunned the NASCAR world two weekends ago with a huge upset at Kentucky Speedway when he took advantage of momentum during a four-wide battle for the lead on the last lap, getting the best of teammate Harvick, Truex and Ryan Blaney.
With the checkered flag, he became the first Rookie of the Year candidate to win a race since Chris Buescher did it in 2016. But more impressively, as the Associated Press noted, he was the first rookie to win a race not shortened because of weather since Juan Pablo Montoya in 2007.
4. Where did Joey Logano go, and is he back?
On paper, the No. 22 Ford driver appears to be having a killer season. He is fourth in the driver standings, has two race wins and has won four race stages - with the latter two categories earning him 14 playoff points so far. And given how he started the season, it would have been fair to assume he’d have at least one more victory before the halfway point in the schedule.
But both of Logano’s wins came before the 10-week COVID-19 hiatus. Sunday’s third-place finish at Texas was only his second top-5 finish since racing returned in May, but he called it “progress.”
“We were a little bit of a lost puppy before the last couple races,” Logano said in Sunday’s post-race Zoom press conference. “But I thought Kentucky we showed speed. Once again, today we showed speed. …
“Really, it’s just been the speed that we’ve been lacking. We’ve made a good step to where we’re in contention to win again, like we were earlier in the year.”