SHR will be hardpressed to get 4 cars into finale

Aric Almirola, Clint Bowyer, Kurt Busch and Kevin Harvick are through to the next round of NASCAR’s playoffs. That is the entire lineup at Stewart-Haas Racing, for those keeping score at home, and quite an impressive display of balance and teamwork.

It is also half the eight slots in the playoff field and SHR of course wants to get its quartet into the championship round and guarantee itself a title at Homestead-Miami next month.

Will all four make it to the finale? Probably not.

“This is what we have built up to all year with our Fords,” said Kurt Busch, who in 2004 won Ford’s last Cup Series title. Busch won in the first year NASCAR moved away from its season-long championship race to a playoffstyle system, and Ford has been trying to claw its way back into contention ever since.

Numbers are certainly on Ford’s side with the four SHR cars and Joey Logano from Team Penske in the round of eight. Five spots to Ford drivers left room only for a pair of Toyota drivers, reigning champion Martin Truex Jr. and 2015 winner Kyle Busch, and a lone representative from Chevrolet in Chase Elliott.

But those numbers can also hurt Ford’s chances, particularly if SHR suddenly fractures and its drivers take a selfish approach during the next three races.

“Racing teammates is tough,” said Alan Gustafson, crew chief for Elliott. “They can give each other no quarter at all. That’s a hard thing to do. That’s a hard thing to kind of balance. To move on, you have to full throttle, hammer down. If you get into a riff, which is going to happen with your teammate, it’s a tough situation.”

Gustafson even wondered if SHR’s juggernaut will inadvertently help Elliott and the Hendrick Motorsports team, which doesn’t have a single Chevrolet ally remaining in the playoffs. But if SHR turns on each other, well, the rest of the field better be ready to pounce.

“In some ways I think it can be an advantage for us because it is difficult to balance it when you’re all kind of infighting against each other,” Gustafson said.

There’s no infighting yet at SHR, at least not publicly. The four drivers executed perfectly at Talladega Superspeedway two weeks ago by sweeping the front two rows of qualifying and working together to stay in line and hold off traffic for almost the entire race.