NASCAR playoffs media day notebook: What the drivers said before the Round of 16 begins at Darlington
After a 26-race battle to make it to this point, the most pivotal point of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season is about to begin for 16 of the best drivers in stock car racing. This weekend's Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway marks the beginning of the NASCAR playoffs, an elimination-style playoff where championship ambitions throughout the field will be made and broken through 10 races and four rounds leading up to the championship race at Phoenix Raceway.
Before any on-track activity occurs this weekend at Darlington, all of the drivers bound for the playoffs' Round of 16 met with the press at the Charlotte Convention Center in uptown Charlotte, N.C. to discuss their seasons so far, their playoff hopes and other topics as well. Here is a sampling of some of the notable topics and storylines discussed during media day:
Strength in Numbers
In the early years of NASCAR's playoff format, and even into the beginnings of the current format adopted in 2014, the available spots on the grid tended to be controlled and monopolized by the biggest and most powerful organizations in the sport. In 2005, for instance, five of the 10 drivers in that year's Chase for the Cup came from Roush Racing at the height of its powers.
That's not the case anymore. 10 different race teams are represented among the 16 drivers in the Round of 16, a new record in the nearly 20 years since NASCAR first adopted a postseason format. The biggest teams in the sport, of course, still hold most of the cards -- Joe Gibbs Racing, Hendrick Motorsports and Team Penske account for seven of the 16 playoff spots. But then there's the resurgent RFK Racing, still-young upstarts like Trackhouse Racing and 23XI Racing, Richard Childress Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing with one car apiece, and then two dark horses in Front Row Motorsports and JTG Daugherty Racing.
Of that group, JTG Daugherty has been pegged as perhaps the biggest underdog organization given that they are the lone single car team in the playoffs. But that label discounts how the team got to the playoffs to begin with. Not only did Ricky Stenhouse Jr. win the Daytona 500 behind the wheel of the team's No. 47 Chevrolet, but he also earned two top fives and seven top 10s in what has been the strongest season for JTG Daugherty since they first made the playoffs with AJ Allmendinger in 2014.
Though Stenhouse acknowledged that being a single car team puts them at somewhat of a disadvantage, he was pointed in saying that he felt like anyone writing him and his team off as an easy first round exit was making a mistake.
"I feel our team and I have a lot more confidence than probably a lot of people have in us, which is fine," Stenhouse said. "I was at the shop yesterday, and my guys were saying, 'So-and-so says we're going to be out,' and I'm like, 'let's go prove them wrong.' I'm not worried about proving people wrong, but I want to make sure I prove that to our guys and our supporters.
There's plenty of people that think we're going to make the next round. It's about proving those people right. I told them don't worry about who didn't pick us, let's just do our job and let's go perform the way we know we can perform."
Christopher Bell's new pit crew
It has become a custom practice among the biggest race teams to realign personnel during playoff time, giving their teams that made the playoffs the absolute best resources they can to try and win the championship, usually at the expense of other teams that did not make the playoffs. That's what's happened at Joe Gibbs Racing: The No. 20 and No. 54 teams have now traded pit crews, giving Christopher Bell the over the wall crew that had previously belonged to Ty Gibbs.
Bell's new crew has been among the very best on pit road all season, and they have the hardware to prove it thanks to their victory in the Pit Crew Challenge at North Wilkesboro Speedway back in May. The adjustment process for all parties began in earnest with pit practice on Wednesday, and the change offers some level of challenge to Bell given that jackman Derrell Edwards is the only crewmember that Bell has worked with previously.
"They've told me they've studied film of me getting in and out of the box and knowing my tendencies of whether I stop long, or if I stop short, or go towards the wall or outside the wall. From my standpoint, it really doesn't change, but from their standpoint going from Ty to myself is going to be a slight adjustment," Bell said. "I know that we have the best people in the business across all of the JGR pit crews and so I know that they will be able to make the adjustment."
Denny Hamlin's contract situation
Perhaps the greatest curiosity in NASCAR as the 2023 season reaches its closing stages is the fact that Denny Hamlin has yet to reach a contract extension to continue driving for Joe Gibbs Racing in 2024 and beyond. While nothing would seem to suggest that any parties involved are heading for a divorce -- as was the case at this time last year when talks with Kyle Busch broke down and Busch left for RCR -- the situation has remained oddly stable without much public movement.
Two weeks ago at Watkins Glen, Hamlin maintained that he wishes to remain at Gibbs, but that outside factors -- namely his being co-owner of 23XI -- have kept a deal from getting done as of yet. When asked one week ago by CBS Sports, Hamlin shared that nothing had changed on the contract front. And when asked by the media corps at large on Thursday, Hamlin again shared that the status quo was being maintained.
"I've got a lot of irons in the fire," Hamlin said of contract negotiations. "I don't have anything new to announce. I'm not trying to leak one way or another."
Earlier this week, a more optimistic tone on the situation was taken by car owner Joe Gibbs himself, who told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that he hoped that an announcement on Hamlin's contract would come about quickly.
"Things are not done yet, and so you're working hard on them. And certainly, all of us want that to happen -- we want Denny here," Gibbs said. "It's been 17 years, he's helped us build our race team ... We would love for him to be here and go his entire career and retire here. That's kind of our dream. That's what we would like."
Lessons Learned for Bubba
At this time last year, 23XI Racing was faced with an unusual predicament: Kurt Busch had put the organization in the playoffs by winning at Kansas, but he was forced to withdraw from the playoffs after he was unable to return from a concussion suffered in a crash at Pocono. That meant that 23XI's playoff driver was gone, but Busch's No. 45 Toyota remained in the playoffs by virtue of the owner's championship standings.
The situation was resolved by swapping the No. 23 and No. 45 teams for the final 10 weeks of the season, which doubled as a means of giving Bubba Wallace some experience in playoff racing. It ended up paying off: Wallace won at Kansas to advance the No. 45 to the next round of the owner's championship playoffs, and the team eventually finished 10th in the final standings.
Now, Wallace has qualified for the playoffs for the first time as a driver, and there's quite a bit both good and bad for him to draw from last year's experience -- though Wallace had four top 10s in last year's playoffs, he also wrecked one of his team's best cars and got himself parked for one race after losing his head and retaliating against Kyle Larson over contact at Las Vegas.
"I think the things you learn last year is how you race, how you approach things, but I made a lot of mistakes last year that I regret, and there is a lot of learning curves coming out of that, setting you up for this year," Wallace said. "I was saying this was going to be our best year yet, so I'm glad it's living up to par."
Interestingly, the owner's points shoe is now on the other foot for Wallace and his team. Though Wallace is in the playoffs on the driver's side, the No. 23 team missed the owner's points playoffs while the Hendrick Motorsports No. 9 team made it in by virtue of the points scored by Chase Elliott and his three substitute drivers.
Thursday's media day also suggested that Wallace is keeping things loose, as the hobby photographer brought his camera with him and gathered his own material -- some of which came at a napping Brad Keselowski's expense.
Ross Returns
Just as it did following Phoenix last year, the record book shows that Joey Logano won the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series championship. But of the 16 drivers who made the playoffs last year, Ross Chastain was the one who stole the show.
Chastain capped off a breakout campaign by becoming the most consequential driver in the playoffs, making it through each round and then pulling off the Hail Melon at Martinsville on his way to a second-place finish in the championship standings. The distance that separated Chastain from the title -- 235 feet -- has now become a rallying cry for Trackhouse Racing.
But the expectation of a deep playoff run is quite a dramatic swing for Chastain, who has already had to adapt to new mindsets going from running at the back of the pack in Jay Robinson-owned cars to being one of NASCAR's biggest stars.
"There's definitely things we've learned. It can be something as simple as my schedule, how we go about the 10 weeks and on the raceday what we build into my calendar," Chastain said. "Fundamentally from a large point of view, we don't have to do anything different. We didn't do anything too crazy last year – the Hail Melon and some of that stuff was crazy – but in our preparation and our execution when we got to the track for all these playoff races.
"We can't reinvent the wheel this week for Darlington. We can't reinvent it for the Roval or anything. We need to go race. That's what we've done for two years and really three since a lot of us were at (Chip Ganassi Racing) together. We didn't get here by accident, and it's OK to go win some of these things. Somebody is going to."
