Driver Kyle Larson leads the circular bullet train of stock cars into the first of NASCAR’s 10 playoff races Sunday, the Quaker State 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
He should see nothing but blue skies and promise. He enters with more wins than anyone through the season’s first 26 races – four. He’s the points leader among the 16 playoff drivers in this first round, and is a betting favorite to win it all.
Yet in his mind, Larson smells smoking rubber and hears the awful screech of twisting sheet metal. Yellow caution flags decorate his championship dreams.
“Yeah, I don’t love seeing Atlanta in the playoffs at all,” Larson said earlier this week. “Even Watkins Glen (next week’s stop) for that matter. I like those tracks, but they’re just sketchy places.”
Sketchy as in built for mechanical mayhem. As for AMS, it is a 1.5-mile track, but with the high speeds and bunched racing it invites, it runs very much like a superspeedway. That means one ill-timed driver’s twitch can turn the front stretch into a scrap yard. A lot of innocent’s can get caught up in the wreckage and through no fault of their own get left behind in the playoff race.
Of course, those who want more certainty in their driving should maybe put on a pair of shorts and sign up with UPS. There is a certain amount of inherent risk built into driving 180 mph bumper to bumper.
The whims of scheduling have made AMS not only a part of the NASCAR playoffs this season, but, for the first time, the lead-off event. At this stage, many drivers, especially those among the upper half of the round of 16, adopt a bit of a survive and advance mentality. The goal is to do whatever it takes to get through these first three races and move on to the round of 12. A race win does that automatically. But the steadier course is to build up stage points – each race is divided into three stages – finish as high as possible without courting disaster and spend no time attached to a wrecker.
That’s why the personality of this track has some of ‘em nervous.
“We’re going to try to make the very most of it. It would be nice to get out of there with a win. If we can’t, just try to avoid the carnage,” said Dawsonville’s Chase Elliott, back in the playoffs after a year away and standing seventh in the standings.
There is a wide range of age and experience in this playoff field. It includes seven of the last eight NASCAR Cup champions. There’s 21-year-old Ty Gibbs, with less than three seasons at the major league level standing one spot ahead of 44-year-old Martin Truex Jr., in his 21st year.
Elliott has the home track advantage, for whatever that’s worth. The son of NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott won the 2020 championship and had spent each of his first seven seasons in the playoffs before missing out last year.
“I fought really hard to try to get back in last year and it didn’t work out. It’s way more fun when you’re in the mix,” he said.
Look who’s gone from young phenom to old wise head, speaking now on how NASCAR’s unique playoff system has evolved over the last decade.
“This format requires similar things over the years. The only thing I feel has kinda changed in my time is people have gotten way smarter with their stage points,” Elliott said. “Early on when the stages were introduced, there really wasn’t a lot of thought in that, people were just selling out to try to win the race. Then people started realizing just how valuable those points could be throughout. Now it’s a total chess match trying to balance your stage points versus your racing finish.”
Two-time Cup champion Joey Logano – ninth in playoff points entering the Quaker State 400 – crosses over to another sport to explain the slightly more circumspect attitude of these early playoff races: “We always say the first round is base hits. But this one is really about getting some base hits because there are a lot of crazy things that can happen.”
This format asks a lot of the fans, faced with keeping track of a full-field event while charting the race within the race between the 16 drivers trying to advance their playoff ambitions.
This playoff has its critics – in fact some traditionalists would still favor the old points-only system in which the championship could be wrapped up well before the final race. Logano is not one of them.
“Like any other sport, fans love playoffs. They love the do-or-die. They love seeing teams right on the very edge of getting something they’re worked for for so long, to get to enjoy that moment or the agony of defeat. Fans want to see both of those and NASCAR presents that over these 10 weeks, every weekend,” he said.
“That pressure creates a lot of drama. When you put your back up against the wall, it tests a lot of things in you as a person – can you rise to the occasion, will you crack under the pressure, what are you willing to do (to win)? That’s what makes the NASCAR playoffs so entertaining.”
And if there is a little fender-banging along the way, no one on the other side of the catch fence is going to complain.
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