Our NASCAR experts, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi, break down the season finale at Daytona and look ahead to the playoffs.
Well… here we are. Last week of the regular season. And back at Daytona. What can we divine from the Daytona 500 and apply to this week’s Coke Zero Sugar 400, if anything?I’d include Talladega’s spring race along with Daytona in trying to figure out how the racing might go. With this car at superspeedways, the trend has leaned toward track position being crucial because the two-by-two lines don’t move as much as they used to.
Will this race be absolute chaos, with an already prone-to-crashes course mixed with 15-plus drivers trying to either win or get in on points? And then there’s the Bubba Wallace/Ty Gibbs strategy scenario, broken down artfullyIt will probably devolve into chaos at the end, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first two stages are relatively calm.
The intrigue of this final spot is pretty great, but how daunting of a road is it for the No. 16 seed to actually make a run deep into the playoffs? Like if Ty Gibbs wins and gets in, what’s it look like from there?First of all, whoever gets the final spot on Saturday might not actually end up being the No. 16 seed. If it’s a new winner, they’ll have five playoff points and be seeded ahead of the drivers who don’t have as many points . But anyway, that wasn’t the question.
Are there any props you see this week that you find interesting, consider all the different motivations and situations in this week’s race?A head-to-head matchup between Aric Almirola and Kyle Larson with relatively equal odds seems bonkers to me, but I guess anything can happen at Daytona. That said, the stats certainly favor Almirola because Larson has failed to finish the last four Daytona races and seven of the 10 superspeedway races in the Next Gen Era so far.
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