After an exciting finish that resulted in no changes to advancement at the Roval, we can now look ahead to the penultimate round of the playoffs.
The top of the field is close – Blaney, Larson, and Hamlin are all currently likely to advance though a single bad finish or wins from those outside of this group would significantly reduce their probability of advancing; with Talladega in the round, I wouldn’t count that out. The middle of the field gets more interesting – Bell, Elliott, and Byron are all bunched up, with slightly less than a coin-flip odds of advancing. Briscoe, and Logano round out the field with a lower than 20% chance of advancing; they’ll be looking for a win to make it through. Let’s look at the projected results for Vegas to see where opportunities lie.
The entire playoff field has a better than random (1/36 or 2.7%) chance of winning. Hamlin and Larson lead with over 10%, followed by Bell, Blaney, and Byron clustered around 7%, Briscoe and Logano trail the field with around 3.75% chances. Vegas is using the same tires as Kansas; and Goodyear expects them to again generate higher tire wear than Vegas has seen in the past. With the expected increase in tire wear the fuel saving strategy that won Logano the race last year is unlikely to be successful. Depending on how severe the tire wear is – expect the playoff teams to optimize for stage points and get aggressive on strategy in the 3rd stage (3 stops in the 3rd stage are plausible) to go for the win.
Finally, let’s look at the expected distributions of points at Martinsville. A few things to know – since 2020 races in the 3rd round have been won by playoff drivers 80% of the time – and have been won by drivers above the cut-line 60% of the time – it’s highly likely that multiple drivers will lock themselves in on points – and is about a coinflip that one of those drivers will be below the cutline.
The distributions here overlap pretty strongly; the cutline should be pretty close – and will likely be very tight if a driver below the cutline wins the race – I expect 1-2 spots in the championship four to be determined by who gets caught up in the a wreck at Talladega, and then by who is able to pull out a clutch performance at Martinsville – don’t be surprised if the conversation after martinsville again centers on race manipulation; hopefully NASCAR’s warnings after the Roval will dissuade teams, and manufacutrers from wading back into that territory.
Leave a Reply