NASCAR Playoffs are here: Drivers scout the opposition, why Bell is the sleeper, Larson staying off dirt, more

Editor’s note: The NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs begin Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Watch at 3 p.m. ET on USA Network or NBC Sports App, and listen on PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. | Details on Sunday’s race

Understanding one of the primary dynamics underpinning the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs is as simple as three, four, five.

Three: The number of cars that Team Penske has qualified for the playoffs (its full roster for the sixth time in seven years since expanding from a two-driver lineup).

Four: The number of cars that Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing each have in the playoffs (only the second time since JGR‘s 2015 expansion that all eight cars are title eligible).

Five: The number of teams with one car in the playoffs.

So the playoffs, which begin Sunday in the Round of 16 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, can be broken down as 11 cars from three powerhouses (Penske, Hendrick, Gibbs) with perfect playoff attendance, and the rest of the 16-car field represented by organizations that each enter with one hope at the title.

There‘s strength (and better odds) in numbers, right?

“I don‘t see it‘s a negative anywhere,” said Chase Elliott, who is back in the playoffs after missing 2023 with teammate Alex Bowman. “It‘s all positive on the way we work on a weekly basis. I‘d rather it be that way.”

Said defending series champion Ryan Blaney: “I don‘t think there‘s a negative to it. It makes everybody at the race shop proud. To have everybody in the playoffs, that‘s the goal at the beginning of the year. There‘s a lot of pride in that. Just a positive to all work together for a common goal.”

But there‘s another numbers game in play here.

Penske teammate Joey Logano said a full boat can be less than harmonious because even the best teams in NASCAR have finite resources.

“It presents some hard questions that you have to answer,” Logano said. “When you start putting them together, sometimes there are just better cars than others. Yeah, we all have the same parts, and everything is really close, but there are some better than others, and when you make the decisions on who gets what, it‘s a little harder when you have more cars in the playoffs than when you have one. It‘s easier to say all the effort goes in this car that is our one chance to win the championship.

“Now it‘s spread out. So it‘s just different. But you‘ve got to have it that way to have more opportunities to win the championship.”

Of the five teams with a lone entry, there is one that stands out from Wood Brothers Racing, Trackhouse Racing, Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing and 23XI Racing.

Stewart-Haas Racing will have the energy of four cars and 300-plus people deployed in one direction that Chase Briscoe believes will benefit his team.

“There‘s probably a disadvantage if you‘re just a one-car team, but I do think there‘s a big advantage to being a four-car team and having only one car in,” Briscoe said. “Those other four-car teams are trying to focus on all four of their cars bringing the best to the race track every single week.

“Even on the race track, they‘re all going to be fighting amongst each other and not cut each other a break. I‘ve got three teammates that essentially are going to do everything they can to help me on the race track. They can race the other guys a little harder than they‘d race me. Even preparing the race cars, we can take the personnel and best of the best from each car and just apply it to our car. I definitely think there‘s an advantage to the position we‘re in.”

Briscoe also can be unworried about battling his teammates to advance as the field dwindles, which Hendrick, Penske and Gibbs drivers all cited as inherently causing tension as soon as the playoff opener ends.

“I don‘t think there‘s any negatives starting with the rope being pulled in the same direction, but it‘s going to change,” William Byron said. “Hopefully we all do, but not all of us are going to make it to the final round. The goals and objectives change as the rounds go on.”

DRIVERS’ SCOUTING REPORT

Soliciting scouting reports on the championship favorites and playing word association with their top rivals can be revelatory. What some stars were saying in sizing up their chief competition during Playoff Media Day:

TEAM PENSKE
After Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney won the past two championships despite relatively lackluster regular seasons, Penske‘s penchant for perfectly peaking drew a lot of comments, as did its starched shirt professionalism and attention to detail.

Martin Truex Jr.: “Sneaky. They‘re sneaky. Nobody had them picked last year for the championship or in 2022. They just get hot at the right time. They‘re really strong in the playoffs. There‘s no question they find a way to get to another gear. They‘ve done it two years in a row. Everybody is looking at it and studied it and tried to figure out how we can do that, too. The last two years are all we have for the Next Gen car, and that‘s the benchmark.”

Alex Bowman: “Buttoned up. Proper. Super polished on everything. It‘s how everybody there carries themselves and that image they portray.”

Kyle Larson: “They just do a really good job of strategy and restarts and just executing. Paul Wolfe especially is great at that.”

William Byron: “They‘ve hedged their bets on superspeedways and various tracks. They have unique tracks where they‘re really good like Phoenix. The drivers are very diverse. Joey‘s on the aggressive side. Austin is really good at Atlanta and Talladega, and Ryan is really good at Martinsville and Phoenix.”

Chase Briscoe: “What makes Penske so scary is how aggressive they are. The drivers are aggressive, the pit calls, everything they do is so aggressive all the time. They always can take a 15th-place car and finish fifth with it. Penske is dangerous because they always find a way to maximize their day and have the fastest car. Joey will run 15th to 18th all day and somehow get to the front.”

Chase Elliott: “Not only the drivers, but their personnel, I‘ve always had a lot of admiration for a number of their guys over the years as I‘ve had the chance to battle against them. It‘s always very buttoned up. You don‘t see them making a fool of themselves. They‘re typically very professional about what they do and take it seriously.”

Brad Keselowski: “The favorite. They have the best driver lineup of the groups. They consistently get better results than the cars on the race track.”

RELATED: Blaney: We want to scare every team

HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS
It‘s simple, really: No team has had four cars longer than Hendrick (which is in its 21st season), and that stability has laid a consistent foundation for the most successful team in NASCAR history.

Denny Hamlin: “They’ve got the resources to get the best people and drivers, and that‘s going to be hard to beat. And it’s why they’ve had such a long, sustained, successful career in NASCAR is they’re able to have the resources to make sure you win with people.”

Keselowski: “They have a lot of youthful talent over there that will be there for a long time.”

Joey Logano: “They‘ve been tough and strong for years. A lot of talent building race cars and behind the wheel. They‘re just a powerhouse team.”

Christopher Bell: “Just consistency. It doesn‘t matter where they go, they‘re going to be in the hunt all the time. It could be two drivers or four, but, consistently week in and out, they‘re always there.

Briscoe: “Naturally gifted, and Kyle (Larson) is at the top of that list. But Chase, William and Alex are all very good race car drivers as well as we‘ve seen with Elliott and Bowman in sprint cars and Byron in Late Models.”

Truex: “They‘re just consistently the standard you have to chase that you‘re always looking at what they have going on.”

RELATED: Ranking title contenders by tiers

JOE GIBBS RACING
The blend of experience (Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. have a combined 29 playoff appearances) and elite talent on the rise (Christopher Bell and Ty Gibbs) was cited as the biggest strength of a team that has gone the longest of the three since its last title (Kyle Busch in 2019).

Larson: “Their driver talent is diverse, not just in age range but in the background of racing. Denny and Martin grew up pavement racing, Christopher Bell is young with a similar (dirt) background to myself. Ty is the new generation-style driver with a quick route to the Cup Series and a little bit of dirt track racing early on and some iRacing. It‘s a diverse group.”

Byron: “JGR builds some of the best cars and does a really good job preparing them. They‘re really competitive at tracks that take handling like Vegas and Kansas with long-run speed and keeping the tires on the car. Their weaknesses are at the superspeedways because they don‘t put as much emphasis there, but they‘ll be good in the Round of 8 tracks and a threat at Phoenix with how well Bell ran there in March.”

Blaney: “It‘s a great lineup with a wide variety of experience, too. It‘s kind of like our group with Joey the veteran guy like Martin and Denny, I‘m like Christopher, and Austin is like Ty.”

EXTOLLING BELL’S VIRTUES

Maybe it‘s hard to label a driver who has made the Championship 4 the past two seasons as being overlooked, but that‘s what multiple peers think about Christopher Bell.

The soft-spoken 29-year-old with the cherubic visage is never one to pound his chest (and would look highly uncharacteristic if he tried), but peers are happy to lobby for his greatness. A sampling of three Cup champions in the CBell Appreciation Club starting with Larson — who has known Bell the longest having raced dirt together for years:

RELATED: Watch Bell, more on Netflix’s ‘Full Speed’

Larson: “Bell is extremely good, and he‘s just so quiet that people don‘t recognize how good he is. It‘s hard to stand out in NASCAR, but in dirt, he goes so fast without looking like he‘s going fast. He‘s so smooth. He never makes mistakes. He just looks so calm in the car. When I watch myself, I look like I‘m hauling ass, but I‘m going the same speed as him, and I‘m erratic. I feel like he‘s just in control all the time. A really smart race car driver.”

Elliott: “Extremely underrated and probably isn‘t appreciated or talked about enough for performing at a high level. He does an exceptional job. One of the smoothest guys in the field and has a nice understanding of where his tire limitations are and is able to drive within the means of what the car is offering.”

Blaney: “Christopher is honestly very underrated. I think he‘s finally starting to get some more recognition like ‘Hey, this guy is really good.‘ He‘s incredibly smooth. You never see him out of control. That‘s pretty big on how he manages the race, his car, his driving style. He does a really good job thinking his way through races. They don‘t always start off great, but they always get better.”

FINAL RIDE FOR TRUEX JR.

How does Martin Truex Jr. want to be remembered after the last playoffs of his career? The answer is as effortless as his driving style: “Respect that I was really good at what I do. Fast, smart, clean, very fair to race with and a tough competitor.”

But reflecting on 19 seasons is a little more complicated for the oldest full-time driver in the Cup Series (which will become Denny Hamlin next year).

Truex, who turned 44 in June, has witnessed not only generational changes (“it‘s crazy with Ty Gibbs, Christopher Bell, Ryan Blaney, how young they are and what they‘ve accomplished already”) but also had a front-row seat for seismic shifts in NASCAR team hierarchies.

He witnessed the demise of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and the trigger of Michael Waltrip Racing‘s eventual shuttering. He then endured the worst season of his career (a 24th-place points finish in 2014 at Furniture Row Racing) before a decade-long renaissance as a perennial title contender (including the move to Gibbs after Furniture Row Racing‘s shutdown).

So as Truex reflects on nearly 700 starts in Cup, he is grateful.

“There were times in my career I thought it was coming to an end pretty soon,” he said. “So I definitely lasted longer than I thought, especially back then. I feel very fortunate to have accomplished what I have. I‘m very lucky to go out on my own terms when I think back to the days when I was struggling and wondering where is this all going and what am I going to do.”

But he concedes the second-guessing remains about winning one championship in five title race appearances (so far).

“You always look back at what you wish you did better,” he said. “The three second-place championship finishes still hurt. I feel like I probably should have three championships, not one. I‘d say four. I think the one we got actually we weren‘t the fastest car that race and kind of stole that one (in 2017).

“Kyle (Busch) and I switched out from 2017 to 2019. We had the best car in ‘19 and he won, and he had the best car in ‘17 and we won. It‘s hard to complain about the amount of wins we had. What hurts is the amount we were so close after dominating races and then get the late caution or not a good enough pit stop. That happened how many times.”

The heartbreaks were so frequent, Truex doesn‘t even rank losing the Daytona 500 by 0.010 seconds as among the worst. “That was a fair loss because there wasn‘t a caution coming out or something going haywire, we got beat fair and square that time,” he said. “There‘s just a lot of other almosts.

“But if you would have told me 15 years ago that I‘d win 34 races and a championship, I‘d be like, that sounds pretty damn good to me.”

SHADES OF STEWART

Along with Truex‘s goodbye, the curtain also will drop on Stewart-Haas Racing as the playoffs end, and Briscoe said the team is using one of its biggest historical markers as the rallying cry in the last hurrah.

In 2011, Tony Stewart won five of the last 10 races in claiming a championship despite admittedly certifying himself as a non-factor after a winless regular season for SHR. Something clicked in his cars and confidence, and Briscoe believes the same is happening again with Stewart-Haas team members motivated in multiple ways (sentimental, pride, source of income) by his emphatically stunning Southern 500 victory.

“For us to make the playoffs the way we did it and to have the opportunity in our final season to be a one-in-16 chance for the championship is pretty special,” Briscoe said. “That makes us scary, too, for that reason. We are willing to do whatever it takes. We have nothing to lose. All of us are hungry and trying to prove our worth. A lot of guys are still trying to find jobs. If they can say they‘re a champion of the sport, it makes it way easier.

“I‘ve never seen our building as confident and as electric as it is right now. I think our race team specifically, we thought we could win but didn‘t know at the end of the day. Now we know we can win, and not just any race. The Southern 500 is arguably the hardest race in the entire schedule to win. If we can win that race, we feel we can win any race. We also know if we get to Phoenix, we‘re really, really good there. We all think we can win the championship.”

THE NO. 48 SEAT

Though Alex Bowman has vetted whether his job status is predicated on advancing through the playoffs (it‘s not, according to the high-level calls he made), he also has made a point of repeatedly holding himself, crew chief Blake Harris and the rest of the No. 48 accountable for getting results in the playoffs.

Since following his Chicago victory (ending an 80-race winless drought) with a third at Pocono, Bowman has finished outside the top 15 in five consecutive races. But he points to a conversation with Harris before the March 17 race at Bristol as the north star for a turnaround.

“Blake came to my window and said, ‘You and I are the only two who can fix it,‘ ” said Bowman, who finished fourth at Bristol (ending a three-race streak outside the top 15). “We were struggling early in the year, and that was a turning point for our season. Now going into playoffs, we need to be better than we‘ve been by a good chunk. We‘ve got a lot we need to do better as a race team consistently. We‘re all super bought into trying to make that happen. I feel it‘s up to him and me to lead the way.”

NO DIRT FOR YOU … FOR NOW

Kyle Larson will be a “full pavement NASCAR guy” for the playoffs, but it‘s a scheduling decision that drove his call to skip dirt races through September and October. With the team that normally fields sprint cars for Larson wrapping up a West Coast run, there were only a few dirt races that logistically would have worked for Larson to moonlight over the next 10 weeks anyway.

“I didn‘t feel like I need for (the team) to come all the way back to the East Coast to run, so I said why don‘t I just not race,” Larson said.

That won‘t keep him from poring over his 2025 calendar for the foreseeable future. Though his management and PR team can add appearances and commitments to his calendar, “when it comes to racing, that‘s all me,” Larson said. “So like the NASCAR schedule just came out, which is great, but the sprint car schedules haven‘t come out yet, so I haven‘t dug in a whole lot but hopefully the next month or so, I can fully dive in. I have a nice Excel sheet with all the different races I can run. I enjoy it. In the offseason, I definitely look at my Excel sheet calendar multiple times a day.”

Nate Ryan has written about NASCAR since 1996 while working at the San Bernardino Sun, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA TODAY and for the past 10 years at NBC Sports Digital. He is the host of the NASCAR on NBC Podcast and also has covered various other motorsports, including the IndyCar and IMSA series.