NASCAR
How the Playoffs Ended for Each Round of 16 Eliminated Driver
After three weeks, the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoff field has shrunk by four drivers. The Bristol Night Race was the end of the line for championship hopefuls on both ends of the experience spectrum. Here’s how their respective Playoff pushes came to a bittersweet end across the opening postseason round.
Ty Gibbs
Amidst his maiden Playoff outing, Ty Gibbs appeared on track to advance past the Round of 16. Things took a turn for the worse Saturday night at Bristol however. The No. 54 sped on pit road after Stage 1. The sophomore driver went from solidly running inside the top-10, to restarting at the tail of the pack. Despite his most valiant efforts, Gibbs never fully regained lost ground and ultimately finished 15th.
“Just unfortunate,” Gibbs said. “The speeding penalty is on me. Just we run under the lights so close, and I just got a little bit too much, I guess. My fault. Unfortunate. Proud of these guys and all the effort that they’ve given me and we’ll keep hammering down.”
Driver 54 was in a tight points battle against Daniel Suarez. Driver 99 just edged out the 54 by 11 points for the last transfer spot.
Martin Truex Jr
At the risk of sounding repetitive, Martin Truex Jr’s final Playoffs ended very similarly to Gibbs’ first postseason. Lap 333 at Bristol saw the No. 19 Toyota speeding on pit road by less than a tenth of a mile an hour while running second.
“It’s really tough when it’s .09 miles per hour that screws up your whole chance at a good season up,” Truex said. “I don’t know how that happened. I didn’t know I was even that close, honestly. It felt like I did the same thing as every other stop. Sometimes you’re just a foot, maybe I was a foot to the left.”
“It’s so tricky when you’re going from that curved section to the straight to get your lights. And it’s on me, obviously. It’s my mistake. They said we were going to have to run second or third there to have a chance, and I don’t know if we could have done it, but it would have been nice to see.”
“Just really sad for my guys. They work so hard. We had a really strong car tonight, and we got a lot of stage points. We did what we needed there. Just hate I screwed it up. I wish we could have at least seen if we could have done it. It would have been fun to have a fighting chance.”
The subsequent loss of all track position was too much for Truex to overcome. The 19 took the Bristol checkers in 24th-place, and missed the cut by 21 points. The 2017 Cup champion has been marred by seemingly nonstop bad luck and poor results over the last eight weeks. In his final seven races of full-time competition, MTJ will try and go out as a winner one final time.
Brad Keselowski
Entering the postseason as the eighth seed, Brad Keselowski did have an outside shot at a deep Playoff run. Following lackluster results across all three weeks, however, RFK Racing’s lone shot at the title goes up in smoke.
“Didn’t have the pace we needed out of our Castrol Ford,” Keselowski said. “We ran as hard as we could, but there wasn’t anything there. Executed what we had to execute with on pit road, and took the chances we needed to take. But just got to be faster.”
“We don’t want to just make the Playoffs, we want to go deep in the Playoffs, and obviously we didn’t do that this year, so we’ve got to keep working and find more pace.”
Keselowski’s Playoffs never truly got off the ground, following an uncharacteristically bad Atlanta showing. Even with a pair of Peach State top-10s a year ago, 19th in Playoff race one was a precursor to back-to-back 26th-place results. Keselowski misses the Round of 12 by 37 markers after leaving plenty of points on the table in this opening round.
Harrison Burton
Perhaps the biggest underdog in elimination Playoff history, Harrison Burton always faced an uphill battle. The Daytona summer winner began the 16-man chase as the 14th seed, but saw fleeting moments inside the top-12.
“To me, it was really fun to show up and have speed at all the racetracks we went to,” Burton said. “It was just a comedy of errors really with Atlanta the last corner, blowing a tire at Watkins Glen, and now this. Just kind of heartbreaking to end it that way where I felt like our team stepped up and we brought fast racecars, were good in all the practices. Just need to qualify better and need to find a way to finish the races where we belong.”
“Proud of our guys. Really just super proud to be a part of the Wood Brothers family and sad it’s over. But we’ve still got a lot to race for now that we’ve been bumped up in the points. We can go get these guys if they have some bad weekends and we have some good ones. A lot to fight for. I’ve just got to get my arms back underneath me before next weekend.”
Watkins Glen (24th) was ultimately Burton’s best outing in the opening three-race sprint, with the 21 facing major mechanical setbacks in Bristol. Losing over 70 laps due to a power steering failure sealed the Wood Brothers team’s fate, leaving them as last in points of the 16. On the plus side, Bristol did see Burton announce his new plans for 2025. For his remaining seven races as the man behind the famed No. 21 Ford, Burton hopes to make more lasting memories.
All of these drivers above still have equal chances at upsetting the remaining Playoff drivers with a win. We saw this exact scenario play out two weeks ago at Watkins Glen with Chris Buescher. As the postseason winds on however, the contenders left standing will only get hungrier in their quests for season-defining checkered flags. Two of the oldest and the two youngest Playoff drivers represent the first four out of the running. It will be fun to see if any of them can end their seasons on a high note.
Written by Peter Stratta
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Photo Credits to James Gilbert and Logan Riely/Getty Images
