The NASCAR Xfinity Playoffs have arrived and there are so many storylines

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Go ahead and mark that day on your calendars because that is the night the NASCAR Xfinity Series will decide its championship final four at Martinsville Speedway in a race that is always one of the most dramatic shows in all of motorsports.

It certainly was last year.

But this weekend at Kansas Speedway starts the process that leads up to that night and the Xfinity Series playoffs has no shortage of storylines and big personalities that will converge over the next seven weeks to the finale at Phoenix Raceway.

Cole Custer’s pursuit of back-to-back
Justin Allgaier’s latest run
The Austin Hill Show
Parker Kligerman’s swan song
Shane Van Gisbergen’s margin of error

And that’s just a snapshot of the prominent narratives that begins in the heartland.

First, there is a top seeded contender in Shane Van Gisbergen, who doesn’t even know how the next seven weeks work.

And it’s fair, because to his point, it’s a convoluted system.

“Yeah, the playoff system is crazy,” Van Gisbergen said during media day on Wednesday. “I studied it last night trying to understand how it works. It’s the most overcomplicated racing series I have ever been a part of but I think it’s cool.

“It’s great for the fans and watching the Cup race at Bristol and seeing the pressure it but the drivers under, it’s wild.”

Let’s try to simplify it for SVG.

The rules for the playoffs largely remain the same as the regular season but in much shorter bursts. The first two rounds are three races each and a playoff eligible driver can advance to the next round with a win in the same way a regular season win advances a driver into the playoffs to begin with.

The first round is 12 drivers, then to eight and then a one-race highest finisher take all finale. The bottom four winless drivers in the standings without a win gets eliminated after each three-race round.

The seeding is determined by playoff points earned during the regular season and they continue to carry over from round to round after each reset albeit with the points also earned for wins and stage wins in that round as well.

To Van Gisbergen’s point, it’s a lot but it becomes intuitive after watching it unfold, certainly over the course of several seasons.

The favorites

Of the four finalists that made it to Phoenix last year, three of them remain in the series in 2024 are amongst the favorites to return to the Championship Race this year in defending champion Cole Custer, Justin Allgaier and Sam Mayer.

Allgaier is famously still chasing his first championship. Of his 16 seasons racing across NASCAR, 14 of them have come in the Xfinity Series, where he has amassed 25 wins and six final four appearances in the eight seasons the current championship format has been utilized.

Allgaier intends to make it seven of nine, but also to close out this time.

“That’s the hard part, do I regenerate something different after having success year after year and still not having a championship,” Allgaier said. “How do you kind of go into Phoenix and have a different school of thought or mindset?

“I think for us, this year has been kind of weird. From a finish standpoint, it’s been one of the worst years we’ve had. It just seems like if it could go wrong at the end of these races, it has gone wrong numerous times, and yet we’re still on the right side of it and we’re the points leader at the start of the playoffs.

“That’s weird, right, but it’s not just us because then I look at the rest of the field, we’ve all had an odd year where the races get shaken up at the end of these races.”

Allgaier has feasted by leading laps and earning the most points and wins across the season, specifically 14 stage wins in addition to two wins. That’s why he is the championship leader to start this Round of 12.

“While I would love to go to Phoenix and win the championship, I also know we need to get to Phoenix,” Allgaier said. “If I look at those two rounds that lead up to that, there are a lot of unknowns and a lot of question marks and things that can work against you too.”

Like Allgaier said, everyone has suffered adversity to go with their speed and Custer was no exception even in winning the regular season championship. He has four DNFs to go with his two wins so it’s just the story of the Xfinity Series when you run up front.

You either win or something happens.

“We just have to keep doing what we’re doing and try to stay clean,” said Custer. “I feel like we’ve had fast cars that can run up front every week but a lot of stupid stuff has happened. We turned that around this past week at Bristol, turned that around, and got a win so hopefully we can take that into the playoffs and advance through the rounds.

And on the other end of the spectrum is Sheldon Creed, who leads the series in top-5s but also has 13 career runner-up finishes without a win. He has five this year. It’s becoming an annoying talking point but it also mirrors Daniel Hemric’s long winless streak that came to a close in winning the 2020 championship race.

“Obviously, Daniel and others have proved that you can point your way in there and then win the championship,” Creed said. “I think Matt Crafton did it [in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series] in 2019. So it is possible. You have to be really consistent, really good to do that, which I do think we have the consistency and speed as we’ve shown the last two, three months. So I don’t want to bank on that, I guess. Obviously, I want to be consistent these next seven races, but I would really love to win in this first round, win stages so our points are up, and would love to go win Vegas or Homestead and have an off weekend for Martinsville [in the Round of 8].”

Chandler Smith has five straight top-10s but that follows four straight races outside of the top-10. Again, it’s not just Allgaier and Custer.

Every contender for the championship has suffered extreme ebbs and flows to their seasons.

We’ve showed up with speed – week-in and week-out,” Smith said. “Some weekends, we miss it, and still have speed (but) the balance isn’t quite right, but we still have speed, which is good. … We’ve been on a good streak these last few weeks, leading into the Playoffs.

“Every team goes through somewhat of a drought in their season – it doesn’t matter if it is Kyle Larson, Chandler Smith – everyone goes through somewhat of a drought, and we were going through ours about midway through the summer and it was just, when was it going to stop.

“It is one of those things that – what is it? What is causing it? Nobody can ever pinpoint, well that is what it is, business as usual, shit just happens. Luckily, slowly ours started turning around, we started picking up good finishes and started bringing better race cars, and what not. I feel like we are in a pretty solid spot heading into the Playoffs.”

And then there’s Austin Hill, perpetually up front over the past three years, but still seeking that elusive first final four appearance.

“The difference to me, is just not winning a race at the right time, because it’s not easy to do,” Hill said. “I don’t know. There have been plenty of ways I have missed out on making the final four and a lot of it could be my doing and some of it is out of my control.

“But I think one of the biggest areas for me might be stage points and not scoring enough of them, and maximizing them, whether that’s me on restarts or the car, that’s where we’re not separating ourselves enough.”

Has a pathway

Van Gisbergen actually shares the series wins lead with Hill, winning three of the four road course races this season, where Hill won three of the four superspeedway races.

So, despite SVG still being a NASCAR rookie, with minimal oval racing experience, the three-time Supercars champion enters his inaugural playoff run in the top half of the playoff standings.

This first round includes Kansas, a track he hasn’t seen before, Talladega where anything can happen, and a unique road course in the Charlotte Roval. There is a legitimate pathway for Van Gisbergen to make the elite eight.

“I’m normally pretty conservative at the start of a race and normally by the third stage, I’m pretty competitive,” Van Gisbergen said. “But some weeks, I just can’t get through the field or I get held up and in practice, I’m just conservative to avoid crashing because every lap is important and adds to my experience.

“So, I’ll probably keep that same approach at Kansas. At Darlington, when I came back the second time, I felt a huge difference and was running up front … so we have a few tracks where I’m going back to for a second time and should be that much better. It will be interesting to see how much we’ve improved.”

AJ Allmendinger also has a similar path to advancement, not because he isn’t capable of winning on ovals, because he is, but because the Roval still represents his best chance to win as well.

Riley Herbst did not make the playoffs again, but was arguably the best driver during those races, and finished the season with five consecutive top-5s. The schedule is mostly unchanged and that represents the path forward for the Stewart-Haas 98 team.

“If we were in the playoffs (last year) that would have put us into Phoenix in the final four, so we know we can do it when we execute,” Herbst said. “We know we have fast enough cars to go do it. We have the speed, so our expectations were high starting in January and I felt like we were matching some of it.

“Obviously, the win total wasn’t where we want it to be right now, and obviously there was a letdown these last four weeks or so through the late part of summer. We just weren’t executing. We weren’t on our game, albeit myself, the car, wrecks. It doesn’t matter, but we just weren’t finishing where we were supposed to be.

“We were knocking on the door. I think we were fourth in the points going into the summer break and now we’re coming into the playoffs eighth, so that was kind of frustrating for all of us to wrap our heads around, but I kind of took it as a good thing, as kind of a wake-up call. We kind of took some things for granted and now we know the work we have to do to get back to where we were supposed to be and it starts this week at Kansas.”

Mayer literally made the championship race last year and knows very well how to navigate this gauntlet.

No real underdogs

That this story hasn’t yet reference Parker Kligerman, Sammy Smith and Jesse Love doesn’t mean they have any less of a pathway.

Compelling cases can be made for each of them to make the championship race.

It would especially be compelling for Kligerman to make a deep run in what is his final season as a full-time race car driver. But if any of these teams counts as a true underdog, it certainly would be Big Machine Racing in its third season of existence and without the cache of the legacy organizations.

“I think it’s natural to see Big Machine Racing, and then up against Joe Gibbs and JR Motorsports and Stewart-Haas and that sort of thing, and to think, OK, that’s a different name than I’ve seen here,” Kligerman said. “But I think we have all the capability to go out there and make a run in these playoffs. And I think internally, we have the confidence, kind of like we alluded to this first round. To me, there’s no reason that if we just perform at the level we’ve been performing, that we shouldn’t be able to advance. And I think right now, we’re still in the top five of average finish through the whole season of Xfinity teams. So we’ve really performed a high level. And so I think putting aside being a young team and that sort of thing, we have all the expectations to make the Championship 4.”

Kligerman is streaking though with five top-10s since Independence Day Weekend. And these are all tracks that the No. 48 team has shown speed or the potential for speed.

“I think that these three tracks are great for us, so there’s I think a high level of confidence that, as long as we execute and just do what we’ve done, we should be in a pretty good position,” Kligerman said. “I know we’re starting 12 points down, but I really think that’s such a tight situation. I mean, just look at Daytona. We had a 38-point or 40-point swing on the (elimination) line that day. And you look at Allgaier and what happened to him at Bristol this past weekend. I think it’s a huge opportunity.

“We don’t have to do anything spectacular. But I do believe Talladega is one that we circle as, OK, let’s go win that. And then, obviously, the Roval is taken care of then.”

Smith and Love race for JR Motorsports and Richard Childress Racing respectively, driving cars that were in the Round of 8 last year, so there is certainly an expectation for both to follow suit. Smith was in the Round of 8 last year with Gibbs but it’s been a grind.

“The goal is to compete for a championship at Phoenix but we have some work ahead of us,” Smith said. “We don’t have any playoff points and are at the bottom of the bracket, but I’ve grown as a driver this year moving to JRM.

“It’s been challenging and it’s been different … It hasn’t been the season we wanted. We barely made the playoffs and that’s not where we expected and need to be. We’ve shown moments of speed and success.”

Love made the jump to Xfinity from ARCA and has never even participated in a playoff before and says he’s going to lean on Kyle Busch, who has become a mentor, for how to best navigate this format.

“I have a pretty good understanding of it but I want to lean on my teammates at RCR, especially Kyle, and I need to call him soon just so he can give me some nuggets,” Love said. “But really, our speed all summer is what gives me confidence.

“Dover, we could have won that race, if not for that flat tire. We had a tough two month stretch where I couldn’t put together finishes but still had really good speed.

“We put the Lego pieces back together the past few weeks and I’ve learned a lot about putting whole races together. So this first round, my thought process is to not overdo it, wreck, finish all the laps and just take what the car will give me. The first round should be smooth if I do that.

“If I can just avoid bad days, maybe even win one of those first round races to get some bonus points for the Round of 8, the harder round, that would be ideal. These are good tracks for me and I might need to make something happen, depending on how the points shake out.”