LINCOLON, AL. – One of the most highly anticipated races on the NASCAR Cup Series Playoff slate is Sunday’s YellaWood 500 at the famed full-action track, Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott – always the Talladega fan favorite – is the defending race winner of this event on the 2.66-mile speedway. The 2020 series champion and Georgia native is still racing for his first victory of this season – an example of the multiple motivators sure to add to the excitement of Talladega.
Whether hoping to secure a win to advance to another Playoff round or simply to claim a first trophy of the season, there are plenty of intriguing scenarios when it comes to competing on NASCAR’s biggest track.
One driver that won’t be dependent on his Talladega showing, however, is Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron, who punched his ticket to the Round of 8 with a dramatic victory last week at Texas in a race that dramatically shuffled the Playoff standings.
With his series-best, career-best single season sixth victory, Byron is already on to the next round. The rest of the Playoff 12 are fairly close in points – from Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin, who holds a 37-point advantage on the cutoff line to Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson, who led almost 100 laps last weekend, but crashed in the closing minutes of the race and now holds only a tenuous two-point edge in that crucial eighth place position over 23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace for the final transfer spot.
RFK Racing driver Chris Buescher (+22 points on the cutline), JGR’s Christopher Bell (+20), Regular Season Champion JGR’s Martin Truex Jr. (+19), Trackhouse Racing’s Ross Chastain (+12), RFK’s Brad Keselowski (+8) and Larson (+2) are currently above the cutoff line.
Needing a good weekend, Wallace’s 23XI Racing teammate Tyler Reddick – who like Larson won a race in the Playoff’s opening round – is ranked 10th, three points off Larson. Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney is 11 points back and two-time series champion Kyle Busch is now 17 points back – both suffering DNFs at Texas.
Busch earned his second Talladega victory just this Spring and his Richard Childress Racing team is historically strong on the big tracks such as Talladega and Daytona.
Eleven former Talladega winners are in the race and six of them are Playoff drivers. The winningest active ‘Dega driver is Keselowski, whose six trophies are twice more than anyone else he’ll compete against Sunday. Reigning series champion, Team Penske’s Joey Logano has three wins. Elliott, Busch, Hamlin and Blaney each have a pair of trophies. Blaney’s wins in 2019-20 make him the most recent driver to earn back-to-back trophies.
Wallace, Trackhouse Racing’s Chastain, Stewart-Haas Racing teammates Kevin Harvick and Aric Almirola and JTG Daugherty Racing’s Ricky Stenhouse Jr. all have a Talladega win too.
“Talladega is just so unpredictable,” said Denny Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 JGR Toyota. “Everyone wanted to maximize their points at Texas last week because Talladega and the [Charlotte] ROVAL are very iffy. We feel pretty good about the position we’re in, but we still have to go into this week trying to get stage points and put ourselves in a good position to get another good finish before the ROVAL.”
An interesting fact about this Talladega race. No Talladega Playoff race winner has gone on to win the championship that same year. Larson won the title in 2021 with the worst ever Talladega finish (37th) for a Playoff driver.
There is no practice this week. Busch Light Pole Qualifying is set for Saturday (4:30 p.m. ET on the USA Network).
Source: Holly Cain / NASCAR Wire Service
