The Top 5: Breaking down the Kansas playoff race

Five thoughts after Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series playoff race at Kansas Speedway…

1. Expert level

We’re going to talk about the rules package again, I promise. But before we dive into the finish of Sunday’s race, it’s important to recognize what Joey Logano accomplished at Kansas Speedway.

Yes, he had track position. Logano’s team gifted him the lead coming out of the pits during the final caution. And ultimately, he used that as the advantage he needed to win the race and lock himself into the championship at Phoenix.

But it would be unfair to simply dismiss Logano’s victory on Sunday as a product of track position and clean air alone. Was it hard to pass? No doubt. But Logano pulled off an incredibly difficult feat only a handful of drivers in the series could: Keep this season’s fastest car behind him, lap after lap, for more than 40 straight circuits in crunch time of a playoff race.

How many drivers in his position do you think could do the same thing? Quick, think of them in your head and count with your fingers. My guess is maybe a half-dozen. So whatever you think of the rules package or the situation drivers are placed in with aero these days, Logano’s feat on Sunday was an elite one.

In that sense, he deserves to be in the final four. He hasn’t consistently been one of the strongest four cars this season and wasn’t again on Sunday. But these are the rules and this is the system everyone accepts going into the playoffs. Logano and his team put themselves in the right position and he executed a flawless last 40 laps, even if he was aided by dirty air behind him.

Logano could have choked. Harvick could have outfoxed him. Or Logano could have simply made one slight bobble in lapped traffic and opened the door for a future Hall of Famer to win for the 10th time this season.

But none of that happened. Logano put on a textbook display of taking someone else’s air away and, like it or not, that’s how these races are often won in 2020. Kansas was just an extreme example.

“You stay on the mirror. When he goes, you go,” Logano said of how he drove. “Try to throw some dirty air up there, make sure he doesn’t get to break the plane, gets to the right or left of you, be able to side draft you from there. That’s the biggest thing, trying to hold that position.”

Track position helped, but it certainly wasn’t automatic. Rules package aside, Logano deserves proper credit for getting it done.

2. Blowing bubbles

Back in 2011, Brad Keselowski wanted to show me what bump-drafting felt like. This was the height of the tandem racing era on superspeedways, and Keselowski happened to have access to a pair of real Cup cars as part of a military veteran ridealong program for his Checkered Flag Foundation.

So I strapped into a car with Keselowski and we followed the other car, driven by Parker Kligerman, out onto the track at Talladega Superspeedway.

After we got up to speed, Keselowski demonstrated how no matter what he did, our car could not catch Kligerman’s. We were flying down the backstretch at Talladega and had been catching Kligerman’s car — but once we got within a few feet, Keselowski could get no closer. In order to do the bump-drafting demonstration, Kligerman had to drag the brake to allow Keselowski to break through the air bubble and lock bumpers.

Obviously, this was at a superspeedway with a different package than Cup cars run on intermediate tracks in 2020. But I’ve never forgotten the concept of that invisible wall of air. Both drivers had their foot to the floor with engines at full song and the trailing car could not break through the air pocket. You could make progress until you couldn’t, and then no amount of talent could overcome the physics of the situation.

Watching the end of Sunday’s Kansas race brought back those memories yet again. No matter what Harvick did — trying to go high, low and everything in between — he wasn’t able to burst through the bubble between himself and Logano. If anything, that bubble only pushed Logano further out in front of him. Maddening.

“Joey did just a good job of putting his car right in front of ours,” Harvick said. “With this package, every time you put your car in front of the car behind you, it takes the nose away. We just had a little bit of trouble trying to get the nose to turn when he would take our lane.”

That said … why all the outcry on Twitter? Fans were livid after the finish and are currently taking their anger out in the “Was it a good race?” poll, which is running around 40%.

Was Kansas a good race?

— Jeff Gluck (@jeff_gluck) October 19, 2020

I didn’t share in the outrage because this is nothing new. The current rules package has existed for almost two full seasons now, and while it’s put on some entertaining shows thanks in large part to the giant packs on restarts, the problem has remained the same since the start.

Here are two paragraphs I wrote from the first major test of this rules package, in January 2019 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway:

—Could the leader get passed? Through the five draft sessions in Vegas, it looked quite difficult to achieve. If a driver had even a half-decent car, it appeared clean air would leave them untouchable as the second- and third-place cars scrambled to try and get by. The action in the field was good, but for the lead? Not so much.

—By keeping the cars from escaping one another, the demand on the drivers will change. This won’t be about the bravery of driving into the corner deeper than another competitor, but rather about understanding the draft and making moves to find pockets of clean air — and thus gain position.

NASCAR Cup Series racing has indeed changed, but not this year. That’s why Sunday’s fan reaction to the race felt very 2019. It was as if many remaining holdouts on judging the package suddenly decided that was the last straw.

But I don’t get why that happened now, at the end of almost two years of this package. Was it that Sunday was the most egregious example yet of how this package works? Was it that Logano was the winner and not a more well-liked driver? Maybe it’s that longtime race fans saw evidence of how a car they knew was faster could not pass no matter what the trailing driver did, and that felt wrong.

Well, if you don’t love the package, welcome to the club. But personally, I gave up on fighting the concept a long time ago. Some battles are worth the energy and some aren’t. To me, this one is pointless because The Package isn’t going anywhere.

This was always supposed to be a temporary bridge to the Next Gen car, and now we’re all stuck with it for an extra year thanks to the postponement of the new model. So to think NASCAR and the teams would suddenly change course? I can’t see it happening.

For one thing, the rules have already been given to the teams for next season and no one wants to spend money to develop something else. Second, it’s important to remember NASCAR officials like this package and have praised it repeatedly, including recently. They have a lot invested in its success.

So that’s it. If fans want to be upset about it, of course that’s their right. But within the industry, I’d say most people have already grudgingly accepted the reality — including the drivers. That’s why you don’t hear as much grousing about it anymore; drivers said their piece in 2019, their concerns were ignored and they were left with two options: retire or race it.

“For me, it’s just a scenario that you just become used to,” Harvick said. “That’s part of what we race. I definitely don’t make the rules. Just try to do the best that we can each week with whatever situation that we have and go from there.”

Said Alex Bowman: “I’m just happy I have a job and get to drive race cars for a living. … Most of us would go race lawn mowers if NASCAR said they were switching to lawn mowers next week.”

Of course, Bowman acknowledged it was frustrating to see the win come down to blocking for an entire run. It’s not that Bowman wished it was easier to pass, he said; rather, he wished it was “less easy to block.”

And that’s an absolutely valid concern. I’m sure at this point, many fans would agree. But from this view, there’s no way it’s going to change. That’s why, in the framework of what we can expect from Cup racing in 2020, Sunday’s finish was a good one.

3. Altered picture

Logano’s win truly changes a lot with how we view the playoff picture and the final four. What had been a mostly straightforward playoffs with the fastest cars making it through each round is suddenly a lot less predictable.

With Logano currently below the points cut line but with an automatic win, it shifts the standings by 10 points (the difference between himself and Chase Elliott, who is fourth in points but now outside of the bubble).

If we are to assume Harvick and Denny Hamlin are still in good shape to make the championship race on points (which is a big assumption, given Hamlin’s cushion is down to 20 points), that only leaves one spot for someone else. And with two races left, one of them would be out of the playoffs should they fail to win while another playoff driver does.

It’s not that far-fetched, honestly. Let’s say Brad Keselowski wins Texas and Elliott wins Martinsville. Is Hamlin then going home after a career year? Or is Harvick, if he stumbles in one of the next two weeks? It’s crazy to think about.

Then there’s how Logano’s win affects the points bubble. Instead of being up 18 points, Keselowski only has an eight-point cushion over Elliott for the last spot. Elliott is out instead of in. And Alex Bowman finished third at Kansas, was in the top six for both stages but actually lost a point to the cutoff line thanks to Logano.

How about Martin Truex Jr.? He didn’t have the playoff points to put himself in a good spot entering Round 3, but his strength this season on intermediate tracks and number of top-five finishes (tied for third in the series) led us to believe he’d make the final four on points anyway.

But after finishing ninth, Truex is considerably out of it (23 points back) and might have to win in the next two weeks to advance. Had Logano not won, Truex’s position might not have looked as bad (-13 instead of -23).

The bottom line here: If you’re Harvick or Hamlin, you’d better hope to win at Texas and root for the other person to do so if you can’t. Otherwise, one of them is going to be at serious risk entering the cutoff at Martinsville.

4. Uh oh

In addition to tightening up the points picture, Logano being eligible for the championship at Phoenix might be one of the worst possible outcomes for the drivers who have spent the season considered as title contenders.

Logano is the most recent Phoenix winner — in fact, that was his last victory until Sunday — and the Team Penske cars have been strong on 750 hp tracks like Phoenix all season.

According to David Smith’s MotorsportsAnalytics.net, Logano has the fifth-fastest car in the overall Central Speed Rankings this season. But when you look at just 750 hp tracks, Logano has the second-fastest car in the series behind Elliott (Harvick is fourth; Hamlin is seventh).

There’s more gulp-worthy evidence for the competition, too. At New Hampshire, the closest comparison to Phoenix, Penske’s Keselowski won and Logano finished fourth. Keselowski also won at Bristol and Richmond, which are 750 package tracks; Logano was famously about to win the first Bristol race until getting taken out by Elliott and later finished third at Richmond.

Logano is an ultra-aggressive, hard-nosed driver who is guaranteed to have a fast car at Phoenix and whose team now has two weeks to prepare for the title race. Does that sound like a car anyone wants to go against in the championship race? I’d say not.

5. Anyone got a copy?

Many of us were wondering why Elliott wasn’t black-flagged on Sunday when he had radio issues in which he couldn’t hear his team — and thus his spotter. That’s a safety situation (there’s a reason spotters are required to be on the roof even for practice sessions) and is normally something NASCAR would make a team correct during the race.

The most recent occurrence of this happened less than a month ago, when NASCAR had Jesse Iwuji fix his radio during the Truck Series race at Las Vegas.

So what was the deal at Kansas? Well, the answer appears to be NASCAR missed the sequence in question. On SiriusXM radio’s “The Morning Drive” program Monday, NASCAR’s Scott Miller told hosts Nate Ryan and Alan Cavanna officials knew Elliott had some sort of problems but weren’t aware of the extent until after the race.

“Maybe we missed that one and maybe we should have had him in there,” Miller told SiriusXM, later adding: “When the driver doesn’t respond to what the spotter is asking him to do, we always make them come down and fix it.”

How could NASCAR have whiffed on the Elliott call when it was well-documented on TV and so over-discussed on Twitter that former crew chief Cole Pearn sarcastically tweeted about it?

Before you scream NASCAR was playing favorites!, I actually can see how this scenario could happen.

First of all, the TV broadcast audio doesn’t play in NASCAR race control. Those officials are listening to various NASCAR radio channels as well as scanning teams while looking out at the track to watch for cautions and other situations. NASCAR doesn’t sit and watch the broadcast like we do at home.

Just from my own experience in NASCAR press boxes, there are always a few times a year when I miss a story that gets picked up on TV. I’m sure it’s the same for those of you who have been to the racetrack and are sitting in the stands with your scanner, but don’t realize something is happening with a car you’re not following.

A driver will say he isn’t feeling well or might have a loose wheel and TV seizes upon the story. But if you’re listening to something else and not looking at the screen, you might have no idea of something that seems obvious to millions of others. It’s embarrassing, but it happens.

So even with all the people in the NASCAR control tower, it’s entirely plausible they missed it. From Miller’s comments, NASCAR was obviously aware Elliott had some sort of problem. But when they scanned the No. 9 team’s channel, they could hear Elliott and his team communicating. The radio was particularly bad for about 15-20 laps, but NASCAR apparently didn’t hear that part and, with the information available, officials figured Elliott could continue.

Was it the right call? No, not if NASCAR had heard the 15 laps in question. That would have been a black flag, and that’s what Miller said Monday.

But not everything is a conspiracy, and in this case I have to give NASCAR the benefit of the doubt. Officials weren’t playing favorites with the golden boy; they just missed it.

(Photo: Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)