MOTORSPORTS MONDAY: Atlanta Shakes Up Playoff Standings; Unchartered Waters
By: Pete Pistone
The Cup Series Playoffs are off to a rousing start… Is the No. 1 Seed in trouble?... What was the deal with Denny Hamlin? Where does the Charter System go from here? Plus more takeaways from a busy weekend of racing.
HOT LANTA
There have been six Cup races at the reconfigured Atlanta Motor Speedway and none have been boring. Despite consternation from drivers and some inside the industry about changing the 1.5-mile track into more of a superspeedway than a traditional intermediate layout, the “new” Atlanta has delivered on what parent company SMI – and NASCAR – had hoped for.
Sunday’s Quaker State 400 was much more a hybrid of a superspeedway/intermediate track. The surface has already worn out in little more than three years and the by product is cars still packed together but not to the degree of Daytona and Talladega. There were three and sometimes four wide racing that made for a competitive and entertaining afternoon.
“There was a lot of adversity that we had to fight through, and that was a freaking blast,” said Christopher Bell after he started 28th and finished fourth. “It was so much fun. The whole race was super intense, and everybody did a good job not to wreck more.”
Opening the Playoffs at Atlanta did raise some eyebrows when this year’s schedule came out, but Sunday’s race proved it was a good decision. Atlanta moves out of the post-season next year hosting both the second race of the year and a mid-summer Saturday night race but with NASCAR’s recent penchant for shuffling around the schedule, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing a return to the Playoffs for AMS.
LARSON NOT NO. 1 ANY LONGER
There have been six Cup Series races on the new Atlanta hybrid superspeedway reconfiguration. Kyle Larson has five DNFs.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver’s latest Atlanta disaster came early in Sunday’s race when his Chevrolet veered wildly before making a significant impact with the wall in a violent crash. Fortunately, Larson was not physically injured in the accident. His Playoff hopes weren’t so lucky.
The driver who lost the regular season championship by a single point to Tyler Reddick left the ATL much closer to the Playoff cutline. Larson’s 37th place finish was another bad result over the last several years for the No. 1 seed in the Playoff opener that has most recently seen that driver finish 18th (2023) and 36th (2022).
Certainly, it would be foolish to count a driver and team the caliber of Larson and the No. 5 entry out of the picture at such an early juncture of the post-season, but the situation is at the least precarious.
Larson has five DNFS this season after a 2023 that saw eight, second most in the series. As odd is it might sound for a driver that led the most laps in the series at 1,089, Larson has to be at least running at the finish in Watkins Glen and Bristol to make it out of the opening round.
HAMLIN HEAD SCRATCHER
It wasn’t the best weekend for Denny Hamlin and that’s probably an understatement. A plug wire issue plagued Hamlin in qualifying and he started Sunday’s race shotgun on the field.
Given the nature of Hamlin’s talent and car plus the drafting elements of Atlanta, common sense would have the No. 11 car moving to the front in relatively short order. However, that wasn’t the case. The combination of an ill-handling race car coupled with a team strategy of looking to leave Atlanta with 20 points added up to a 24th-place finish and only 13 points, seven shy of the goal.
The tin foil hat-wearing crowd of NASCAR fandom believes Hamlin’s performance was in some way a protest over the stalled charter negotiations between 23XI Racing and the sanctioning body. However logical thinkers grounded in reality understand Hamlin sabotaging his job as a driver for JGR as a means of sending a message to his business interests would be ludicrous at best.
But hey, somebody has to keep Reynolds Wrap in business, right?
UNCHARTERED WATERS
NASCAR certainly did not want the specter of what has now become a contentious negotiation over the future of the Cup Series Charter deal to overshadow the start of the Playoffs. But that’s exactly what happened Saturday morning.
News of every team except for 23XI and Front Row Motorsports signing a new agreement sent shockwaves through the Atlanta garage and around the sport.
There were reports teams were told Friday night they could lose their charters for 2025 if they did not sign the latest proposal. The Associated Press reported some teams felt “threatened” and “coerced” to sign the deal. In the end, only the two outliers did not.
What this means going forward is anyone’s guess. Both 23XI and Front Row have made public plans to expand their operations growing by an additional team at each organization by acquiring charters available in the wake of Stewart-Haas Racing shutting down three of its four teams at season’s end. Just days ago, Trackhouse Racing announced they would add Shane Van Gisbergen to its Cup effort next season joining Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez in what is speculated to be a chartered entry. While both 23XI and Front Row issued statements and Denny Hamlin, who has been more than outspoken about the ongoing back and forth, has shared thoughts NASCAR has not made any public statement.
There is much financially at stake here with a majority of the focus on dividing up revenue from NASCAR’s new media rights deal that begins in 2025 with FOX, NBC, Amazon Prime, Turner/MAX, and the CW. But there are other revenue streams inside the sport, teams are also interested in tapping into, which according to several in the industry has been a major stumbling block.
“I believe I am (telling the truth) from our standpoint but it depends on who you ask,” Hamlin said of the stalled negotiations from 23XI’s view when he discussed the situation at Playoff Media Day. “There’s probably a handful of teams that are just happy to take any deal that they can get and there are others with some business sense that say this is unreasonable.”
However now with the majority of teams inking and approving a new deal, what leverage does 23XI and Front Row have? It’s intriguing that the other 13 organizations and the sanctioning body have for the most part remained silent.
That silence is deafening.
HILL OF A RECORD
Just get out the permanent marker and ink Austin Hill’s name in the win column when Atlanta rolls around on the schedule. That’s how it feels anyway after Hill powered his way to another XFINITY Series win on Saturday afternoon for the Georgia native’s fourth win at his home track.
It was Hill’s third win of the season giving him a sweep of Atlanta to go along with the season-opening victory at Daytona. It didn’t hurt that Toyota teammates Chandler Smith and Corey Heim didn’t work better together in an effort to run down Hill but still the Richard Childress Racing driver impressively took another checkered flag.
It sets up an interesting question once the series’ Playoffs begin after The Glen and Bristol; can either a superspeedway ace in Hill or a road course expert like Shane Van Gisbergen actually compete for the title? For as good as both drivers are at their respective disciplines, neither has shown much in the way of prowess on other kinds of tracks.
While both have three trips to Victory Lane, Hill has been more consistent than SVG and ahead by several spots in the regular season point standings. There is one superspeedway (Talladega) as well as a road course (Charlotte’s Roval) in the Playoff slate, so each driver has one of their specialty tracks to look forward to in the title run. Outside of that the as now three-time winners look to have their hands full competing for the crown unless performance can be upped at the rest of the track disciplines left in 2024.
LIKE OLD TIMES FOR SAUTER
It feels like forever ago when Johnny Sauter won the Craftsman Truck Series championship. In reality, it’s only been eight years since the veteran scored the series title in 2016.
But a lot has happened since for the Wisconsin native who in recent years has migrated back to his late model roots. It paid off Saturday night when Sauter took the checkered flag in the UARA National Series Billy Bigley Memorial Tune-Up 125 at Bradenton, Florida’s Freedom Factory.
Sauter piloted the familiar Wauters Motorsports No. 5 to the win, a prelude to the series’ return to the track for the high-dollar Bigley Memorial 128 in November.
Sauter looks to be busy in the next few weeks around the Midwest with the UARA returning to Michigan’s Owosso Speedway this Wednesday and special events at Wisconsin’s Dells Raceway Park (9/15), Illinois’ Grundy County Speedway (9/21), and the ASA Midwest Tour Oktoberfest 200 at LaCrosse (WI) Fairgrounds Speedway coming up.
Toby Christie is the Editor-in-Chief of Racing America. He has 15 years of experience as a motorsports journalist and has been with Racing America since 2023.