This is the Lap Raptor podcast. It is September 8, 2024. We're doing a preview of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs going into the 1st round and perhaps also thinking about who we expect to reach the final 4 and win it all. Going into the 1st round, we have more than half the field sitting 3 points above or below the cut line. I think the safe drivers are Larson, Bell, Reddick, Byron, Blaney, Hammond, and Elliott.
Speaker 1:Elliott sits not 9 points above the cut line. Everyone else I mentioned is above that. But then you get to Keselowski 3 above, Logano, Cedric, Suarez, Bowman, Briscoe, Burton, Gibbs, and Truax, all between plus 3 and minus 1 in that order. It's a really big group, all effectively all sitting on the bubble with 3 drivers on the cut line, Bowman, Briscoe, and Burton. Our first round starts with Atlanta, which is today, and Atlanta is a super speedway at this point, and very difficult to predict how super speedways are going to go.
Speaker 1:I think you basically just go based on running order because Atlanta, if I recall correctly, has proven difficult to pass on in the last couple of years, even though it is a super speedway. The super speedway led itself to chaos, and that's the that's the issue there. But then we go to Watkins Glen on a road course. We only have 3 road courses run this year, and Alex Bowman won one of the races. Larson and Byron won the other in a Hendrix sweep of the regular season road courses.
Speaker 1:Looking at the advanced metrics, these bubble drivers, Gibbs and Truex, who are both at the bottom of the table right now, they were the 2nd and third best based off of net rating, g r minus l r, on your LapRaptor dashboard. Bowman sits 10th. So you start to think that maybe those guys will separate themselves based off performance at Watkins Glen. And then when you get to the bottom, Briscoe in 28th, Cindric in 30th, Logano 34th, Burton 36th, these are all Fords. Other than RFK and Ryan Blaney, the Fords did not have a good season on the road courses this year.
Speaker 1:And so what I would expect to see after these first few races is it starts to shift where you have the forwards moving toward the bottom, except for Keselowski, and the Toyotas and Bowman shifting toward the top. Suarez is 24th in net rating, 18th in average finish. Trucks is 24th in average finish, but every other metric that we have, average running position, weighted average running position, and net rating, all indicate that he's very strong. I think he's had some good starts to races and then finished poorly as is indicated by the negative five PFAE per race. He's finishing 5 positions on average below where you would expect based off the starting position, which is averaging 17th.
Speaker 1:He's got an average finish of 23rd. So you would expect them on average to finish around 18th, basically where he started. But, again, Burton, Briscoe, they all sit they all sit a bit lower. Even Logano, his numbers aren't great. He's running in 20th on these road courses.
Speaker 1:The field gets a lot more spread out on the road courses. There's a lot more of a edge to talent and car quality on the road courses, especially given the small sample. So that's the field coming out of Watkins Glen, I would expect, because I would expect the Fords to be shifting down and the JGR guys and Alex Bowman shifting toward the top. Then we go look at the short tracks for Bristol, the Bass Prochant's night race from Bristol Motor Speedway. Again, if you're worried about Elliott sitting there at plus 9, he has the best average finish on short tracks this season with an 8.75.
Speaker 1:Truax is up there in 7th. Gibbs at 11th. Briscoe sits 12th. McConnell in 17th. But Burton down there in 35th.
Speaker 1:Cindric in 32nd. Those are the drivers I'm cutting now. Right? We'll say those are pretty confident fall offs. It's Burton and Cindric.
Speaker 1:And so then you have to start asking, we expect Suarez to go through. I'm optimistic for the 54 and the 19 that they get through. Bowman's 14th in average finish on these short tracks. He's 11th in weighted average running position. He's 15th in that rating, which still makes him a bit of a bubble driver.
Speaker 1:Hence, you might put him on the cut line. Same thing with Suarez. They're sort of in the flip flop position. And so then it's a question of, does Briscoe do well enough on the short track, maybe at Watkins Glen, to make up the difference to jump over them? If I was sorting this out, I would have the JGR drivers and then Alex Bowman, Brad Keselowski in that mix.
Speaker 1:And then below the cut line, we're gonna have Burton. We're gonna have Sendric. I'm looking at Briscoe and Suarez. Logano is a bit of a wild card, but I think Logano's strong enough on the short tracks that he also gets through likely in the 9th to 11th range for me if we're going that deep and predicting the final standings coming out of this this first round. So that's the that's that's the first round.
Speaker 1:1st round is usually a cleanup round where you get rid of the drivers who probably didn't deserve to make it. And in that category, I would have Cindric, Suarez, Briscoe, Burton. Again, Bowman is kind of on the edge there of is he in, is he out? And given that we can find the other 4, he's probably in and also give him the strength at the road courses for him. And When we start thinking about who might we expect to make the final, the playoffs are very intermediate focused.
Speaker 1:We have Kansas, Charlotte, Las Vegas, and Homestead all in there once we get out of the 1st round. The only other ones, Charlotte's the road course. Still Kansas, Las Vegas, and Homestead. That's 2 intermediates in the round of 8. The round of 12 with Kansas Talladega and the roville is a bit of a chaos situation.
Speaker 1:So you wanna lean to the intermediates, I think, when you're predicting who's gonna be in the final 4. And when we pull up the stats for this, Brad Keselowski can make it. He's got the best average finish on intermediates this season. And it's Hamlin, Elliott, Reddick, and Logano. I'm not sure we've gone as got enough to get through the tracks where he's not strong in order to make it to that round of 8, in order to make it deep in the playoffs, but Keselowski might.
Speaker 1:RFK is good. Hamlin, Elliott, Reddick. Remember those names. Your average running position, Hamlin, Reddick, Gibbs, Keselowski, Byron. Elliott sits 10th.
Speaker 1:We look at net rating on these intermediate tracks. Hamlin, Reddick, Blaney Bell, Byron. Elliott and 9th. When we look at what I'm going to call the skill tracks of the non drafting ovals, plus the road courses, Top of the tables, Hamlin, Larson, Truax, Elliott for average running position. Average finish, it's Reddick, Elliott, Larson, Hamlin, Keselowski.
Speaker 1:Net rating, Hamlin, Larson, Bell, Trucks, Blaney, Reddick, Elliott. So if I could pick 5 for that final 4, I would have Hamlin and Larson and Reddick as a definitive 3 with one of Elliot and Byron making up that 4th. And of those 5, who might win it all? What's a toss-up? When you look at the short tracks, which is what we call Phoenix, Phoenix is a tough one to categorize.
Speaker 1:But the top for the average finish is Elliott, Larson, and Hamlin. Average running position, Hamlin, Larson, Truax, and Elliott. But there's not a lot of separation between between these drivers. They're all in the single digits for average running position and average finish. The top of the net rating is Hamlin, Bell and Trucks, Larson, and Elliott.
Speaker 1:So if Elliott can make it, he's in there. But Hamlin or Larson seems to be, to me, the favorite at this point to win because Reddick does not have the short track to close out a championship run. He might dominate his way to the final 4, to Phoenix, but I'm not convinced that he has what it takes to be able to close it out. That's the playoff preview. Your first round plus the final 4, and either Hamlin or Larson winning it all.
Speaker 1:And I'll say this, probably not erratic, winning it all. But we can move into the news, and there's been a bit of a news since we last recorded a podcast. Quick one. Brandon Jones is moving to JGR. Jones has been really interesting to me because the average finishes are never really there, but everything else is, which to me indicates that he might not be that good.
Speaker 1:His average running positions in the Xfinity series since 2020, 8, 10.7, 8.6, 11a half, 12. Those are pretty good. But the success rates, he peaked at 67% for the last 3 years, 52, 57, 50. Those are really weak. Those are borderline replacement level.
Speaker 1:The PFAEs are typically hovering around neutral. Right now, he's at negative two and a half this season. And so what does he bring, Gibbs? He brings a dry he's a driver for that team. He's able to He's able to drive the car.
Speaker 1:He's able to get decent results. He's not he's not gonna waste the equipment, but he's not gonna get more than than the equipment provides like a top driver would. Another bit of news is Christian Akas has announced that he's moving up to colleague in the Xfinity series where they'll have Akas, Josh Williams, and Daniel die. And I called this a slam dunk in my article on this. He's having one of the greatest truck seasons ever.
Speaker 1:His PFAE is top 2, top 3 in the 21st century for the truck series. His success rate is nearly perfect on non drafting tracks. I think he's still got a perfect record, which would be the only perfect season in the era where we have track categorization. He's 23 years old, and so I don't know that you could call him a truly elite prospect. If he's putting up these numbers at 18, 19 in the truck series, that would be that would be very significant.
Speaker 1:The truck series is also a bit weaker than it's been in the past few years, but it's hard to argue with these results. It's hard to argue with the underlying numbers. He is dominating statistically. Him and Haim are out of their minds in terms of their performance this season in the truck series. That'll wrap it up for this week for the Lap Raptor podcast.
Speaker 1:We're going with playoffs. This is when it all counts. This is when you start seeing the good driver separated from the weaker drivers. The good drivers are gonna be able to get more out of their car than the weaker drivers would, which sounds like an obvious statement, and that's because it is. But that's what we're looking at.
Speaker 1:That's what we need to see. That's what we should be seeing from Hamlin and Larson and Reddick. I'm not convinced that Reddick is in that tier of driver, but this is his chance to show it in the playoffs. And let's see if he can, and let's see if he can prove me wrong in that championship race.