Five to Watch: XFINITY Series Chase

1. Who's the favorite? Drivers indicated a couple of choices when asked, and both with reasons. Elliott Sadler finished the regular season with a nearly 60-point lead over second-place Daniel Suarez. Erik Jones is the top seed, though, due to his four regular-season wins. The two drivers couldn't be more different, either. Jones (20) is headed to Furniture Row Racing next year while Sadler (41) agreed to an extension with JR Motorsports. 'I'm let you pick whoever the heck y'all want to pick,' Sadler said. 'We're not going to lay over and die, and I'm sure as hell not.'

2. Getting wild: The Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup has a wild-card race in restrictor-plate Talladega, and a second in short-track Martinsville. The NASCAR XFINITY Series Chase does not go to either venue, but drivers were in agreement on their own wild card: Dover, the second race of the opening round.“You'd have to say Dover,” Richard Childress Racing driver Brendan Gaughan said. “The concrete monster is different -- not a wild-card like Martinsville or a Talladega -- but still a wild-card race because it's so different from the mile-and-a-halfs that dominate it.”

3. Aggression, activated: Fans have seen the aggression, and the stakes, rise over the past two years of the new Chase format. Expect the XFINITY Series drivers to follow suit. Elliott Sadler has experience driving in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, and his JR Motorsports teammate Justin Allgaier was in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series the past two years. That gives them a bit of an edge.“The last couple years in the Sprint Cup Series, it's come down to winning the race and I think that it's going to be the same way this year with the XFINITY race in Homestead,” Allgaier said.

4. Small team, big dreams: Some of the names on the bottom of the XFINITY Series Chase bracket stand out as being underdog (and underfunded) drivers. Ryan Sieg and Blake Koch are in the field, as is rookie Brandon Jones (although he drives for Richard Childress Racing) and first-time full-timer Brennan Poole. “The fun part is that all the teams now, this is a boost for all the race teams that are in it,” said Gaughan, who drives for RCR. “Ryan Sieg has a shot to win this. I don't care what … all the people are going to start doing their seedings, but it doesn't matter. It just takes one good run or one bad run and it can knock you out or put you in. So it's fun that it's here and I applaud NASCAR and I applaud XFINITY for doing it. It added years to my career.”

5. What to watch … restarts: Five of the seven race tracks in the XFINITY Series Chase are 1.5-mile ovals. The breakdown: two out of three races in both the Round of 12 and the Round of 8, and the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.“I feel like in XFINITY, we're already real aggressive all the time,” Brennan Poole said. “Especially on restarts, you've just got to get all you can get. It's just tough to pass at these mile-and-a-halfs, and most of the tracks in the Chase are a mile and a half. I feel like restarts are going to be really important and keeping your track position and just not making mistakes.”