Five to Watch: Playoffs embark at Darlington with crown jewel Southern 500

PLAYOFF DEBUT - Cole Custer and Matt DiBenedetto each will be making their first appearance in the playoffs. Custer, who scored his first career win at Kentucky in July, became the fourth rookie to make the playoffs since the inception of the postseason format in 2004. DiBenedetto, racing in his first season behind the wheel of the No. 21 Ford, gave Wood Brothers Racing its second playoff berth. Among the two drivers, DiBenedetto had the best finish at Darlington earlier this season, ninth, and an average finish of 11.5 in the two races.

"I think we can go in there and prove some people wrong is the biggest thing, but at the end of the day it’s about being consistent and it’s about being competitive," Custer said. "I think we’ve had a lot of peaks and valleys at times this year, but at the same time we just need to try and level it out more going into these playoffs. If we can be consistent and we can put it all together and put all the pieces together for these last 10 races, I think we’ve shown that we can compete with anybody it’s just trying to put those pieces together every single race."

FINAL 10 - Jimmie Johnson, who missed making the playoffs by six points last weekend at Daytona, will kick off his final 10 races as a full-time driver in the NASCAR Cup Series on Sunday. The seven-time champion has seen his share of success at Darlington in his career with three wins, including two in the Southern 500, with his last in 2012 marking the 200th Cup Series win for Hendrick Motorsports. Johnson finished eighth in the second race at Darlington in May, but it was the first race that was a tough pill to swallow when he crashed while leading on the final lap of the first stage and lost out on those valuable points.

“We won’t have the chance to go for eight championships, but I am pretty damn proud of the seven we won," Johnson said. "We do have 10 more chances and there are plenty of trophies up for grabs with nothing to lose. Darlington owes me one and we plan to finish this season strong."


For Johnson's final Darlington start he will be driving a special paint scheme to honor NASCAR's other two seven-time champions - Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt. Johnson's Hendrick Motorsports teammates will pay tribute to him by running three different paint schemes that adorned his No. 48 Chevrolet through the years.

DIFFERENT PLAYOFFS FOR BUSCH - Defending Cup Series champion Kyle Busch will be making his 13th appearance in the postseason and is looking to make the Championship 4 for the sixth consecutive season. However, the start to the playoffs look much different for Busch as this is the first time in his career he's gone this deep into a season without a win. He enters this year's postseason with only three playoff points versus his 45 last season. The first round of the playoffs could be where Busch gets back to Victory Lane as he leads all drivers with 15 combined wins at the three tracks.

"We’ve got an opportunity to go out here, obviously being on the bottom side of the spectrum rather than the top side of the spectrum during the playoffs so it’s going to be a different playoff for us than what we’re used to," said Busch, who won at Darlington in 2008. "Looking forward to the challenge and if we can win it this year then there’s no reason why any year we should ever not have an opportunity to win it."

ELLIOTT OUT FRONT - Chase Elliott will start from the pole and have the No. 1 pit stall for Sunday's race, looking to continue his momentum of six top 10s in the last seven races coming into the playoffs. Elliott finished fourth in the first Darlington race in May and led 28 laps in the second race. He was running second in the closing laps of the night race, but was turned by Kyle Busch, relegating him to one of his three DNFs in the regular season.

“We had a couple of good runs there in those first two races back, which was nice," Elliott said. "I think a lot has changed since then. So, I’m really curious to see how we stack-up this go-round. But Darlington is always kind of one of those things where the two ends of the race track are just so different, that it’s hard to get them both perfect. But it happens. And people do it all the time. And I look forward to trying again."



Elliott is one of four drivers with at least six top 10s in the last seven races this season joining Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano and Martin Truex Jr, who is on a current streak of eight top-four finishes.

LOOKING FOR REPEAT - Regular-season champion Kevin Harvick and second-seeded Denny Hamlin will each be looking to kick off the playoffs on a high note by becoming a repeat winner at Darlington this season. Due to adjustment of the 2020 schedule because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the track "Too Tough to Tame" hosted two races back in May with Harvick and Hamlin taking the wins. Harvick's win was his second at the track while Hamlin's was his third. Hamlin's Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Erik Jones were the only other drivers to finish in the top 10 in both races earlier this season.

"I guess we’ll just take May and combine them because we ran one in the day and one at night," Harvick said. "It shouldn’t be that much different other than the fact that we’re gonna start the race with a couple other divisions already having been on the racetrack. We’ve been on both sides of daytime and nighttime from the two races at the beginning of the year."

Darlington Raceway is set to host the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs opener for the first time with Sunday's Cook Out Southern 500 (6 p.m. ET, NBCSN/NBC Sports App, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Darlington is one of two new tracks in the first round of this year's playoffs joining Bristol Motor Speedway, which will host an elimination race in two weeks.



"The first round is your tried and true NASCAR tracks. Darlington, South Carolina -- a tough track, 500 miles, one of the most historical events in all of sports, and then you throw in there Richmond, which is again back to one of the more traditional short track beating and banging short tracks and Bristol," said Brad Keselowski, who won the Southern 500 in 2018. "That first round is a power round with tracks that I think should have been in the playoffs from Day One, but we can’t live in the past. You’ve got to look to the future and I’m glad that they’re in now."



This year marks the sixth consecutive year for Darlington's popular throwback weekend with a majority of the cars in the 367-lap race sporting special paint schemes to honor the history of the sport.