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Power Rankings: Kyle Busch creeping up on Kevin Harvick?
By Pat DeCola | Tuesday, September 22, 2020
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NASCAR.com's Pat DeCola ranks the 12 remaining drivers in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs after the Bristol Night Race and before Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
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12. Kurt Busch (-1)
Comment: Busch finds himself at the tail end of the playoff field entering the Round of 12, and it could be a struggle to climb any higher. The 2004 champ has just one top 10 since Michigan and saw his Las Vegas average finish dip to 22.5 after finishes of 39th and 25th in the last two races at his home track.
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11. Alex Bowman (-3)
Comment: Bowman has rekindled a bit of his early-season speed, firing off four straight top nines before a 16th-place finish at Bristol. He's struggled at Vegas in the past, but did notch his first top 10 in seven tries in last year's fall race.
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10. Austin Dillon (-3)
Comment: Austin Dillon, Round of 8 driver? It's becoming more conceivable by the day, as for the better part of two months Dillon has looked like a contender. He could be even better positioned after the weekend at Las Vegas, where he ran P4 in the spring.
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9. Clint Bowyer (+3)
Comment: Bowyer has five top 10s in the last seven races and three straight overall, but he could see all of his momentum come to a screeching halt this weekend. The No. 14 driver has just one top 10 and one lap led at the Nevada track since 2012.
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8. Aric Almirola (+2)
Comment: Almirola's overall body of work at Vegas isn't great (three top 10s, 22.1 average finish in 14 tries), but with him it can often make more sense to look at his more recent results. For the season, he's bettered his finish in four straight 2020 races (three top 10s) and owns an average finish of 9.5 over the last two fall races.
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7. Kyle Busch (+2)
Comment: By now, you've heard Busch say he'll be eliminated in this round. I'm not so sure that's true. Removing a trio of crashes at Loudon and the unpredictable Daytona races, Busch has a 5.88 average finish since a P21 at Kentucky in mid-July. That's Championship 4 territory if you ask me.
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6. Chase Elliott (--)
Comment: Elliott's had a tremendous mixed bag of results at Vegas that it's tough to gauge how he'll fare this weekend. To perfectly encapsulate his history of good and bad finishes at Vegas, the No. 9 driver finished 26th there earlier this year after leading 70 laps.
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5. Joey Logano (--)
Comment: Logano likely lines up as the favorite this weekend, as he's rarely misfired at Vegas in his career. The winner of the last two spring races, he led a race-high 105 laps last fall before placing ninth and owns a series-best average finish of 8.0.
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4. Brad Keselowski (-1)
Comment: Team Penske's Vegas success certainly extends to Keselowski as well, with his three wins (most recently fall 2018) most among playoff drivers. A slight concern overall is that other than his Richmond win, the 2012 champ hasn't finished better than eighth since the first Michigan race.
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3. Martin Truex Jr. (-1)
Comment: It's still hard to believe Truex has been held to just one win this year, given how he's been near-elite to elite all season, but that'll happen when Kevin Harvick has nine wins of his own. That said, Truex is the defending winner of this race and stacks up as one of the contenders yet again this weekend.
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2. Denny Hamlin (+2)
Comment: It's fair to question Hamlin based on his recent results (P13, P12, P21 at Darlington, Richmond and Bristol, respectively), but it's not like he's not been competitive lately. The likely Championship 4 contender has led laps in all races since Kentucky except for the second race of Dover's doubleheader. And we're willing to look past that, since he won the first one.
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1. Kevin Harvick (--)
Comment: Will Harvick go back-to-back this weekend? It's likely, as the 2014 champ has a pair of Vegas wins since 2015, led a race-high 92 laps in the spring and finished runner-up here last fall. A non-top-five for Harvick on Sunday would be an upset.
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