Take 5: Elliott’s brilliance, avoiding a Lap 1 meme and other lessons from the road at Daytona

A historic first for the NASCAR Cup Series ended with a familiar road-course ruler in Victory Lane at Daytona International Speedway. A circuit usually reserved for sports cars opened its gates for the stock-car crowd Sunday, and there was plenty to digest after the inaugural Go Bowling 235. With the regular season winding down, here are five story lines to take away from the Cup Series' first go at the Daytona Road Course.

CLOUD NINE: Road-course ringer? Chase Elliott now has half of his eight career Cup Series wins on the more twisty tracks, but his second victory of the season also thrust the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports team back into the outskirts of the conversation with the 2020 elite. Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin have combined to win 11 of the 23 races so far this year, and Elliott fended off Hamlin step for step in the late going Sunday. Though the team has shown its share of speed this year, crew chief Alan Gustafson says there's still work to be done in making gains. "I promise you there's nobody in the garage working as hard as Hendrick Motorsports is and the 9 team is to try to reel that back in," Gustafson said, "but those guys have got an upper hand on us, and I'm sure they did it by grinding hard and working hard, and kudos to them for doing it, but we've got to find something."

CHAOS CURTAILED: For the gloom-doom predictions of mass chaos for the Cup Series' debut on the 3.61-mile circuit without practice or qualifying, any major pandemonium was avoided. Save for a handful of off-course moments and missed chicanes, the stack-ups that flared during the Xfinity and Gander Trucks events were missing from the weekend finale. Credit the teams' game plans plus the drivers' diligence on prepping in simulators, but also give a nod to the overall talent level in NASCAR's top division, a factor that minimized the unforced errors. "Myself and some friends were talking about that before the race today, and we were like, 'I wonder how many cautions there will be.' I'm like, these guys are pretty good," runner-up Denny Hamlin said. "They found a way to adapt and they've got a lot of tools to help them prepare for these races. I mean, these are pros, and you see a clean race whenever you see the driver quality that we have in the Cup Series."

FRIENDLY FOR STARTERS: One way that the field headed off a lawlessness Daytona Road Course debut was to make the Lap 1-Turn 1 experience as seamless as possible. That started up front. A casual conversation on the pre-race grid among the first four starters -- in order: Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr., and Kyle Busch -- turned into an informal gentleman's agreement for the first turn: Let's not become a meme. "We just wanted to figure out how we were all going to approach Turn 1 so we didn't crash each other and look like idiots," said Truex, who finished third for the fifth straight race, "so really it was just about what kind of marker were you going to use for braking so we didn't run each other over, and obviously it went fine from there."

AN END AT 10: A pair of hot streaks ended with a moderate thud for Kevin Harvick on Sunday. A 17th-place finish snapped the pole-starter's string of top-10 finishes at 10 races and ended a modest win streak at two after his weekend sweep the week before at Michigan. The No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford spun twice -- once in Turn 3 with a nudge, once in Turn 6 without -- but rallied from as far back as 37th in the 39-car field. Those sorts of days happen to the best of them, even Harvick, who still leads the series with a peerless 19 top 10s in 23 races thus far.

PLAYOFF PICTURE: Jimmie Johnson's weekend may have been a virtual push as it relates to the provisional postseason grid -- his margin off the cutline for the 16-driver field shrank only from 26 to 25 points -- but there was a likely morale boost from his fourth-place finish Sunday, a result that marked his first top five since May 31 at Bristol. Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron still clings to what would be the final playoff berth in the standings, but Johnson at least put some distance on his nearest challengers -- 11th-place finisher Erik Jones and 18th-place Tyler Reddick. Better still, Johnson heads into favorable territory next weekend with two Cup Series races scheduled at Dover International Speedway, a track where he holds the all-time record with 11 career wins.