Take 5: Hamlin’s number, a JGR surge and playoff positioning mark Kansas’ July race

A Thursday night special kicked off the second half of the NASCAR Cup Series season, giving the field a weekend off before the push to the playoffs begins in earnest in August. With trends and story lines emerging from the smoke of yet another triumphant burnout from Denny Hamlin, here are five topics to take in from Kansas Speedway.

WINNING NUMBER: Denny Hamlin let slip in his post-race interviews that crew chief Chris Gabehart had suggested a win-total goal before the season that seemed outrageous to him. "You're nuts," he recalled saying, though neither driver nor crew chief would quite reveal the exact number. But here we are with Hamlin sitting at a series-best five wins in 19 races and the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing looking every bit the part of championship favorite. "I'll be honest with you. The goal was to win all 36, so we've already fell short of that," Gabehart said, maybe joking about the "win 'em all" number, maybe not. "I just think that much of this race team and Denny Hamlin, all the resources we have behind us. There's not a single race that I go to that I think we can't win."

TEAM EFFORT: Joe Gibbs Racing placed three drivers among the top five finishers Thursday evening, with Martin Truex Jr. running third and Erik Jones closing out the night in fifth. The organization just missed putting all four among the top 10 as Kyle Busch -- a stage winner for the first time this year -- came home 11th. The performance was enough to draw eyebrow raises from runner-up Brad Keselowski, who voluntarily lauded the rival team's intermediate-track performance. "They were super, super strong. Got a little bit of work to do," said Keselowski, who recorded his fourth straight top-10 finish in the Team Penske No. 2 Ford. "They brought something new the last two weeks, really shown a lot of strength in the drivetrain. Have to do a little bit of work to keep up with that."

THE CREAM RISES: Once the final restart of the Super Start Batteries 400 sorted itself out, two familiar car numbers rose to the top of the scoring pylon -- Hamlin's No. 11 and the No. 4 of Stewart-Haas Racing veteran Kevin Harvick, who sits just behind Hamlin in the 2020 win column with four victories. At 39, Hamlin is roughly five years his junior, but he sees plenty of prime seasons of racing ahead for both of them. "What you've seen from us in the last year with the 11 and the 4 is a lot of mutual respect," Hamlin said. "We race each other with a lot of mutual respect because we know it won't be the last time. We still have probably many years of battles ahead of us. We've been around the sport a long time. We butted heads early in my career. He's certainly a guy that I personally would like to model myself after."

BUBBLING UP: A late-race crash and a variety of mixed Kansas fortunes tightened the pursuit for the NASCAR Playoffs, with just 50 points now separating the six drivers -- the last three in and the first three out -- on the provisional grid. William Byron, rookie Tyler Reddick and Erik Jones each moved up two spots -- all at the expense of seven-time champ Jimmie Johnson, who stumbled out of the provisional postseason field after his No. 48 Chevrolet was too severely damaged to compete. Johnson sat 11th in the Cup Series standings as recently as June 22 after Talladega, but has slid to 18th. Missing the Indianapolis race after a positive COVID-19 test has hurt his points total, but so has a seven-race stretch since his last top-10 finish.

SUBBED IN: Keith Rodden's first crew chief gig in nearly three years -- tagging in while Chad Knaus missed the Kansas race on baby watch -- had the ring of a moderate success. Pit strategy lifted the No. 24 team to the top of the leaderboard in the late going, and though he faded in the final green-flag run, Byron set a season-best for the most laps he's led (27) in any race this year and posted a 10th-place finish for some potential postseason benefit. "It was a solid finish for us -- we needed that for sure for the playoffs," Byron said. "We started the race way off. We were really loose -- just really struggling. The guys, Keith and everybody made a lot of great adjustments throughout the race. It really got us in a position where we could attack."