Perhaps the worst thing for any playoff driver is to wreck early and finish in the back of the field, watching helplessly as rivals battle for the win and rack up crucial points in the standings.
Unfortunately for Kyle Larson and Chase Briscoe, that’s exactly what happened 56 laps into Sunday’s playoff opener at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Larson got loose in Turn 2 and went hard into the outside wall, and Briscoe was unable to avoid hitting the back of Larson’s car as he skidded down the banking. In an instant, two of the 16 active championship hopefuls doomed themselves to be scored 37th and 38th out of the 38 cars that ran the race.
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After assessing the physical damage of the wreck, both teams also need to survey the metaphorical damage — just how much does this hurt Briscoe’s and Larson’s chances of advancing to the next round of the playoffs (and beyond)? To help with that task, let’s turn once again to our playoff simulator, which uses each driver’s recent performance at each track type to simulate the rest of the playoffs 10,000 times and project everyone’s probability of success going forward.
Briscoe was the biggest loser of the day as his odds of escaping the Round of 16 dropped by 43.9 percentage points with the last-place finish, the largest decline in advancement odds for any driver after Sunday’s race.
We noted last week that Briscoe’s skills didn’t necessarily match up well with any of the first-round sites, but Atlanta was nonetheless a place where avoiding catastrophe would be paramount, just because of the track’s chaotic tendencies since being reconfigured and running like a superspeedway starting in 2022. By being caught up in the worst-case scenario so early, Briscoe now stares at a 21-point deficit versus the elimination line, and with it, just a 16% chance to advance.
It’s still not impossible to dig out of Briscoe’s hole in the standings. In the simulations, a top-10 finish at Bristol Motor Speedway — where he has run at an above-average clip –boosts Briscoe’s odds of advancing to 41%, and a top 10 at Watkins Glen International would see his odds rise to 46%. That’s still not great … but if he finishes in the top 10 in both races, he would have an 88% chance to advance. So Briscoe still has a chance, but his margin for error is nonexistent at this point.
An interesting thing about Sunday’s wreck was that the fallout was asymmetrical. Larson started the chain of events that knocked both Briscoe and himself out, but Larson’s odds to advance only dipped by 10.3 percentage points — damage that was less severe than the race exacted on Martin Truex Jr. (minus-35.9), Harrison Burton (minus-33.1), Denny Hamlin (minus-13.8) or Brad Keselowski (minus-13.0).
Some of this is due to Larson’s status as a high-ranking driver — he had more breathing room to work with — and, indeed, he remains 15 points over the elimination line despite the near-last-place finish. (Before the playoffs, we wrote that he really just needed to avoid disasters at all three first-round races — so he has two more chances to keep that from happening.) Some also owe to Larson being one of the best-projected drivers in each of the next two races, particularly at Bristol. On average, the model shows he will have a pair of strong drives and make the troubles of Atlanta a distant memory.
But it’s worth noting that a pair of finishes outside the top 20 from here would make Larson’s path forward look unlikely: Under the simulations that fit those criteria, Larson made the Round of 12 just 21% of the time.
All of this just underscores how important a single race can be in the playoffs. While Joey Logano set his advancement odds to 100 percent by virtue of the win, and Alex Bowman, Daniel Suárez and Austin Cindric all lifted their odds above 90% with strong runs, Briscoe — and even Larson to some slight degree — showed that a rough day at the track can have far-reaching implications for a playoff future.