RELATED: Chase Bubble Watch | Power Rankings after Texas

With Jeff Gordon locked in for the Championship 4, former Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 crew chief Ray Evernham made his picks for the three other drivers who will be battling for the Sprint Cup title at Homestead.

Evernham likes Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick for the final four, making his picks on Sirius XM radio Tuesday with host Dave Moody.

“Martin Truex will be one of the guys going to Homestead. They have shown they can beat any of those other cars on any given day,” Evernham said.

And a more mature Kyle Busch is in good shape, too. Evernham noted Busch’s presence in Victory Lane the last few weeks congratulating another winning.

“He’s matured and he has become a bit of a politician,” Evernham said of Busch. “He’s learning the ropes in more ways than one. I think he’s being sincere. I think those guys called him when he was hurt, and he is now a mature race car driver who appreciates the sport and his position.”

Though some equipment failures have shown a “chink in the armor,” Evernham predicted the No. 4 Stewart-Haas team would be defending the 2014 title at Homestead.

Evernham noted two big problems for the teams he’s not picking to advance from the Eliminator 8.

Both Team Penske drivers must win to advance. He said the biggest competition Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski face is not from other Chase drivers, but from those who could leave a spot open by denying a Chase driver a win this week.

“We’ve talked about several ways to play this game, and it’s a lot like Survivor Island,” Evernham said, naming another Hendrick driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. , among those who could be a threat. “The biggest thing that the No. 2 and the No. 22 have to fight this weekend is all the guys who are not in the Chase who are going full tilt to win at Phoenix.”

As for the Joe Gibbs Racing team, which came into the Chase as a force, Evernham thinks that the issues JGR teams had with their splitters at Texas could carry over to Homestead.

RELATED: NASCAR will not penalize JGR for splitters

NASCAR officials announced Tuesday that no penalties would be levied on the Nos. 11, 18, and 19 teams after their splitters were confiscated during pre-race inspection. The teams were forced to replace the parts and go back through inspection before the start of Sunday’s AAA Texas 500.

“As much as 30 thousandths of an inch or 40 thousandths of an inch make a big difference,” Evernham explained. “It’s not gonna turn the cars from blazing fast to junk, but it will change several things.”

Evernham said the winning teams will be able to put aside the pressure throughout the whole team, from the driver through every over-the-wall team member and every person setting up the cars. He said relishing pressure is what made the No. 24 team so strong when he was Gordon’s crew chief.

NASCAR will not penalize three Joe Gibbs Racing teams for pre-race inspection failures at Texas Motor Speedway.

Officials confiscated the front-end splitters of the No. 11 of Denny Hamlin, the No. 18 of Kyle Busch and the No. 19 of Carl Edwards prior to Sunday’s AAA Texas 500. The No. 20, which was piloted by Erik Jones this week due to Matt Kenseth‘s two-race suspension, cleared inspection with no issues.

Team members replaced the splitters prior to the drop of the green flag and resent the cars through inspection with no issues.

The splitter situation nearly mirrors Team Penske‘s issue at Michigan in August, when the Nos. 2 and 22’s splitters were confiscated after failing pre-race inspection.

The splitters were brought back to the NASCAR Research & Development Center in Concord, North Carolina, but no penalties were ultimately handed down to the Penske teams, either.

RELATED: Cut tire puts Logano in a hole

How did a sunny Saturday in Texas lead to an hours-long weather delay that wiped out all but the NASCAR XFINITY Series race? That was one of the questions posed to NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O’Donnell on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday morning.

“It was unique and was certainly frustrating,” O’Donnell said of the situation, which was hampered by early morning showers and unusually heavy rain in Texas throughout October. “It’s really hard where you have an environment where, you know, it’s not raining, the fans look at it and say ‘What’s going on here?’ “

The main culprits in the delays were weepers, small cuts in the track where water pours out and streams across the racing surface. The weepers caused difficulties drying the track because, when the sun finally did come out, the heat helped pull the water up and out and compounded the problem, O’Donnell explained.

Two Sprint Cup practices and XFINITY qualifying were canceled due to the delays, and the absence of the Cup practices, O’Donnell said, carried over into Sunday’s AAA Texas 500. Tire issues, first involving Joey Logano, whose left-rear shredded on Lap 10, put teams in a precarious guessing game early in the race.

“I think Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. probably summed it up best in terms of talking about the lack of that last practice, (where) a lot of times teams really dial in the tire pressures,” O’Donnell said. “Some would go perhaps too far, and you saw some of that happen early in Sunday’s race. You didn’t see that later in the race.”

Defending Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick also experienced tire trouble early in the race, but crew chief Rodney Childers claimed it was debris that caused it, as heard on the in-race driver-crew chief audio.

“I think there were one or two where it was debris on the track, and that happens,” O’Donnell said. “We do everything we can to make sure there’s nothing on the race track.”

Logano’s tire failure and subsequent damage to the No. 22 Team Penske Ford led to him going to the garage and finishing 40th. He is eighth in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings, 63 points below the cutoff line, heading into Phoenix.

Facing a must-win situation at Phoenix in order to advance to the Championship 4, Logano’s team won’t have much time to dwell on the Texas result, but one wonders whether a final practice Saturday evening  would have made a difference.

“That was a lot of discussion in the garage area … we talked to the drivers, the crew chiefs,” O’Donnell said about the decision to not hold a final Sprint Cup practice after the XFINITY Series race. “There’s a lot on the line and we certainly want to make every effort to get practice in, but after having those discussions, the teams felt like they were ready to start setting up the cars for the race and preparing for Sunday.”