DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Is the risk worth the reward?
That will be the question 40 teams and drivers ask every lap during Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC, Peacock, NBC Sports App, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
With two races left in the Cup Series regular season, little has been determined from a points perspective and half the field will be looking to score their first victory of the season to clinch a berth in the 16-driver playoff field.
Between the battle for the Regular Season Championship, drivers already locked in attempting to get more playoff points, and winless drivers trying to use Daytona as their Hail Mary into the postseason, agendas will vary within the close-quartered pack racing.
Carson Hocevar enters Daytona coming off back-to-back top 10s at Richmond and Michigan. A victory is the only path Hocevar has to make the postseason and the momentum for the Spire Motorsports rookie will certainly aid in the challenge to come Saturday.
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“Everybody has their own agendas. That’s what makes it so difficult,” Hocever said during Saturday’s media availabilities. “But a lot of times what makes this race pretty good is there’s a handful of Chevys that need to try and win the regular-season champ. There’s some that are trying to get in the playoffs, and there’s some that have zero care for stage points and just have to win, and that’s it. So it makes it difficult to kind of work and choose and know what’s the right deal to do. But actually, it probably is what makes this race pretty exciting. It always shakes it up. It’s always different than Talladega, or the (Daytona) 500.”
Coming from the short-track scene, mainly before the jump to the national series, rookie Josh Berry is still learning the ropes around drafting tracks. However, a productive Friday afternoon in qualifying put seven Fords into the top 10 starting spots for the race, including Berry, who will start fifth in the No. 4 for Stewart-Haas Racing.
“It’s a really good improvement over what we had here in February and as well as Talladega,” Berry said. “So having the track position, having a better pit stall, all those things are definitely really helpful and exciting. So it’s always a balance. You run hard to stay up front, you use more fuel. So it’s hard to say how all that will work out.”
Saving fuel will once again be a factor Saturday evening. A 35-lap opening stage will allow for drivers to go all out for points if they need with the fuel window around 40 laps, but the final two stages are 60 and 65 laps, respectively, requiring at least one stop for fuel.
The goal for saving fuel? To have the shortest pit stop possible to gain track position and set up for the finish.
One of the drivers needing a win to make the playoffs and in one of the best positions to do so entering Saturday night’s race is Todd Gilliland. He and Front Row Motorsports teammate Michael McDowell locked out the front row with blistering qualifying laps in both rounds. Gilliland’s track position early on will be a good building block for the 160-lap thriller, but the No. 38 team will have some adversity to overcome as it lost pit-stall selection for failing pre-race inspection twice.
Even with the absence of one of the coveted pit stalls, Gilliland is still looking forward to staying out front during the race.
“It’s definitely really nice to at least have a good starting spot, right?” Gilliland said. “You can pass and I’m sure we’ll be at the front and the back throughout the whole race at some point, but at least being able to start up front right? The field is the deepest it’s going to be right when the green flag drops, and recently I guess we’ve kind of seen, I mean, at least in the 500, an early wreck. It’s just nice to be ahead of those first few incidents.”
Entering Saturday as the most recent race winner, superspeedway winner and on a hot streak of 10 top 10s in the last 11 races, Tyler Reddick should be among the favorites for another strong run. However, he’ll have to manage a clean race to hold his slim 10-point lead over Chase Elliott for the Regular Season Championship, a position the four-year veteran is in for the first time in at the Cup level.
There’s no crystal ball to see how the flow of Saturday night will shape, but while the No. 45 23XI Racing team doesn’t have a specific strategy locked in, they have provisional ideas for any scenario.
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“It’s hard to look in the future and know how it’s going to play out,” Reddick said. “We just try to have a plan, and then a backup plan and then a plan when seemingly no other plans make sense. I’ll just do my part in the car, and I’ll let those guys figure it out. They can see a lot more of what’s going then me. Just focus on what’s going to be important for what I can control inside the car and that should give us some options.”
