2024 NASCAR Cup Championship Preview: Five storylines to watch

The drivers who will fight for the title in Phoenix are Ryan Blaney, William Byron, Joey Logano and Tyler Reddick. Blaney is the reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion, while Logano, his Penske Racing teammate, is a two-time series champion, winning in 2018 and 2022. Byron and Reddick (whose 23XI team is co-owned by Michael Jordan) are seeking their first championships.

The wildest card in the field might be 34-year-old Logano. The Connecticut native finished 15th in the regular season, but two of his three wins in 2024 came during the Chase, and he appears to be peaking at the right time. He has won three races in 31 career starts at Phoenix, the most of any driver in Championship 4. The only other win at the 1-mile oval goes to Byron, who won the final race of the season there last year.

One of the most interesting things to watch for on Sunday is the paint trade that could take place between Blaney and Byron. For about four years Byron was dating Blaney’s younger sisterErin – Byron even referred to Blaney as his “brother-in-law” during a post-race interview at Martinsville last year. It was a feel-good family story.

But now everything could be different. Garage scuttlebutt is that the couple is no longer together, and at least not for a good portion of this season. It could all be just a harmless rumor, apart from the conflict between the two drivers that flared up at Darlington in May. During mid-race action, Byron pushed driver Martin Truex Jr.’s car into Blaney, resulting in an accident that damaged Blaney’s car and knocked him out of the race. The accident prompted Blaney to explode over his team’s radio at both drivers: “I’m going to kill these two motherfuckers, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Blaney later walked back his comments. However, there is a chance that the ongoing tensions between him and Byron could come to the fore on Sunday in what will be the most consequential race of the season for both drivers.

Truex will retire from full-time driving after the Phoenix race, ending one of the most consequential Cup careers of the playoff era. His career in NASCAR was the epitome of slow building – he worked in the Cup Series for a dozen years before finding real success. From 2004 to 2014, Truex won a total of two races and never finished in the top 10 in the final points standings. “There [were] “There are many more hard years than good years,” he recently told Fox Sports. “But those hard years somehow make you who you are and they make you appreciate the good times.”

And there were many good times over the next 10 years. Truex transformed from a perennial favorite into a bona fide star. He won the 2017 Cup championship, finished second three times and enters his final race with 34 series wins. Now 44, he still plans to race every now and then, but says he wants to spend more time off the track than on it. “It’s tiring,” he says of life in the Cup, and it would be nice if the schedule wasn’t printed out for me a year in advance. The most important thing is really just having some time for myself to do what I want and still get some racing done.”

The 31-year-old Californian was the best driver in the Cup in almost every respect this season. He won the best six races in the series and finished at speedways (Charlotte, Kansas, Las Vegas) and road courses (Sonoma), as well as at Bristol and Indy, two of the sport’s most storied venues. He also finished in the top 10 in 17 of his 34 starts and led all drivers by 1,686 laps. From start to finish he was the driver to beat almost every week.

However, he was eliminated from NASCAR Championship 4 due to a series of self-inflicted injuries on the final lap of the Chase. On October 20 in Las Vegas, he suffered a pit stop failure, and the following week at Homestead, the Hendrick Motorsports driver suffered a flat tire and a collision with the wall in Turn 2. None of the rocks were catastrophic, but they helped keep him outside the top 10 in both races. At Martinsville last week he couldn’t find the speed to finish better than third. “We had a lot of bonus points, we had 20 more than the next guy,” Larson said after Martinsville. “We just had two unfortunate races. I think the victories are very beneficial. I don’t want to say there’s anything wrong with the format. You just can’t have two bad races in the round of 16.”

When NASCAR launched the Chase before the 2004 season, it was the fastest-growing sport in the United States, a juggernaut that would one day rival professional football on Sundays. But the Cup Series postseason never caught the attention of the NFL. TV ratings for NASCAR have been declining for 10 years, including last season’s championship race an average of only three million viewers. (For comparison, the average regular-season NFL game in 2023 drew 17.9 million viewers.)

The format hasn’t caught on, but NASCAR hasn’t managed to settle on a Chase it can live with either. First, the number of drivers was expanded from 10 to 12, and then to 16 in 2014. Back then, NASCAR divided the final 10 of the season into four rounds, with a winner-take-all race featuring four finalists – the framework , which still exists today. However, stage points were added to the mix in 2017 to reduce the volatility caused by the format.

But there are still ways to game the system, and the shenanigans that overshadowed the end of the race last week in Martinsville revealed that fact. As Byron was on the verge of being eliminated from Championship 4, he was bothered by two other Chevrolet drivers who were not participating in the Chase – Ross Chastain and Auston Dillon. Byron was further supported as NASCAR has disqualified a car from the championship Das had taken an illegal step to get into the qualifying position. Even some of them The drivers seem to have had enough.

With a format that has changed so many times, there shouldn’t be too much drama with another round of tweaks. Or, better yet, NASCAR could make its title race a season-long points affair. That’s what Formula 1 and IndyCar still do. There’s no shame in trying to get it right.