NASCAR: Review of Bristol – Looking Ahead to the Round of 12
Photo Credit: Fox News
NASCAR: Review of Bristol & Looking Ahead to the Round of 12
This past weekend we got to see the end of the round of 16 for NASCAR, and now know which 4 drivers were eliminated from contention in the next round. In this article, I will be quickly reviewing the race from this past Saturday at Bristol Motor Speedway, and then looking ahead to the Round of 12 this week at Texas Motor Speedway. So without further ado, let us begin with the review:
Breakdown and Review of Bristol & Standings
Bristol was quite the entertaining NASCAR race to watch, and it brought us our 19th different winner of the season with Chris Buescher. This race ultimately led to two of the more surprising eliminations in the first round, with Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick both being pretty weird to see, however with Busch losing his engine in 2 of the 3 races this round that is understandable. Tyler Reddick and Austin Dillon were also eliminated this weekend, which was somewhat less surprising, at least with Dillon, as he was a last-minute entry due to his win at Daytona.
The NASCAR race at Bristol was solely characterized by one thing, flat tire cautions. There were 7 separate instances of cautions solely caused by right-front flat tires, two of which had two drivers with right-front flats. Harrison Burton had 3 right-front flat tires at separate times throughout this race, it was just a calamity. This is primarily due to the long-run nature of Bristol where drivers will run as long as possible considering how small the track is to not go a few laps down on green flag pit stops. Considering the number of cautions, it came down to strategy and who played it best. This is why Buescher won this race without a doubt, he was not going to be able to make it to the end with the tires he was on, but ran it just long enough to get a caution call and come out in first.
Looking ahead to the NASCAR Round of 12
The playoff standings entering this weekend’s NASCAR race at Texas Motorspeedway are as follows:
- Chase Elliott (3040)
- Joey Logano (3025)
- Ross Chastain (3020)
- Kyle Larson (3019)
- William Byron (3015)
- Denny Hamlin (3013)
- Christopher Bell (3013)
- Ryan Blaney (3013)
- Chase Briscoe (3009)
- Alex Bowman (3007)
- Daniel Suarez (3007)
- Austin Cindric (3006)
This round also consists of 3 races, which are Texas, Talladega, and the Charlotte Roval respectively. This round will be one of the more chaos-filled ones, as there are still enough playoff drivers to make it interesting, but Talladega and then the Roval back-to-back is just asking for tempers to flare. Since Chase Elliott made it to the next round, the points reset to defaults for him and he sits atop the standings. This is another season where all 4 Hendrick Motorsports teams made the round of 12 as well. Surprise surprise I guess.
But with the Next Gen cars, it was somewhat cloudy what the standings would look like. With only 2 of the 4 Joe Gibbs Racing cars remaining, it makes for an interesting push to the Round of 8. You have Drivers from various different teams left, which will be intriguing. With 2nd place to 8th place split by 12 points, it is anybody’s game now.
