But still, actually doing it and adding seven more playoff points to his second round starting point actually makes his pathway to the Final Four easier, because he may not have to win again to get there. Earlier in the week, he projected that he would need to win a Round of 8 race because he just didn\u2019t have the playoff point advantage some of his peers do.<\/p>\n
Now he does.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, it’s definitely nice to start off, be able to lock our way into the round of 12,\u201d Briscoe said. \u201cI’m way more excited about seven Playoff points for the next couple rounds, right? That’s something we were at a pretty big deficit at. To add seven, that’s a huge deal going forward. I was way more excited about that than locking into the round of 12.\u201d<\/p>\n
Upset alerts
\n ![\"Joey](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/joey-logano-team-penske-ford.jpg\")
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Joey Logano, Team Penske Ford<\/p>\n
Photo by: Logan Riely \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, 10 of the 16 drivers in the chase for the championship finished 17th or worse and made it not impossible that several expected favorites could face elimination in two weeks after Gateway and Bristol.<\/p>\n
Defending champion Joey Logano<\/a> finished 20th and was a non-factor.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has been a good track for us in the past, but I don\u2019t know,\u201d Logano said. \u201cSome of our cars were decent at times but not like we have been here. It\u2019s a bit of a head-scratcher to try to understand. I don\u2019t know where we are in points but it\u2019s obviously not the day we wanted. We just did a good job of not making a bad day worse.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Teammate Ryan Blaney<\/a> suffered splitter damage on a Lap 208 restart and his car was never the same en route to finishing 18th.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were multiple instances, one on pit road,\u201d Blaney said.\u00a0\u201cWe had to start in the back and then getting spun off turn four killed the splitter, and then we came from the back to 19th and then the caution came out as soon as we got to pit road and sent us all the way back again.\u00a0Just about everything that could go wrong tonight went wrong.\u00a0At least we recovered to where we did, which is okay, I guess.\u00a0It just wasn\u2019t a smooth night.\u201d<\/p>\n The Hendrick Motorsports<\/a> quartet of Kyle Larson<\/a>, William Byron<\/a>, Alex Bowman<\/a> and Chase Elliott<\/a> suffered a well-documented myriad of misfortunes.<\/p>\n Read Also:<\/p>\n Christopher Bell<\/a> is just 11 points above the cutline after getting into a pit road collision with Carson Hocevar<\/a>, which damaged his right front splitter, and relegated him to a 29th place finish.<\/p>\n For the most part, if you are a driver that won multiples races and scored a lot of playoff points, it\u2019s easy to stave off elimination because there are generally two-to-three longshots in the Round of 16.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the saving grace this time too because the longshots did not do what they needed to either with Shane Van Gisbergen<\/a> coughing up nearly the entirety of his buffer due to a poor-performing car and getting bit by a caution right after he pit in the final stage.<\/p>\n ‘SVG’ finished 20th at Darlington in the spring and this is his favorite oval type — low grip and needing to move around the track to find speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, he’s going to need some help at Gateway and Bristol.<\/p>\n “I think so, yeah, because I don’t know next week’s track and then Bristol’s very tough,” Van Gisbergen said. “So yeah, just have to try and do our best job and hopefully we get good results in the coming weeks.”<\/p>\n Read Also:<\/p>\n Josh Berry<\/a> qualified exceptionally, starting third, and immediately rendered it moot with a Lap 1, Turn 1 crash from the second row that left him with a 38th place finish and a 19 point deficit.<\/p>\n “I’m not really sure what happened there,” Berry said. “If we missed something or … but yeah, I mean, you can’t drive these things when they’re hitting the track that hard and especially on the first lap when you’re not expecting it.”<\/p>\n Austin Dillon<\/a> finishing 23rd did little to capitalize on the misfortunes of the usual contenders for that matter as well.<\/p>\n Big picture, there are some names at risk, that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t miss this first round.<\/p>\n Updated Playoff Grid<\/p>\n Chase Briscoe Adv. Improved odds Chase Briscoe, Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota<\/p>\n Photo by: Logan Riely \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n As Briscoe alluded, bigger than simply winning is the seven playoff points he got for sweeping both stages and the victory combined because those carry over into the second round.<\/p>\n He started this round with 10 playoff points that go towards seeding and will start the second round with a minimum of 17. Should he win stages or another race at Gateway and Bristol, that tally will increase even further.<\/p>\n Briscoe said earlier in the week that he expected to make the Round of 8 but that he would have to win there because of his points deficit. Now, a pathway to make it on championship points is starting to materialize.<\/p>\n Does this change his internal expectations at all?<\/p>\n \u201cI might have gotten taken out of context on Media Day so what I will say is we expect to make the Round of 4 at Joe Gibbs Racing but if you don\u2019t make it to the Round of 8, that\u2019s a huge failure,\u201d Briscoe said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the sport in general, there’s 8-10 really good cars. It’s JGR and Hendrick cars and a couple of Penske cars. If you aren’t one of those top eight, it normally means you didn’t have the most successful season.<\/p>\n \u201cStarting the Playoffs as a team, we feel we’re definitely capable of being Championship 4 caliber, and even the champion. It’s a matter of putting 10 weeks together. Obviously we started week one the way we need to.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, if some of those Penske, Hendrick and other Gibbs cars meet a premature elimination come Bristol, that makes the pathway all the easier.<\/p>\n In this article<\/p>\n Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It would be hyperbole to say this one single race changed the entire dynamic of the NASCAR Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[79659,72096,72097,425,6327,79660,99],"class_list":["post-124529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-chase-briscoe-win","tag-darlington-ii","tag-darlington-raceway","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-cup","tag-pit-road-woes-shake-up-nascar-playoffs","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Denny Hamlin<\/a> +43
Kyle Larson +38
Tyler Reddick<\/a> +35
Bubba Wallace<\/a> +25
William Byron +25
Ryan Blaney +22
Ross Chastain<\/a> +21
Austin Cindric<\/a> +12
Christopher Bell +11
Chase Elliott +9
Shane Van Gisbergen +3
—
Joey Logano -3
Austin Dillon -8
Alex Bowman -19
Josh Berry -19<\/p>\n
\n ![\"Chase](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/chase-briscoe-joe-gibbs-racing.jpg\")
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