While Daytona-winning hardware is a trophy-case superstar for any driver, there remains a lot else on the line beyond a victory Saturday.<\/p>\n
Although 14 drivers have already secured their Playoff positions and Hendrick Motorsports\u2019 William Byron wrapped up the Regular Season Championship a week ago at Richmond (Va.) Raceway, there are still five drivers separated by only 23 points ranked second through sixth in the standings \u2013 important for the Playoff bonus points awarded by ranking.<\/p>\n
Byron\u2019s Hendrick teammate Chase Elliott is second in the standings, with only a five-point advantage on third place, Joe Gibbs Racing\u2019s Denny Hamlin. Hendrick\u2019s Kyle Larson is fourth, 12 points behind his teammate Elliott.<\/p>\n
Team Penske\u2019s Ryan Blaney is 15 points off Elliott and Joe Gibbs Racing\u2019s Christopher Bell is 23 points back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only other main priority is Ryan\u2019s (Blaney) got a great chance to get to second in points, which is obviously a ton of playoff points, whereas Joey [Logano] and I don\u2019t\u2019 really have that opportunity,\u201d the 2022 Daytona 500 winner Austin Cindric said of Team Penske\u2019s overall gameplan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying the priority will be Ryan, but if we can get Ryan points \u2013 points don\u2019t really matter for me regular season-wise, so I think that\u2019s really the only thing that fall in the category of what else is out there. If we can get one of us a win, even having another Ford in the Playoffs is a big deal, so we\u2019ll do our best to try and contribute to that cause.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bell conceded his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team is also very conscious of the points-situation and potential of moving up in the standings to collect more bonus points. Of the five drivers vying to move up in points position \u2013 only the three-time Daytona 500 champion Hamlin and 2021 summer winner Blaney have previous Daytona victories at NASCAR Cup Series race at Daytona.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt definitely is [on my mind] and we need to finish up as high as we can in the points, but you just never know how these races are going to play out,\u201d said Bell, a three-time race winner.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could go tomorrow and score a bunch of points and the rest of guys could score a bunch of points and it doesn\u2019t matter. So, we\u2019ll roll the dice and see where we end up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Daytona-winning hardware is a trophy-case superstar for any driver, there remains a lot else on the line…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":167837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[7728,4422,12440,4424,16412,15865,1833,1406,6180,6166,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-167836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-chase","9":"tag-chase-elliott","10":"tag-daytona","11":"tag-hendrick-motorsports","12":"tag-joe-gibbs-racing","13":"tag-kyle-larson","14":"tag-motorsports","15":"tag-nascar","16":"tag-racing","17":"tag-series","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115075299707499811","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}