Stat Pack Recap: 2024 Cup Series South Point 400
Joey Logano stole a win. Where does that leave the playoffs?
Race: Results | Analytics | Loop Data | Lap-by-lap Download
Qualifying: Results and lap download
Practice: Results and lap download
Strategy race. The finish to this was pretty exciting, but for a publication that typically looks at car performance through driver-colored glasses, a strategy race is difficult to analyze.
Joey Logano won. Christopher Bell finished second. Bell blew the field away, statistically speaking, leading in every metric by a sizeable margin. He was visibly vexed after the race.
The win puts Logano in the final four, miraculously so: for about an hour after the Roval race, we thought he'd been eliminated from the playoffs. That's a minor miracle. This season, Logano has the fifteenth-best average finish and fifteenth most points (if you strip out the playoff formality points). He has the eighth-best average running position, but the tenth-best weighted average running position — on average, his front-running happens in the early parts of races. He's only got a 52% success rate. But his GR-LR is fifth best, and that'll get you through a lot.
Where does this leave the playoffs? With two races and three spots to fight for, Bell, Kyle Larson, and William Byron sit pretty above the cut line. Denny Hamlin, who has the best numbers this year, is 27 points below Byron. Tyler Reddick is 30 out, Ryan Blaney is 47 out, and Chase Elliott is 53 out. We're not quite in stinker territory yet. Reddick finished 35th today after a flip. If that happens to any of the above-the-cut-line drivers at Homestead or Martinsville, the fourth Phoenix spot will open back up. And: any of the eight remaining could win.
| Driver | Start | Finish | ARP | PGAE | GR-LR | cPOMS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joey Logano | 10 | 1 | 6.76 | 30.74 | 4.23 | 0.9753 |
| Christopher Bell | 1 | 2 | 2.45 | 31.46 | 4.56 | 0.9841 |
| Daniel Suarez | 23 | 3 | 11.34 | 28.39 | 3.30 | 0.9689 |
| William Byron | 9 | 4 | 6.72 | 29.31 | 3.51 | 0.9779 |
| Alex Bowman | 3 | 5 | 6.95 | 38.36 | 2.49 | 0.9772 |