NASCAR insiders surprised by 'lack of chaos' at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Many expected the opener of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs at Atlanta Motor Speedway over the weekend to be absolute anarchy. That’s far from what we saw on Sunday afternoon.

On the latest episode of The Teardown, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic broke down why Atlanta was so different from what many drivers and experts alike expected, and which drivers benefitted the most from the way it all shook out.

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“So we have Joey Logano through, and you know, I’m not sure that this Atlanta race was the amount of chaos that was predicted,” Gluck stated. “There was no true big one, but you certainly had some drivers get impacted by things that happened in the race. I guess we’ll start at the beginning, right, because Kyle Larson, Stage 1, he’s running P3, he looks like he’s going to be having a good finish to the stage. Suddenly, out of nowhere, his car seems to snap loose, and he overcorrects, and he’s done, just like that.

” Now, you could say, ‘Oh my gosh, this superspeedway,’ or something. I don’t think that was really super speedway related. He, you know, it was a hard tire. The car was a little bit out of control, maybe, at the moment. Everybody was screaming loose in that first stage. He got loose, and that’s it. Now, the bad part of that, superspeedway-wise, was Chase Briscoe, you know, not being able to drive through.

“Well, he drove through Larson, but not drive through the wreck and the smoke, and so that was really unfortunate for Chase Briscoe, because that was somebody who I did have going far, as my dark horse in the playoffs, I think, to the Round of 8.”

In addition to Larson and Briscoe, it wasn’t a good afternoon for Denny Hamlin, who left Atlanta only up two points above the cut-line for the Round of 12. Atlanta’s reconfiguration has led to some chaotic races, but Bianchi agreed that we didn’t see that over the weekend.

“This race, how it played out, was so different from what I expected,” Bianchi added. “There was so much trepidation in this race. Everybody kind of thought this was going to be tumultuous, a lot of chaos. You know, typical races, what we’ve seen at Atlanta since they’ve done the reconfiguration, and largely, it didn’t really happen that way.

“I mean, yes, Larson crashed, but this wasn’t, you know, we didn’t have a ton of title contenders leave here, you know, scratching their heads, going, ‘Man, what could we have done differently? We’re in a hole now.’ Even Denny Hamlin, who did not have a good weekend across the board for reasons on the track and off the racetrack, still left here +2, and, you know, heading to two racetracks where he should be much, much better.

“This did not play out at all like I thought it would, but it was still a very good race, with a very expected outcome, in that Team Penske was really the dominating force throughout the race, whether it was winning the stages, leading the laps, or winning the overall race, they do what they do on superspeedway races so often.”

While Atlanta featured an unexpected race with a common result, as Team Penske was the team to beat on the superspeedway, perhaps we’ll see more chaos at Watkins Glen and Bristol over the next two weeks, as the Cup Series looks to trim it’s playoff field from 16 to 12, and many drivers fight for their right to remain in the mix.