Predicting the 2019 NASCAR Cup Series playoff field
Could the fight to make the 16-driver NASCAR playoff field be a little easier in 2019?
The closure of Furniture Row Racing at the end of the 2018 season opens up a spot to a bevy of potential contenders in 2019 now that 2017 Cup Series champion Martin Truex Jr. is at Joe Gibbs Racing. Furniture Row’s absence could give Roush Fenway Racing the chance to get a driver into the playoffs after a playoff-less 2017 or a team like Richard Childress Racing to get both of its drivers in the field.
Or the rich could get richer. With Truex at JGR, it feels like a lock that all four Gibbs cars will make the playoffs. Daniel Suarez, the man Truex replaced at JGR, missed the playoffs in each of his first two seasons with the team. Truex could essentially be replacing himself in the playoff field.
Suarez is now at Stewart-Haas Racing, a team that got all four of its drivers into the 2018 playoffs and Kurt Busch is now at Chip Ganassi Racing. Jamie McMurray missed the playoffs in 2018 and Busch should be an upgrade in the No. 1 car in 2019.
The battle for the final few playoff spots could be fun over the summer. Here are the 16 drivers that we think will make the 2019 playoff field. After getting 14 of the 16 playoff drivers correct ahead of the 2018 season (sorry Austin Dillon and Alex Bowman), we’re shooting for perfection.
16. Alex Bowman
Bowman’s first full season in non-backmarker equipment went fairly well. Yeah, Hendrick Motorsports’ struggles were a big 2018 storyline but Bowman was never lower than 17th in the standings at any point in the season and spent the final 12 weeks of the regular season in 15th. That was good enough for a playoff spot, though Bowman was eliminated from the playoffs after a poor second round. He should get back to the playoffs in 2019, though a win may be asking too much.
“I wouldn’t say it suits my driving style,” Bowman said of NASCAR’s new rules. “I kind of grew up driving light horsepower cars and now we have a heavy low-horsepower car with a lot of downforce. So, it’s different. I’m going to have to adapt to it and learn it. But, so does everybody else.”
15. Daniel Suarez
This is perhaps our riskiest playoff pick. But Suarez in Stewart-Haas equipment is a more compelling choice than any of the possible alternatives to fill out the 16-driver playoff field. After two unfulfilling seasons at Joe Gibbs Racing, Suarez could be like Joey Logano and blossom with a move to a Ford team. Banking on a win in 2019 for Suarez is risky. But he should be consistent enough to make the playoffs ahead of anyone else not listed here.
“You need to have people who actually trust in yourself and people that have your back, and if you don’t have that combination of things something is gonna be missing,” Suarez said. “The perfect example is last year I would say that for myself it was a bad year, but we had good results. We had a pole position and we had a couple second-place finishes and we had some good results, and it’s not like I remembered how to drive in those races. We were just extremely inconsistent somehow and we couldn’t figure out the reason. Now I feel with new fresh air, a fresh change, new people and new energy, it was something very good for me.”
14. Kurt Busch
It’s hard not to see Busch’s move to Chip Ganassi Racing as a downgrade. Stewart-Haas Racing was the best four-car team in the Cup Series in 2018 and now Busch is moving to a two-car team and inheriting a No. 1 car that hasn’t visited victory lane since Talladega in 2013. Busch himself is an upgrade over Jamie McMurray and should make the playoffs. His best chance for a win will come at a restrictor plate track or a short track like Bristol.
13. Aric Almirola
Is Almirola due for a letdown in 2019? He finished fifth in 2018 in his first season with Stewart-Haas Racing and won at Talladega in the fall for his second-career win. Almirola had never finished any higher than 16th in the points in his Cup career.
That type of spike is typically unsustainable. But Almirola is driving for the team that was the best in the garage in 2018 and far and away the best team he’s ever driven for in his career. He should be a playoff contender for the foreseeable future even if fifth ends up more of an outlier than a sign of things to come.
“I learned a lot going through the playoffs and going as deep into the rounds as we did and getting that close to making it to the Championship 4,” Almirola said. “I learned how hard it is. I learned how incredibly, incredibly pressure packed it is. That is something that you can’t really learn or understand until you experience it yourself.”
12. Clint Bowyer
Did you know Bowyer hasn’t finished in the top 10 since the 2013 season? A late-season slump relegated Bowyer to 12th in the points standings at the end of 2018 but the season was a career renaissance of sorts for Bowyer. He won races for the first time since 2012 and should be a factor on short tracks once again. Bowyer, like Almirola, should be a playoff contender as long as Stewart-Haas is one of the best teams in the garage.
11. Kyle Larson
Larson could be in for a relatively rough 2019. He’s exceptional at finding speed in cars with lots of horsepower and relatively little downforce. And that’s the exact opposite approach that NASCAR took with its 2019 rules. Larson could feel the brunt of those rule changes as the advantages that he had in the cockpit are negated by NASCAR’s rules. Larson’s ability will ultimately get him a spot in the playoffs, however. And he could get his second Cup win at a track that isn’t two miles in length.
10. Erik Jones
You know your team is deep when you can make the case that Jones is Joe Gibbs Racing’s fourth-best driver. That’s not a slight to Jones, either. He’s a guy that looks destined for numerous Cup Series wins and got his first at Daytona in July. Jones should be a mainstay near the top 10 for most of the season and could make a run into the third round of the playoffs.
“It’s great to have three guys who have been around and really know what’s going on,” Jones said. “I have a lot of information to lean on and learn from, which is a good opportunity for me to continue to better myself. I think we’ve got a great lineup. It’s going to be interesting with the rules change but driver-wise I think our talent in our group is in a really good spot.”
9. Denny Hamlin
Both Hamlin and Jimmie Johnson should enjoy bounce back seasons in 2019. Hamlin is too good of a driver and Joe Gibbs Racing is too good of a team for him to go winless for a second-straight season. But Hamlin was pretty far off of the torrid pace that Busch set in 2018. That’s an alarming sign if you don’t think 2018 was an aberration. It says here that Hamlin makes it back to victory lane at least once.
“I’m looking forward to this one more than looking back on the last one simply because there’s just nothing I can change from this past year,” Hamlin said. “I couldn’t help the bad breaks that we had or the things that went wrong. All you can do is just figure out how can that not happen again.”
8. Jimmie Johnson
Johnson’s win in the Clash is a boost. Yeah, the Clash is an exhibition race and yeah, Johnson won the rain-shortened race after contact with Paul Menard caused a huge crash, but a win is a win. Especially when you’re a seven-time champion (still) in the midst of the longest winless drought of your career. Johnson gets a points win in 2019 with new crew chief Kevin Meendering and makes a run past the first round of the playoffs.
“Certainly, the change with [former crew chief] Chad Knaus moving over to [William Byron], and Kevin coming in for me, I think that fresh start is a weight lifted off of us. We had a lot of pressure on us to succeed. When we weren’t succeeding, that created more internal pressure, had us in our own slump of sorts.”
“This year is going to be much different. It’s already much lighter in general. I think it’s a lot to do with just the pressure we were putting on ourselves.”
7. Ryan Blaney
Blaney pointed out at Daytona 500 media day that he felt his team was better than the 10th-place finish he earned in 2018.
“I thought we should have finished higher in the points than what we did,” Blaney said. “Having that penalty after Texas was bad. Taking 20 points away there and then blowing up running second at Phoenix and finishing dead last really hurt us. We should have finished fifth or sixth in points and wound up 10th.”
Blaney will probably finish in that neighborhood of sixth to 10th again in 2019. A big step forward would be capitalizing on a race like Kansas or Bristol in 2018 where he led a bunch of laps but ended up with a wrecked car.
6. Chase Elliott
Elliott’s rise to Cup superstardom was complete in 2018. He won three races in the second half of the season (including two in the playoffs) and succeeded former teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. as NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver. Elliott should be a contender for multiple wins again in 2019 and his chances at racing for the title should come down to a moment at Phoenix for the third-straight season. Maybe this is the year Elliott breaks through.
5. Brad Keselowski
Keselowski will be a perennial title contender as long as he’s with Team Penske. Heck, the same goes for teammate and defending Cup Series champion Joey Logano. It’s hard to believe that five drivers have won Cup Series titles since Keselowski won the championship in 2012 but the title wealth has been split pretty evenly. Only Jimmie Johnson (2013 and 2016) has won two titles in that span.
Can Keselowski get his second title? If the team has more speed relative to the field in 2019 than it did in 2018, it’s very possible.
4. Martin Truex Jr.
The scenery change for Truex Jr. is pretty subtle. Furniture Row Racing had a technical alliance with Joe Gibbs Racing and Truex will still have crew chief Cole Pearn and much of his Furniture Row Racing crew with him at JGR. That familiarity should mean a pretty flat learning curve at JGR. Truex immediately becomes Busch’s challenger for JGR supremacy and should be in the mix for the championship once again at the end of the season.
“Less nervous about it just because I know things,” Truex said of the transition to JGR. “I talk about simple things like I know what their brakes are like. I know what their throttle pedal feels like. I know what kind of steering they run. When I’ve switched teams before it’s like starting over a lot of times. When I went from DEI to MWR it was like completely starting over. All new people. All different parts and pieces. All new equipment. Everything felt different.”
3. Joey Logano
What’s Joey Logano going to do for an encore? The No. 22 team played the 2018 season to perfection. More bonus points in the regular season would have been nice but Logano won the first race of the third round to guarantee a championship berth and then beat three champions for the title. Logano had an average finish of 8.6 in the playoffs even with a 37th-place finish at Phoenix. That’s the recipe for a title. Now that the No. 22 team knows what to do in the playoffs, it’s easy to see them replicating it.
2. Kyle Busch
Busch should be in contention for the title once again. The bigger storyline surrounding his 2019 season could be his chase of 200 overall NASCAR series wins. Busch has 194 combined Cup Series, Xfinity Series and Truck Series wins. With 12 starts in the lower two series and 26 Cup starts, it’s not out of the question that Busch could get six (or more) NASCAR wins in 2019. Expect a lot of talk revolving around Busch’s pursuit and Richard Petty’s Cup Series record of 200 wins even if the marks aren’t really all that comparable.
“I’d like to think that the good drivers and the good teams and the good cars will still be able to excel eventually,” Busch said of the 2019 rules. “We’ll be able to figure it out and kind of get to the point where you can be the best because you are the best.”
1. Kevin Harvick
The 2019 season is Harvick’s 19th in the Cup Series. In his first nine seasons, Harvick had 11 wins and finished in the top 10 in four seasons. In the most recent nine seasons, Harvick has racked up 34 wins and hasn’t finished any lower than eighth in the standings. Expect more of that late-career surge from Harvick in 2019. He’s our pick to win the championship and a second title will solidify his status as a surefire NASCAR Hall of Famer. The No. 4 team should be the best at figuring out how to find speed in NASCAR’s new rules.
“You have to be able to reset your mind and address the new challenges as they come forward because right now we have no clue what the races are going to look like next week going to Atlanta,” Harvick said. “You don’t know if you need a low downforce car or high downforce car. As teams we have a ton to learn and really no clue what direction it is going to go in at this point.”
Drivers missing out
Chris Buescher: JTG-Daugherty Racing has made the playoffs once. Buescher would need to get a stunning win to give the team a second playoff berth.
William Byron: Byron could end up being the guy who finishes 17th in the points standings. And if we were picking anyone in this group to replace a playoff driver, Byron would be the choice.
Austin Dillon: Dillon has made the playoffs each of the last two years with relatively fluky wins. We’re not doubting the validity of those wins. A win is a win. But he’s led a combined three laps in each of those two victories.
Daniel Hemric: The rookie is Dillon’s new teammate at Richard Childress Racing. Finishing in the top 20 will be considered a good season.
Ryan Newman: Newman is now at Roush Fenway Racing. That’s a downgrade from Richard Childress Racing. It’ll be a surprise if he makes the playoffs.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr.: Stenhouse’s best bet to win a race may be the Daytona 500.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter
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