The second race of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs takes place on Sunday, and the last four drivers in the playoff standings need to have a strong performance. The drivers are in Kansas City, Kansas for the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway. The race will start at 3 p.m. ET on the USA Network and also stream on the NBC Sports App.
Chase Elliott entered the playoffs as the No. 1 seed. But after a shaky performance at Darlington Raceway last week, the 2020 Cup Series Champion dropped to ninth place. The first 12 drivers advance to the next round of the playoffs, so that means Elliott will need to bounce back on Sunday so he won’t put himself in a do-or-die position next week. Joey Logano is in first place in the standingsย while William Bryon is in second. They are followed by Denny Hamiln, Christopher Bell and Tyler Reddick who won pole for Sunday’s race.ย
Videos by PopCulture.com
“It’s reassuring,” Reddick said after earning pole for the race. “The last few times we’ve been here, we’ve had a car capable of leading, and we’ve been able to do that. It’s just been a matter of putting together the whole day, which is something we’ve fought at time throughout the year โฆ Starting first is great any weekend, but being able to have that first pit stall is going to be key.”
Reddick reached the playoffs last year but was eliminated after the Round of 16. Before this year’s playoffs, Reddick spoke to the media about having his full capabilities while driving the Next Gen car. “We are still learning about this car every weekend it seems,” he said. “But I don’t know, what comes to mind when you ask that is that you still don’t know to a degree what might happen. Mainly because it’s a new car and weird, one-off things seem to happen. Whether it’s like the failure we fought at Michigan or the tire stuff that we had earlier in the year that seemed to go away. So, you can’t just blindly overstate or say, ‘oh, we will be fine, and we won’t have any of these issues, because it is still a completely new car. I don’t know, I feel like we have hit it pretty good on two days and the way that we did it, yeah, it was road course racing, but I feel like we can keep it going on the ovals too.”