Darlington Turning Point: Harrison Burton's future; incoming drama in regular-season finale?

Here’s what’s happening in the world of NASCAR with Daytona in the rearview and Darlington (Sun., 6 p.m. ET, USA) up next.

THE LINEUP ️

1️⃣ OK, he’s in — but what’s next for Harrison Burton?

2️⃣ Southern 500 finale … what more could you ask for?

3️⃣ Has Kyle Busch forgotten how to speedway race?

4️⃣ Keeping it a buck — it takes about 100

5️⃣ Catch the pack — news and notes from around the garage

1. OK, he’s in — but what’s next for Harrison Burton?

NASCAR’s newest first-time winner finds himself in the unique position of competing for a championship in this year’s playoffs … for the team that fired him last month.

Out of a job, but into the playoffs.

It‘s almost hard to grasp Harrison Burton‘s past few months, seeing his team choose its “obvious” driver of the future — a driver other than him — based on performance, then delivering a landmark, 100th victory to NASCAR‘s most historic team to clinch a postseason berth and elevate the organization’s outlook for years to come.

Not only did Burton‘s victory mark the largest playoff deficit overcome in history, his win — the first for Wood Brothers Racing since 2017 — came at a pivotal point in the 23-year-old‘s racing career, with just 11 races remaining before he faces the great unknowns of free agency, with most available competitive rides already snatched up.

Few, if any, expected the North Carolina native to be a factor the rest of the way after WBR anointed Josh Berry the new pilot of the No. 21 Ford last month. Yet, here we are, now wondering what Burton‘s prospects might be for both his postseason push and pending plans for 2025.

MORE: Key players in 2024-25 Silly Season

We‘ve seen plenty of one-off superspeedway winners in the past peter out after their moment in the sun — former WBR driver Trevor Bayne only won two more Xfinity Series races and is out of the sport at age 33 after becoming the youngest Daytona 500 winner in 2011, for instance — but could Burton‘s win potentially have saved his career?

You know, it‘s difficult to fathom a 23-year-old son of a cusp Hall of Famer who was viewed as a hot prospect this decade as being in need of “saving his career,” but it‘s possible that‘s exactly what he just did. It wasn‘t just the fact that he finally won — and right on schedule, as you‘ll see in the chart later on down the page — but that he did so rather adeptly, outmaneuvering NASCAR‘s literal winningest driver in history on the final lap with unquestionably the most pressure he‘s ever felt with a steering wheel in his hands.

This might not have the Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racings of the NASCAR world lighting up his cell phone for a premier 2025 ride, but surely Burton warrants more consideration above a middling Xfinity or Truck Series ride for next year. After all, this is a driver that managed to put four wins on the board in 2020 with current Cup stars Chase Briscoe and Austin Cindric running silly on the NXS that year, combining to win nearly half of the season‘s 33 races.

Four wins don‘t happen by accident, and perhaps there‘s a team out there looking to catch lightning in a bottle. It‘s not impossible to think there are some dominoes to fall over the coming months that see Burton remain in the Cup Series when the dust settles and 2025 rolls around; though it’s no guarantee, the window feels a little more open now. Even if not, we‘re starting to see instances of drivers to struggle at the Cup level in their early 20s drop down a series or two for more seasoning before ultimately returning; his Ford stablemate and reigning NXS champ Cole Custer being the most recent example.

Even still, come next week Burton will be one of 16 remaining drivers still vying for the 2024 Cup Series championship — which is no small feat in itself, as some collection from the group of title hopefuls in Martin Truex Jr., Ty Gibbs, Chris Buescher, Bubba Wallace, Ross Chastain, Busch and Briscoe will be out of contention. While he isn‘t expected to be a serious contender for the championship — Burton is still the lowest-ranked full-time driver in points, with just 306 total — beating any of those guys in the standings is an accomplishment.

Anything can happen in the playoffs, especially with a pair of drafting-style tracks in the first two rounds, and it‘s possible Burton isn‘t done padding his resume for any prospective employers might be eyeing him. And there are certainly more on that list than there were a week ago.

2. Southern 500 finale … what more could you ask for?

One of NASCAR’s crown jewels will officially determine the 16-driver field for the 2024 NASCAR Playoffs — it also happens to be arguably the hardest race in the sport.

Sunday night is going to be anything but tame.

Darlington Raceway — the track “Too Tough to Tame” — serves as the regular-season finale for the first time this Sunday, and it‘s already setting up to be an instant classic. Not only will the final result of the most hotly contested Regular Season Championship battle to date be determined, but the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs field will be set, and it‘s anything but settled at the moment.

Tyler Reddick paces the field with a 17-and-18-point lead over fellow title contenders — and Hendrick Motorsports teammates — Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott. We literally could see the three of them battling for both the race win and regular-season crown Sunday night in what might wind up being a preview of the actual title race at Phoenix Raceway later on. On top of that, five drivers are trying to point their way into the field of 16 with just three spots available, with the rest of the drivers in the standings behind them — including a two-time champ riding both a lengthy playoff appearance and winning-in-a-season streak that he certainly would not like to see snapped — gunning for their respective shots at glory with their only remaining chance being to win one of NASCAR‘s crown jewels with pressure at its absolute highest measure.

Burton‘s Daytona win just further complicated the playoff picture, adding a third driver to the field below the top 16 in points, pushing that bubble line down even more. Coming into Sunday, a pair of drivers considered 2024 playoff locks — one of whom was a 2022 Championship 4 contender — have Ross Chastain and Bubba Wallace sweating even making the playoffs at a time when they theoretically should‘ve just been concerned about adding a crown jewel win to their collection. Toss in there Kyle Busch, mesmerizingly 106 points out of the picture and in full must-win mode, and the desperation among those three drivers, three of the most successfully aggressive in the garage, and it‘s enough to ramp things up to a degree that drama almost feels like an inevitability rather than a possibility.

MORE: Regular-season goals and playoff pursuits boil down to Darlington

Oh, and if that weren‘t enough — Sunday evening‘s race is considered by most of the garage to be the toughest event on the schedule, with drivers gripping and ripping for 500 miles of grueling, wall-riding action with changing conditions from day-to-night that have crew chiefs tossing and turning in bed all week just thinking about it.

“Darlington is probably the most unique track on the schedule, just from the way that you drive the track, how narrow it is, how the risk vs. reward is,” No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell said via teleconference on Tuesday. “That table is completely different than most of the other tracks, because you’re basically forced to put your car right up against the fence to have any sort of pace at all. So with that being said, it’s just you have to be on point all 500 miles, and you’re going to have to be up against the fence all 500 miles. So you know, you have to be comfortable putting your car in that position and driving hard when it’s time to drive hard, and you can’t make mistakes whenever it’s time to drive hard, and then whenever it’s time to cruise and not push the car, you still have to be in that exact same line but figure out how to just back it up just a little bit so that you’re not putting your car in jeopardy.

“So yeah, I mean, it’s a very, very tough race.”

No pressure, right?

3. Kyle Petty analysis: ‘Has Kyle Busch forgotten how to speedway race?‘

Kyle Petty sounds off on Kyle Busch’s decision not to block the top lane at Daytona, costing him a win and a playoff berth.

4. Keeping it a buck — it takes about 100

Harrison Burton won in his 98th career start, matching other current top drivers — along with his dad Jeff, who won in his 96th — who also scored their first career win right around start No. 100.

Driver	Start No.	Event date	Track
Harrison Burton	98	8/24/2024	Daytona
Tyler Reddick	92	7/3/2022	Road America
William Byron	98	8/29/2020	Daytona
Chase Elliott	99	8/5/2018	Watkins Glen
Kyle Larson	99	8/28/2016	Michigan