The NASCAR Cup Series season has reached the midpoint following Sunday’s wild, rainy race at New Hampshire.
Ahead of Sunday’s race at the Nashville Superspeedway, 10 drivers have wins in the first 18 Cup Series races in 2024. That list does not include former champions Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Joey Logano, nor rising stars Ross Chastain and Ty Gibbs.
Part one of The Tennessean’s NASCAR midseason roundtable discusses the surprises and disappointments of a very entertaining first half of the 2024 Cup Series season.
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What do you make of the news regarding Stewart-Haas Racing’s closure after the season? Will an SHR driver make the playoffs?
Mike Organ: Too little success and too much cost led to the shutdown of Stewart-Haas Racing. And it didn’t come as a great surprise. There had been speculation the end was near.
Rookie Josh Berry is the only Stewart-Haas Racing driver with a chance to make the playoffs and while he has run well lately he remains a longshot.
Nick Gray: Chase Briscoe is the best chance to make the playoffs on points, but the Josh Berry-Rodney Childers partnership is starting to produce some strong finishes in the No. 4 Ford. I lean toward no SHR drivers in the playoffs, but Daytona is always the outlier.
As for the big picture, Briscoe, Berry and Noah Gragson are running well enough that there would be some legitimate promise for SHR in 2025 if it continued on through next season and beyond. That’s not happening of course, and it’s tough for a unique group of drivers. Ryan Preece has struggled in the No. 41 Ford, but he isn’t the only one to struggle in that ride in recent years. Will this be his final chance in a full-time Cup ride? Berry isn’t the youngest rookie, but surely he’s shown enough in the Cup Series the last two years to be an attractive candidate for a ride. Briscoe and Gragson should be OK long-term. But it’s never a good thing for the series to lose more than 10% of the full-time rides in one decision.
Tom Kreager: No SHR driver will make the NASCAR Cup playoffs. That speaks a lot to the state of Stewart-Haas Racing this year. But who would have guessed after Kevin Harvick retired the team itself would exit the sport a season later?
What is the biggest surprise in the first 18 races?
Mike Organ: The close finishes in the Next Gen era have been a welcome surprise and two of the closest have come this season.
Kyle Larson beat Chris Buescher by .001 seconds at Kansas Speedway for the closest. Earlier in the season Daniel Suarez beat Ryan Blaney in Atlanta to the finish line by .003 seconds, which was the second-closest.
Nick Gray: Joey Logano should be an automatic title contender every season, but he had a lackluster 2023 season and is in danger of missing the playoffs in 2024.
Tom Kreager: Martin Truex Jr. Truex’s announcement that he was going to retire at the end of the 2024 NASCAR season was something I didn’t see coming when the year began. Now, he may race a little next season, but seeing him not in a car on a weekly basis will be different.
Fill in the blank: The biggest disappointment of the first half of the 2024 season is _____
Mike Organ: I realize Kyle Busch is in the final chapter of racing career and his time as a consistent Cup contender is in the past, but I really expected a better 2024 season for the driver of the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet. Busch fizzled two weeks ago at Iowa and last week at New Hampshire, continuing the frustration he has experienced all season. He has only two top-five finishes and five top-10s.
On top of all that, Busch extended the longest winless streak of his career to 39 races and likely won’t make the playoffs.
Nick Gray: Kyle Busch and Richard Childress Racing. Busch has been running better than the race results let on, but the No. 8 Chevrolet has run the gamut of ways to falter late in races. Austin Dillon has been an absolute non-factor with a worse 2024 (32nd in points, 24.7 average finish) than a terrible 2023 season (29th in points, 21.8 average finish). How can RCR return in 2025 with the status quo?
Tom Kreager: Kyle Busch. It’s not that Kyle Busch hasn’t won. It’s the meltdowns we are seeing on nearly a weekly basis. He’s not handled other drivers’ aggressive style. That’s interesting considering Busch’s style early in his career.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: NASCAR Cup Series 2024 midseason surprises, disappointments
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