INDIANAPOLIS – A seven-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion is out. He drives a Hendrick Motorsports car and is among the top funded teams in the entire field. A Stewart-Haas Racing driver is also out. That car too is one of the most funded.

A Roush/Fenway Racing car is in.

Let that sink in.

Ryan Newman driving a car that hasn’t won since 2011 for an organization that hasn’t won in now 81 races as a driver who hasn’t won in 94 races himself are in the playoffs.

Newman, just did what Ryan Newman does.

He didn’t score any stage points on Sunday. He needed them but didn’t. Jimmie Johnson scored eight. Daniel Suarez had five. Clint Bowyer earned six. Newman? Zero.

That could put him in a bind. But, Johnson crashed, Suarez got involved in an early race incident then fought to come back and Bowyer just hung around. That allowed Newman to come back with an eighth place finish and scored the fifth most points out of everyone in Sunday’s Brickyard 400.

The finish was Newman’s eighth top 12 in his last nine Indianapolis Motor Speedway starts. It was also his third in the last four races.

That’s why Newman is in and the big teams are out.

“It was a struggle a lot of times,” said Newman. At the end of the first stage, I had a lot of confidence. At the end of the second stage, I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence. We just stuck our nose to the grindstone. The 41 (Suarez) kind of got himself in a pickle there and we were able to hold him off. That was part of the race. The other part of the race was that we didn’t have a fast enough race car to go up there and lead.”

Newman though, took RFR to the playoffs in the first year with them. He did the same in 2014 with Richard Childress Racing and made it all the way to Homestead with a shot at a championship. That’s why Newman is encouraged by his teams’ resilience despite all being new to one another.

“If you look at our roster on this team, there’s more new people on our team together for the first time than all the other teams put together, said Newman. “I’m proud that we’ve been able to take that and use our experience collectively and turn that into a playoff position. Now, we just have to do something with it.”