Martin Truex Jr’s opening round of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs on how much the regular season truly does matter. In a playoff era to where most say you can’t afford any mistakes, well Truex proved that if you have a good enough regular season, you are afford multiple mulligans still.

At least early on.

Truex won the 2023 regular season championship. That granted him 15 additional playoff points. 2nd place gets 10. The difference in 5 was the margin that he was above the cutline on Saturday night in Bristol.

If he doesn’t win the regular season title, he’s tied with Kevin Harvick for the final Round of 12 spot and Harvick’s 11th place finish in Kansas would have won the tiebreaker among the two to propel him forward and Truex instead out.

Harvick went winless in the regular season and the lack of 5 playoff points for a race win also kept him out. So it works both ways and shows that the 26-race regular season means more than you might think it does.

While Truex has a fresh outlook again, moving back to the top of the standings for the second round, I still think he has to be on upset alert.

Truex is 0-for-33 at Texas.

He’s 0-for-37 at Talladega.

He’s 0-for-5 at the Charlotte ROVAL.

If push comes to shove again, he could be in a perilous position.

For Texas, 3 of his last 4 finishes have seen him come home 25th or worse. He was 31st last year. He has just one top five finish in his last 8 Texas tries.

For Talladega, he’s had just three top five finishes since 2007. His last 12 finishes there are 40th, 35th, 23rd, 26th, 23rd, 20th, 24th, 23rd, 31st, 12th fifth, 26th and 27th respectively. He’s only scored the 17th most points on superspeedway’s too. Combine that with being 0-for-64 at Daytona and that’s counting the Clash and Duels and now 0-for-4 at Atlanta, he’s 0-for-105 on drafting tracks.

That could put him coming from behind again on the ROVAL. Granted, he should have won the inaugural race, was 7th in the two races after but since has finished 29th and 17th the last 2 years. He’s also finished 17th, first, 32nd, seventh, sixth on road courses this season. Last year, he finished 7th, 26th, 13th, 21st, 23rd and 17th on them.

That’s why he’s on upset alert in my book.

Same for Kyle Larson. Yes, I think as we sit after the three-race opening round, he’s a championship front runner. But, that’s through the first round. For the second round?

In 2021, he won 2 of these 3 playoff tracks. However, Texas wasn’t in this round. Now, it is.

He finished 9th, 18th, 35th on the same tracks last year. Texas is his best shot at victory. On superspeedway’s, he’s only 1-for-40 for top 5 finishes. In fact, his last five finishes at Talladega are 39th, 40th, 40th, 37th, fourth, 18th and 33rd respectively. For the ROVAL, yes he won in 2021, but he was outside the top 30 last year and has finished 14th, eighth, fourth, eighth and 26th on road races this season too.

The margin for error is smaller in this round with 4 less drivers. That’s why the regular season can only get you so far in the playoffs because you the pool of drivers grows smaller but more talented too.

What about William Byron? He didn’t lead a single lap in the first round. He had 1 top 5 finish in 3 races. In fact, over the last 15 races, he’s had just 3 top 5 results, 2 of which being wins. That was at Atlanta and Watkins Glen. While we have a superspeedway and road course in this round, he’s going to have to find a way to get top fives on days he doesn’t win and with no laps led in the first round still, it shows me that they’re still searching.

Which is what makes this round so interesting. 3 different discipline of tracks and 3 of the top 4 in points entering could struggle.

Does that open the door up for someone else?

Maybe this round sets up nicer for the Ford camp. They have just 3 drivers left and 2 of them are with RFK Racing. While they are going to be the favorites in Talladega, how much can they do at Texas?

Ford’s led just a combined total of 30 laps in the opening round of the playoffs. That shouldn’t come as much of a shock because they’ve largely struggled away from superspeedway’s this season. 686 of their 1,808 laps led (37.9%) were on these types of tracks.

Since August, their entire laps led for a race was 68, 54, 17, 110 (Daytona), 2, 27, 1.

On road courses, Toyota led 148 laps. Chevy 133. Ford? 76.

On short tracks, it was Toyota 558 entering the night, Ford 498 and Chevy 394. The rest? Chevy 1,998, Toyota 1,444 and Ford 547.

It’s the main reason as to why 3 of the 4 drives eliminated in the opening round belonged to the Ford camp. With just 6 wins this season, they’ve been playing from behind all along.

However, they could shock some people I think over the next three weeks.

Chris Buescher won the regular season finale at Daytona and has been strong on road courses the last year in-a-half. His last five road course finishes last year read: second (Sonoma), sixth (Road America), 10th (Indianapolis) ninth (Watkins Glen) and sixth (ROVAL). This year, he’s finished eighth, fourth, 10th, 11th and seventh on them. He should be solid the final two weeks of this round. But at Texas, he was 30th last year.

Brad Keselowski is great at Talladega but on road courses, he’s finished 13th or worse in 18 of his last 20 starts on these tracks. That’s why Texas is so crucial for him. He has four straight Top-10 finishes in Texas (9th, 6th, 4th, 8th) and 12 top 10 finishes in 27 career starts on this track. He was sixth in Darlington, ninth in Kansas and eighth in Bristol in the last round too.

Ryan Blaney is 0-for-14 at Texas. However, Blaney has a top 12 finish in all but one Texas start too. In fact, he has seven Top-8’s in his last nine tries and the only ones that he doesn’t, he led 145 laps in spring race in 2019 before an engine problem and leading 150 laps and sweeping both stages in July 2020 before a late race fluke caution. He won the All-Star race on this track in 2022 and led 29 laps in a fourth place run last Fall. He just won the Coca-Cola 600 this past May too and has four Top-10 finishes in his last five intermediate track starts. The only thing is, he’s not had a Top-5 finish since that ‘600 win and results of ninth, 12th and 22nd in the opening round. Talladega is his best shot and like Keselowski, the ROVAL is his worst.

But for Ford’s all together, they could in theory band together and use all but Talladega the rest of the year for 2024 development. Without much practice these days and testing being so limited, why not start looking ahead and ensuring 2024 looks nothing like 2023.

Which as a result, could help the playoff drivers without basically a whole manufacturer punting on the rest of this season.

Still, this is likely going to be an unpredictable round of chaos that will see some drivers eliminated that we didn’t see coming.