Friday night's Winn-Dixie 250 at Daytona International Speedway closes the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series regular season and sets the 12-driver field for the Chase, the series playoff. The fight at the cut line could not be tighter: three Joe Gibbs Racing drivers, teammates, separated by exactly one point with one race left. On Episode 1 of The Grand National Show, I went around the table with the panel, SiriusXM's Davey Segal, MRN's Dillon Welch and pit reporter Chris Wilner, on who gets in and who gets left out.
We all agree on one thing: Rajah Caruth is in. Caruth sits 14th in the No. 88 for JR Motorsports, 15 points behind that three-way knot, and every card at the table has him clearing at least two of the three Gibbs cars. I went further: I think he wins the race.
Here is my thinking. He has nothing to lose. If he finishes behind all these other guys, he's not making it anyway, so he might as well try to get up front and control the field. And his JRM teammates are already locked into the Chase, so I expect that camp to spend Friday night pushing the one car that still needs it. Daytona can shred anybody's plan, but that is the position I would rather be in than any spot on the bubble.
The math at the cut, through 23 races. Parker Retzlaff is ninth, 46 points clear of the first man out. Sam Mayer is 10th, 19 up. Then the knot: William Sawalich and Brent Crews tied at 598, one point ahead of Taylor Gray at 597. All three drive for Joe Gibbs Racing, which means the organization is racing itself for the last spots.
That is the fight, and it split the table.
Chris Wilner has Sawalich surviving and Gray going out. "I have a weird gut feeling about Taylor Gray missing it," he said, pointing to pressure-packed situations finding him at the wrong time. Dillon Welch and I both flipped it: Crews survives, Sawalich and Gray go out. "It just seems like they just get themselves in bad situations," Welch said of the two. "They'll be running great and then all of a sudden, boom, they're in a crash." Davey Segal took the third road: Gray in, Sawalich and Crews out.
However it breaks, at least one Gibbs car misses the Chase, and all four of our cards say two. "Not one, not two, but three Joe Gibbs Racing cars potentially missing the Chase," Segal said. "How the mighty have fallen."
The one to watch early is Mayer. Nineteen points sounds safe, but a stage win pays 10, and as Segal put it on the show, if the wrong driver sweeps the first two stages, "he's out going into the final stage because they get 20 points right there." If that cushion is gone before the final run, nobody on the bubble has room for error.
The Winn-Dixie 250 runs Friday night, August 28, on The CW. The Chase opens at Darlington on September 5.
Watch the full Daytona breakdown on Episode 1 of The Grand National Show. Track the cut line on the standings page, and get to know the track in our Daytona International Speedway guide.