Who Has Been the Biggest Surprise in Cup?

Who has been the biggest surprise in the NASCAR Cup Series this season?

James Krause: Richard Childress Racing, and not in a good way. Kyle Busch sits 15th in points after Martinsville Speedway. Since his third-place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Busch has one top 10. By comparison, Busch was locked into the playoffs with a win and had four top 10s at this point last season. While the No. 8 Chevrolet may not be meeting high expectations, Austin Dillon and the No. 3 team are failing to meet the standard of some lower-funded organizations. Dillon is 31st in the standings with one top-20 finish. Justin Alexander took over as crew chief for Dillon last weekend, and there are no immediate signs he’ll turn the team around as the team finished 34th.

Wyatt Watson: Daniel Suarez’s three-wide finish at Atlanta is easily the biggest surprise of the season so far. Essentially locked in (barring at least 12 different winners in the next 18 points-paying races) to the playoffs, Suarez punching his ticket to the postseason has pretty much eliminated any stress during the regular season. Without the win, Suarez would be sitting 10 points below 16th-place Chase Briscoe. Winning is all that matters in this format, and the way Suarez won will be on replay for generations as well.

Mike Neff: The pair at 14th and 15th in points. Multi-time champions Joey Logano and Busch are both floundering at the back of the playoff point positions. While they have both had some good runs, Logano has a second and Busch has a third and we are a third of the way through the season. Neither driver can be pleased with their position, and the dog days of summer may make it tougher for them to find the speed to threaten for wins.

The 189-lap green-flag run toward the end of the Cup race was the longest at Martinsville since 1996. Is that a problem?

Chase Folsom: Yes, but it stems from a bigger problem: that the cars are horrible. The fact that the race went green isn’t necessarily as big of a deal as the fact that the cars can’t get close enough to one another and are too stuck to the ground to allow the race to go green for that long. If NASCAR fixes the issues with the racecar, which will take more than just a few minor adjustments, the long green-flag runs will fix themselves.

Neff: If you like green-flag runs, then no. If you want to see beating, banging, rooting and gouging, it was horrible. The short track package is a little better this year, but…