Erik Jones needs a win to qualify for this year’s NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. He, along with more than 20 other drivers, has just two weeks to grab four remaining spots. It’s a result of modern NASCAR’s cutthroat championship format, where no driver can win the title before the last lap of the year.
Jones sits a distant 27th in points after a growing season with his team, Legacy Motor Club, and an injury that sidelined him for two races. Jones and his competitors have only two races left to make it happen—Daytona and Darlington—and he has more than an outside chance: His three-career Cup Series wins came at those two tracks.
“It’s a really different mentality going into both of them,” Jones told Motorsport.com. “Darlington is a technical race, and one that I feel like you have to have a plan for: how you’re going to manage your day and what you need out of your car as the race transitions from day to night. The Daytona race, it’s less of your own plan and more of what everybody else is doing around you.”
Like the championship itself, qualifying for the NASCAR Cup playoffs goes down to the wire: A win secures one of 16 spots, while any leftover spots are filled by the winless drivers with the most points. But that elusive win is up for grabs through the final lap of the regular season, and anyone from 17th through 34th in the points standings could get it—knocking out a driver who’s tentatively “in” and changing the postseason landscape.
For a few years, that final regular-season lap happened at Daytona International Speedway. This year, Daytona will be the penultimate race before the playoffs, while the regular-season finale moves elsewhere: the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. This is how Jones — and likely, a sea of other playoff hopefuls — will tackle thesea couple of polar-opposite, high-stakes tracks at the end of NASCAR’s regular season.
Daytona: Preparing for Chaos
This weekend is the chaotic 2.5-mile Daytona oval, stereotypically known as a crapshoot due to wrecks and three-wide pack racing equalizing the field. Not every driver loved the uncertainty of Daytona as the season finale, but Jones did.
“I guess I heard Dale [Earnhardt] Jr. put it a good way,” Jones told Motorsport.com. “The guys who are fast and going to be racing for a championship, they’re probably already in the playoffs. They’re not in a situation where they’ve got to win Daytona to get in, so why…
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