Did You Notice? … Early NASCAR Cup Series championship favorites for 2022 have crashed back down to earth? Just 10 races ago, at the halfway point of the regular season, the postseason field looked far different than it does right now.
There were only two drivers with multiple wins: William Byron and Ross Chastain. Byron could have easily had a third victory, losing out to Joey Logano after contact at Darlington Raceway, and was in solid position to challenge for the overall top seed. Chastain had been on a hot streak of his own, winning a second race of the year (Talladega Superspeedway) and posting six top-three finishes in the year’s first 13 events.
Fast forward to August and both drivers are still guaranteed to make the playoffs. But each one finds themselves facing a set of problems no one anticipated. Byron is the big mystery, going without a top-five finish the last 10 races while posting no result better than ninth. During that stretch, he’s led just 42 laps, 41 of them at Atlanta Motor Speedway — a pack race he wound up TKO’d in a wreck not of his making.
Byron was upbeat at Michigan International Speedway this past weekend, claiming the car had speed, only to become a victim of circumstances. But he also acknowledged the difficulty in being able to nail down a rhythm with a Next Gen chassis that’s still on its first year of competition.
“There’s really not a lot of consistency, as we’ve seen, with performances,” Byron said at MIS. “There’s not a lot to lean on, in terms of what to expect.”
With Chastain, expectations are precisely the problem for a No. 1 team that’s gotten in a few too many messes. An aggression that snuck up on everyone during the first half of the season has backfired spectacularly over the last three weeks. People now expect Chastain to make the mistake, or they expect to get revenge over past crimes against them.
Such highly-anticipated payback from Denny Hamlin happened two weeks ago at Pocono Raceway, ruining Chastain’s bid for the win. The next week, on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, Chastain using the access road as a shortcut led to a 30-second penalty after the final restart in a failed bid to sneak ahead of winner Tyler Reddick.
Then, at MIS, Chastain got knocked out when trying to pass fellow contender Christopher Bell on fresh tires. But the story that will linger comes from Kyle Larson’s radio, where the reigning NASCAR champion laughed when asked if he’d…
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