NASCAR Xfinity Series: 2018 playoff field set

With the 2018 NASCAR Xfinity Series regular season having been completed, here is the field for the seven-race playoffs, which are scheduled to begin on Friday.

Chip Ganassi Racing’s Ross Chastain, who drove for JD Motorsports in 24 of the 26 races throughout the 2018 NASCAR Xfinity Series regular season, closed out the regular season with his first career Xfinity Series victory in the DC Solar 300 at the four-turn, 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Only seven races remain until the 2018 Xfinity Series champion is crowned, and these seven races are all playoff races.

The 2018 Xfinity Series playoffs consist of three rounds, which contain a total of seven races. The first two rounds consist of three races each while the final round consists of only the season finale. The playoffs are scheduled to begin on Friday, September 21 with the Go Bowling 250 at Richmond Raceway.

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Heading into the 250-lap race around the 0.75-mile (1.207-kilometer) Richmond Raceway in Richmond, Virginia, JR Motorsports’ Justin Allgaier leads the championship standings. He won five races in the regular season. The driver who sits in second place in the standings, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell, won four, including three in a row at one point.

All 12 drivers who qualified for the playoffs had their point totals reset to 2,000 after the regular season finale. The playoff point totals that they earned throughout the regular season were then added to their respective point totals. Four of the 12 drivers who qualified for the playoffs did so as a result of the fact that they won at least one race in the regular season. The other eight did so as a result of their regular season point totals.

All four drivers who qualified for the playoffs by winning at least one race in the regular season would have qualified for the playoffs even had they not been victorious at some point in the season’s first 26 races, as their point totals all ranked in the top 12.

Aside of Allgaier, Bell and Chastain, the only other playoff driver who won at least one race in the regular season is JR Motorsports’ Tyler Reddick. He won the season opener, the PowerShares QQQ 300, at Daytona International Speedway back in mid-February.

Of the 15 regular season races that were not won by these four drivers, 13 were won by full-time Cup Series drivers and two were won by part-time Xfinity Series drivers.

Just as the case was in the regular season, race victories are worth five playoff points while stage victories are worth one playoff point in the playoffs as well.

Additional playoff points were awarded to the drivers who finished in the top 10 in the regular season point standings. These 10 drivers were awarded 15, 10, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one additional playoff point(s) for finishing in first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th place, respectively, in the standings.

Here is how the 12 playoff drivers stack up against one another as far as the standings go heading into the Go Bowling 250 at Richmond Raceway on Friday night.

Tune in to NBC Sports Network at 7:30 p.m. ET on Friday, September 21 for the live broadcast of the Go Bowling 250 from Richmond Raceway to see who will open up the 2018 NASCAR Xfinity Series playoffs on what note.