NASCAR Cup Series Driver Power Rankings after 2018 South Point 400
By Asher Fair
Nine races remain on the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series schedule. How do the sport’s 30 full-time drivers stack up against one another with one playoff race having been contested?
Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski picked up in the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs where he left off at the end of the regular season. After winning the races at Darlington Raceway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway to close out the regular season, he won this past Sunday’s race, the South Point 400, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to lock himself into the round of 12, the second of four rounds of the playoffs.
After failing to win any of the first 24 races of the season, the driver of the #2 Ford has now won three races in a row. With the lack of recent victories by the drivers in the “big three”, including Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch and Furniture Row Racing’s Martin Truex Jr., the fact that Keselowski seems to have heated up at the right time has made him one of the favorites to advance to the Championship 4.
While 12 of the 16 playoff drivers ran into some kind of trouble throughout the South Point 400, seven of them still managed to finish the race in the top seven. Several drivers who not many people expect to advance to the round of 12 are currently above the round of 12 cut line with two races remaining in the round of 16.
How did the action from the opening race of the playoffs affect the NASCAR Cup Series Driver Power Rankings? Here are the formulated NASCAR Cup Series Driver Power Rankings and the non-formulated NASCAR Cup Series Driver Power Rankings following Keselowski’s third consecutive victory.
To see how the formulated NASCAR Cup Series Driver Power Rankings are calculated, click here.