NASCAR Cup Series: Daytona race slated to set 2019 playoff cut line

What happens in this Saturday night’s race at Daytona International Speedway is slated to set the cut line for the 2019 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

Nine races remain on the 26-race 2019 NASCAR Cup Series regular schedule prior to 10-race playoffs, and the first of these nine races is scheduled to take place tonight at Daytona International Speedway.

This 160-lap race around the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) high-banked Daytona International Speedway oval in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Coke Zero Sugar 400, is slated to set where the playoff cut line will be once the regular season concludes in September with the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Through the first 17 races of the season, seven different drivers have been victorious, and all seven of these drivers currently sit in the top nine in the championship standings.

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Upsets simply have not happened so far this season, and barring an upset in Saturday night’s race, they likely won’t, as this race is the final, for lack of a better word, “wild card” race on the regular season schedule.

This race will be the first race contested at Daytona International Speedway without restrictor plates since 1987, although the first race at Talladega Superspeedway without restrictor plates since the same year still produced restrictor plate-style racing when it was contested in late April. It was a “wild card” race that featured a boatload of passing, drafting, lead changes, and, of course, heavy crashes.

Since the modern 16-driver playoff format was introduced ahead of the 2014 season, never have the 16 drivers who finished the season in the top 16 in the championship standings all qualified for the playoffs. That is slated to change this season — that is, unless Saturday night’s race features an upset winner.

Last year’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 winner was Joe Gibbs Racing’s Erik Jones, whose victory in this race is the lone victory of his Cup Series career. He currently sits in 17th place in the championship standings, 15 points below the playoff cut line (431 to 416), so a victory for him in this Saturday night’s race would likely launch him into the top 16 for the time being.

However, a victory for any driver who finishes the regular season outside of the top 16 in the championship standings, assuming he also finishes in the top 30, would move the playoff cut line up by one position from below 16th place in the standings to below 15th.

A victory by one of these drivers would be huge in determining where the cut line ultimately ends up and what the bubble drivers will ultimately need to do to qualify for the playoffs.

It would be especially huge if a driver such as Jones wins this race and ends up finishing in 17th or 18th place in the regular season standings, only to end up advancing to the playoffs over the 16th driver who will have beaten him in the points battle.

Of course, this 16th place driver could still end up advancing to the playoffs by winning another one of the regular season’s remaining races, and while such a victory would not ordinarily affect the playoff cut line from moving up within the top 16, the fact that a non-top 16 driver will have already won a race will move it up even further, a cycle that could repeat itself multiple times if other drivers near but above the original top 16 cut line manage to win races before the regular season ends.

The possibility of such drama all hinges on what happens this Saturday night under the lights at the World Center of Racing.

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Tune in to NBC at 7:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, July 6 for what is slated to be the most important race throughout the remainder of the 2019 NASCAR Cup Series season in terms of determining where drivers will need to be and what they will need to do to lock themselves into the playoffs if they have not already done so.

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