One year ago, Joe Gibbs Racing's Ty Gibbs worked his way through NASCAR's inaugural In-Season Challenge tournament bracket and won the championship with only a 21st place finish at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, simply because he finished higher than No. 32 seed Ty Dillon of Kaulig Racing in the Brickyard 400.
Gibbs won the entire 32-driver tournament, and collected the coolest 21st-place trophy of all-time, before he ever even won a Cup race.
This year, however, Gibbs has failed to qualify for the quarterfinal round, and it ironically came after he actually posted a top eight finish in the second round.
Ty Gibbs eliminated despite top eight finish
The driver of the No. 54 Toyota entered the tournament as the No. 5 seed and comfortably advanced to the second round at Chicagoland Speedway with a third place finish in the opening round at Sonoma Raceway. His opponent, No. 28 seed Austin Dillon of Richard Childress Racing, only finished 27th.
But at Chicagoland, Gibbs was matched up against teammate and race winner Chase Briscoe. So his eighth place finish, despite being the seventh-best finish among the 16 remaining tournament drivers, was not good enough to stave off elimination and end a run of six consecutive tournament matchups victories.
Every other tournament driver who registered one of the best eight finishes among remaining tournament drivers advanced to the quarterfinal round at EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta Motor Speedway), including Hendrick Motorsports' Chase Elliott, who finished 11th (eight-best among tournament drivers).
The lone outlier among advancing drivers was Front Row Motorsports' Todd Gilliland, who is slowly but surely beginning to look like this year's Ty Dillon.
A 29th place finish was enough for him to advance from Sonoma to Chicagoland, and his 16th place finish at Chicagoland, despite only being the 11th-best finish among the 16 remaining tournament drivers, also ended up being good enough, since he was matched up against Spire Motorsports' Carson Hocevar. Hocevar only finished 22nd.
Here's a look at how things shook out in Sunday's 267-lap eero 400, which was the first Cup race at the four-turn, 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) Joliet, Illinois oval since 2019.
Chicagoland NASCAR tournament results
Seed | Winner | Finish | Seed | Loser | Finish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
32 | Alex Bowman | 5th | 16 | Austin Cindric | 13th |
25 | Todd Gilliland | 16th | 9 | Carson Hocevar | 22nd |
12 | Chase Briscoe | 1st | 5 | Ty Gibbs | 8th |
4 | Chase Elliott | 11th | 20 | Michael McDowell | 29th |
2 | Denny Hamlin | 3rd | 15 | Erik Jones | 15th |
10 | Christopher Bell | 2nd | 7 | Chris Buescher | 19th |
11 | William Byron | 4th | 6 | Kyle Larson | 34th |
3 | Ryan Blaney | 7th | 14 | Shane van Gisbergen | 25th |
In addition to Gibbs, Gilliland also finished behind Team Penske's Austin Cindric and Legacy Motor Club's Erik Jones, both of whom also did not advance.
But such occurrences were inevitable, just as they were during round one; with head-to-head matchups being the lone factor contributing to advancement (or lack thereof), anything can happen, and it actually would have been far less statistically likely for the top eight of 16 finishers to all move on, since it would have required none of them to face off directly.
The four quarterfinal matchups are set to feature Bowman vs. Gilliland, Briscoe vs. Elliott, Hamlin vs. Bell, and Byron vs. Blaney. Will that trend continue in Atlanta?
EchoPark Speedway is scheduled to host the Quaker State 400 this Sunday, July 12, with live coverage set to be provided by TNT beginning at 7:00 p.m. ET. Don't miss the drafting race that could veryw ell be the biggest wild card of this year's In-Season Challenge!
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