For much of the 2024 season, projections as to which driver will earn the Cup Series championship have mostly centered around Kyle Larson, whose six wins are the most of any driver so far. But even though the playoff format emphasizes and rewards winning at the right time above all else -- Joey Logano is living proof of that -- perhaps too little attention has been paid to the run that Christopher Bell is on as he tries to win his first championship.
A dominant performance at Las Vegas, in which Bell only ran second because he got out-strategized by Joey Logano's team and ran out of laps to pass the No. 22, continued a streak of remarkable consistency that Bell has been on since Daytona in August. In his last nine starts, Bell has now earned six top fives, eight top 10s, only a single finish worse than seventh and none worse than 14th.
That's just part of the reason that Bell is now 42 points above the Championship 4 cut line and in position to advance to the final round for the third year in a row, but it's a major factor in his new place at the top of the CBS Sports NASCAR Power Rankings entering this weekend's race at Homestead-Miami Speedway:
| Rank | Driver | Change | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Christopher Bell | Christopher Bell missed his opportunity to become the first driver to clinch a Championship 4 spot at Las Vegas, but the good news is he should have a great chance to do it at Homestead as the track's reigning winner. The last driver to earn back-to-back Homestead wins was Greg Biffle, who won three years in a row from 2004 to 2006. | ||
| 2 | Joey Logano | "Even Year Joey Logano" is becoming as inevitable as Jimmie Johnson was when he went on his streak of five straight Cup titles from 2006 to 2010. If Logano ends up winning the championship despite fairly average numbers throughout the year, expect people to start talking about "Joey proofing" the playoffs the way they used to talk about "Jimmie proofing" the old Chase format. | ||
| 3 | William Byron | The "Drive for Five" was alive from 2002 to 2015, but Jeff Gordon was never able to celebrate a fifth Cup championship at Homestead in the car William Byron now drives. Byron has three top-10 finishes in his career at Homestead including a win in 2021. | ||
| 4 | Kyle Larson | What made Kyle Larson's pit road issues at Las Vegas especially jarring was that it was wholly uncharacteristic of Larson's pit crew. The mid-race sequence that led to Larson going to a lap down was as sloppy of pit work as you'll ever see out of a Hendrick crew. | ||
| 5 | Alex Bowman | The final four races are going to be an extremely tough pill for Alex Bowman and his team to swallow, especially if they continue to have success. Bowman was running as high as second late in the going at Las Vegas before finishing fifth to kick off the "what-if" conversations. | ||
| 6 | Denny Hamlin | It's odd to see Denny Hamlin finish eighth in a race and be left saying that it could have been a heck of a lot worse. Hamlin was plagued by bad pit stops and a lack of overall pace, but salvaged a top 10 on strategy. | ||
| 7 | Bubba Wallace | Bubba Wallace continues to stack good finishes to end the 2024 season, just missing out on another top 10 in 12th at Vegas. Wallace finished sixth at Homestead a year ago after starting from the outside pole. | ||
| 8 | Chris Buescher | Chris Buescher had as much raw pace as we've seen out of RFK Racing on a 1.5-mile track in some time, as he ran up inside the top five at Vegas before finishing 10th. With top 10s in the final three races, Buescher can match the career-high in that category he set a year ago. | ||
| 9 | Tyler Reddick | -- | Everyone welcome Tyler Reddick to the club of drivers who have managed to flip a car at Las Vegas. It happened twice in the old Busch Series: Randy LaJoie was first to do so in 1998, and then Shane Hall had an absolutely vicious rollover crash there during a test session in 2000. | |
| 10 | Daniel Suarez | The 57 laps that Daniel Suarez led at Las Vegas mark the second-most he's had in any race he's led this season. Suarez led 93 laps at Richmond in August and has three races left to match or better than mark. | ||
| 11 | Ryan Blaney | I'm usually not one to rag on the TV broadcast, but I'm a little disappointed it took NBC longer to realize Ryan Blaney was collected in the crash on the frontstretch than it should've. In fairness, there really wasn't much focus on Brad Keselowski sliding back up into traffic when Tyler Reddick was on his lid and potentially about to tumble. | ||
| 12 | Kyle Busch | The last time Kyle Busch came this close to going winless in a season was 2020, when he entered the third-to-last race of the season at Texas still looking for his first win. Busch won that race -- one pushed all the way to Wednesday by terrible weather -- to preserve the streak of winning seasons he's had since 2005. | ||
| 13 | Martin Truex Jr. | A sixth-place outing at Las Vegas, which included seven laps led and a mid-race battle for the lead with Christopher Bell, showed that Martin Truex Jr. is putting his best foot forward to trying to get one more win before retirement. Truex's lone Homestead win in 2017 won him the Cup Series championship. | ||
| 14 | Ross Chastain | Ross Chastain, indeed, bounced back at Las Vegas with a seventh-place finish. He now has 13 top-10 finishes this season, just one less than he had in all of 2023. | ||
| 15 | Chase Elliott | Now 53 points below the cut line, Chase Elliott may already be in must-win territory if he wants to advance to the Championship 4. His best Homestead finish is a runner-up back in 2020. | ||
| 16 | Justin Haley | Consider Las Vegas a demonstration of what Justin Haley and Spire Motorsports could potentially do together next year. Haley had a top-10 car, cracked the top five at one point, and Rodney Childers hasn't even been brought into the equation as crew chief yet. | ||
| 17 | Austin Cindric | After failing to meet minimum speed under the DVP, Austin Cindric left Las Vegas with his fourth DNF of the season, all due to crashes. That's the same amount of DNFs that he had in both 2022 and 2023. | ||
| 18 | Carson Hocevar | I'm interested to see how Carson Hocevar in particular performs at Homestead. Last year, Hocevar won the Truck Series race there to advance to the Championship 4 in that series, but wasn't in the Cup race afterward. | ||
| 19 | Zane Smith | Wherever he ends up next year, Zane Smith is going to be a driver on the upswing in 2025. Since the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis, Smith has one top five, three top 10s, eight top 20s and no finishes worse than 23rd. | ||
| 20 | Ty Gibbs | Racing Kyle Larson for the free pass, Ty Gibbs needed a caution at Las Vegas to get back on the lead lap. Instead, his spin off Turn 2 was a textbook case of a driver who needed a caution becoming the caution. | ||
| 21 | Ricky Stenhouse Jr. | You would think Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has been around long enough to have done this, but he's never had a top-10 finish in his career at Homestead. His best outing to date is a 13th-place finish back in 2021. | ||
| 22 | Corey LaJoie | While Rick Ware Racing did not directly commit to Corey LaJoie as their driver in 2025, LaJoie has now earned two top-15 finishes in four races since joining the team. It's starting to feel like LaJoie-RWR is a pairing that should stay together for next season. | ||
| 23 | Brad Keselowski | Brad Keselowski is one of the last drivers of the pre-playoff era to have not needed to have a spectacular finish to win the Cup Series championship. After Jimmie Johnson dropped out with a mechanical problem, a 15th-place finish at Homestead in 2012 was good enough for Keselowski to win the title. | ||
| 24 | Michael McDowell | -- | Homestead was a part of Michael McDowell's first ever streak of consecutive top-10 finishes just a few years ago in 2021. A sixth-place run marked three top 10s in three races to open that season, starting with McDowell's Daytona 500 triumph. | |
| 25 | Harrison Burton | A 15th-place finish at Las Vegas marked the second straight top-20 finish for Harrison Burton. He ran 20th at Homestead in 2022, but failed to finish last year due to overheating problems. | ||
| 26 | Daniel Hemric | Austin Dillon's frustration with Daniel Hemric is understandable, as Dillon had a violent impact with the wall at a pretty bad angle. But in fairness to Hemric, he hasn't earned a reputation as an aggressive driver, and it should earn him the benefit of the doubt that it was a racing accident. | ||
| 27 | Chase Briscoe | If you were a Texas A&M fan riding high on Sunday after a 34-24 win over Mississippi State, you were definitely looking for a lot more than what you got out of the Texas A&M Ford. Chase Briscoe was never a factor in the Aggies colors and finished a lap down in 26th. | ||
| 28 | Todd Gilliland | With the exception of the two road course races, Todd Gilliland has had a rough go of things since the playoffs started. A 31st at Las Vegas was Gilliland's fourth finish outside the top 25 and second outside the top 30 since Atlanta. | ||
| 29 | John Hunter Nemechek | This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of John Hunter Nemechek and Legacy Motor Club's first start together. Nemechek drove the No. 42 at Homestead last year as a dry run for 2024, but he finished 32nd after being involved in a crash. | ||
| 30 | Noah Gragson | If Stewart-Haas Racing has any really good cars left in the No. 10 stable, this should be the weekend they bring it out. Noah Gragson has the right stuff at Homestead, as evidenced by how he performed there in the Xfinity Series. |
