Storylines ahead of NASCAR Cup playoff opener at Atlanta

HAMPTON, Ga. — If things had gone as expected, Sunday’s playoff opener at Atlanta Motor Speedway would have been Tyler Reddick’s first with 23XI Racing.

Instead, a series of events landed Reddick at 23XI Racing last season and he enters his second playoffs with the organization as the regular season champion.

Recall that 23XI Racing — co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin — announced nine days after Reddick scored his first Cup win in July 2022 that Reddick would drive for the organization beginning in 2024. That was the earliest Reddick could join the team because Richard Childress Racing had already picked up Reddick’s option for the 2023 season.

Hamlin said at the time that the team wanted to sign Reddick early because it viewed Reddick as a “franchise driver” and didn’t want to lose him to someone else.

The timeline changed when Joe Gibbs Racing could not sign Kyle Busch to a contract extension in 2022. Busch eventually signed with Childress, which released Reddick from its contract. That allowed Reddick to join 23XI Racing last season.

Reddick reached the third round of last year’s playoffs, finishing sixth in the points. He enters Sunday’s race as one of the favorites.

There are many factors for Reddick’s success this year, but getting to 23XI Racing a year early helped.

“We just had to go through races,” Reddick said of building chemistry with crew chief Billy Scott last year. “The more time we’ve had together – we’ve got to experience the highs and the lows – and understand how to navigate them as a team.

“I think that just experience can be invaluable as a team, the more we know each other, the more instinctively we know what’s going to happen next without really having to talk about it or letting it play out. I think that experience for both of us has really helped us a lot.”

They’ll rely on that experience in Sunday’s playoff opener (3 p.m. ET on USA Network) with Reddick starting 23rd.

“I just feel like the more and more we get into this season, the more comfortable we get with how we’ve been running,” Reddick said. “The confidence is on our side I think.”

Here are a look at the other storylines Sunday:

Avoiding trouble

The opening round often is about avoiding problems and that will be even more important this year.

The rest of the first round includes Watkins Glen, which has a new tire that could dramatically alter that race, and Bristol, which will have the same tire that wore so much in the spring race. So, there are a lot of unknowns.

“The first round definitely needs to be respected because it’s not a cakewalk by any means,” Chase Elliott said

The first round has races at Atlanta, Watkins Glen and Bristol.

Having Atlanta as the opening race of this round only complicates matters. All but five drivers were involved in at least one incident in the February race at this track. Sixteen cars were collected in a Lap 2 crash in that event.

Christopher Bell was among those involved in that crash. He lost several laps for repairs before falling out of the race.

“We took absolutely nothing out of it,” said Bell, who is seeded second in the playoffs, of what they could take into this race. “Our individual team meetings, the 20 group, we literally sat there and we’re like ‘Well, we have nothing to go off of.’ So we’re looking at our other teammates to see what they had.”

Don’t overlook non-playoff drivers

The last few weeks have been dramatic. Chase Briscoe won last weekend’s Southern 500 to make the playoffs. The week before, Harrison Burton won at Daytona to make the playoffs.

While the focus will be on the 16 playoff drivers, many more will be looking to win to make up for a disappointing season.

USA Network has coverage of Sunday’s Cup race at Atlanta.

“We just move on,” Kyle Busch said of not making the playoffs for the first time since 2012. “We go through it and try to play spoiler now and try to go out here and be a guy that’s on the outside looking in and taking victories from these guys that want them to be able to move on to the next round.”

Three of the top four starters are not playoff drivers. They are pole-sitter Michael McDowell, his teammate, Todd Gilliland, and Josh Berry.

“Our cars have been really fast at all the superspeedways and it feels like we actually have cars very, very capable of winning every single superspeedway at this point and that doesn’t last forever,” Gilliland said.