By Jerry Bonkowski
And the 2021 NASCAR Cup champion is...
Answer: whoever finishes the highest in Sunday’s season-ending and championship-deciding race at Phoenix Raceway.
Bad joke, I know. But what else would you expect from four drivers who come into the race tied at 5,000 points apiece? In the winner-take-all format, if any of the four finalists wins the race, they get the added bonus of winning the championship as well.
And if any of the four do not win, ergo, the highest-finishing driver is crowned champion. Pretty simple concept.
The four drivers left in contention have by default made it a championship-deciding battle of not just driver vs. driver, but also team vs. team, as two of the Championship 4 drivers are from Hendrick Motorsports (defending series champion Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson) while the other two are from Joe Gibbs Racing (Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr.).
I’ve ridden the Larson bus throughout the playoffs and am going to stick with him at Phoenix. He will be your next champion.
But ….
Being that I’m the kind of guy who looks at a glass as being half-empty rather than half-full (hey, somebody’s gotta do it, right?), I still do believe Larson will win it all.
Yet at the same time, other than a three-race slump early in the season, he’s had no real other multi-race slump since then. He comes into Phoenix with a series-high nine wins, and in the first nine races of the playoffs, has four wins (including three in a row), a runner-up finish, two other top-10 finishes, a 37th-place finish and a 14th-place finish in his most recent race, this past Sunday at Martinsville Speedway.
There’s no question that Larson has been the best-performing driver this season. He deserves to win the championship to put a cherry on top of his best season ever in Cup competition.
So why do I have this uncomfortable knot in my stomach – which actually has been there for probably the last six or seven weeks – and has continued to grow and grow from race-to-race during that time?
Yes, I admit, I kind of expected Larson to have maybe a mini-slump, especially after he won at Texas to kick off the third round of the playoffs. No one would have faulted him if he slipped in the subsequent races at Kansas or Martinsville, as he was already assured a spot in the Championship 4 by virtue of winning at Texas.
But Larson went on to an encore win at Kansas the week after Texas before slipping back to a 14th place finish at Martinsville.
Hopefully, that last race will be a one-and-done mini-slump and now that he’s gotten that out of the way, he’ll go on to dominate Sunday’s race at Phoenix and capture what so many fans and media members – even fellow drivers – have been predicting for Larson for at least the last five or six years: to finally be a NASCAR Cup champion.
I have absolutely nothing against Elliott or Truex or Hamlin capturing the championship and taking it away from Larson, provided it’s done in a fair and square way. Any of the three other than Larson would also make deserving champions in their own unique way:
Elliott because he managed to make it through Round 3, even though it looked somewhat dicey following the first race of the round at Texas (left there in fifth place) before bouncing back at Kansas (left there in second) at some point.
Hamlin because it has been predicted so many times that he would eventually win his first Cup title, yet never has up to now.
The odds of that have to be astronomical: seven straight years where the eventual champ also won the championship-deciding race.
Somehow, some say, and the odds definitely bear it out that the 7-for-7 streak is bound to end eventually and then the championship will revert to the highest-finishing of the four title contenders.
Even if, hypothetically, let’s say all four drivers take out each other in a multi-car wreck midway through the race, whomever winds up going furthest after the wreck – maybe spins the most and for the longest length – it’ll be that driver who takes home the trophy and the multi-million dollar prize.
Let’s just hope we don’t have to worry about that possibility until next year because we all really want to enjoy this year’s championship in a similar fashion as we have in the previous seven seasons.
Follow Jerry Bonkowski on Twitter @JerryBonkowski