Martin Truex Jr. is the defending race winner at Chicagoland and will no doubt be highly motivated after having victory ripped from his grasp at Richmond as a result of a questionable late-race caution. Joey Logano missed the playoffs but all but guaranteed after Richmond that he’ll be a factor in the remaining 10 races. With no points considerations to impact his strategy, Logano is free to go for broke. Brad Keselowski won at Chicagoland in 2012 and 2014 and was fifth a season ago. Despite being relatively quiet in recent weeks, Keselowski might be the favorite this weekend if recent history…

By Jared Turner The regular season is over. It’s playoff time. The playoffs begin Sunday afternoon with the Tales of the Turtles 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, a 1.5-mile track that will host the first of three races in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series’ Round of 16. By the time the Round of 16 concludes at Dover on October 1, four drivers will have been eliminated from championship contention. While it’s not too hard to predict who among the 16 playoff drivers will advance to the next round, there are no guarantees. A bad race in the playoff opener could change everything…

By Jared Turner Martin Truex Jr. had a comfortable lead and was cruising to victory at Richmond when Derrike Cope’s car scraped the wall and brought out a caution with less than five laps remaining. After all the leaders hit pit road, Truex exited the pits behind Kyle Larson and lined up second for the restart with two laps to go. But instead winning the race that he’d dominated, Truex was unable to run down Larson and ended up slamming the wall after bouncing off Denny Hamlin as the two Toyota drivers battled for second. While Truex didn’t seem to harbor any…