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…

By Jared Turner Let’s be totally honest: NASCAR needed Dale Earnhardt Jr. to make the playoffs — and for multiple reasons. The most obvious reason, of course, is that he’s been NASCAR’s most popular driver for 14 consecutive years and generates buzz for the sport like no one else can. Good luck finding a silver lining in any sport’s most popular competitor not being part of its playoffs. But what makes Earnhardt’s absence from the 16-driver championship field particularly disappointing is that this is his final season as a driver in NASCAR’s top series. That means this was supposed to be his…

By Jared Turner Entering the regular season finale at Richmond, Joey Logano had only one pathway to the playoffs. That pathway? Winning. But for the first time since joining Team Penske in 2013, Logano won’t arrive at the final 10 races with a chance to compete for the championship. The only consolation? He went down swinging, finishing second at Richmond to race winner Kyle Larson. “We came into the weekend saying second would be a failure, and we finished second,” Logano said moments after the race at Richmond concluded. “So one spot short. But, overall, I’m proud of this team. We came in here…