The NASCAR Cup Series playoff list is much lighter entering Sunday’s race at Texas Motor Speedway.The playoffs’ first round eliminated Tyler Reddick, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon.Entering the Round of 12 Sunday are six Chevrolet drivers, four Ford drivers and two Toyota drivers — a group that includes three former champions (Chase Elliott, Joey Logano and Kyle Larson) and one rookie (Austin Cindric).MORE: NBC Sports NASCAR Power RankingsIt’s quite a mix, as is the round itself. After Texas, the playoffs move on to Talladega Superspeedway and then to the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval for the next cutoff race.Sunday’s 500-mile race (3:30 p.m., ET) will be televised by the USA Network.A look at drivers to watch at TMS:FRONTRUNNERSChase Elliott
Points position: 1st
Last three races: 2nd at Bristol, 11th at Kansas, 36th at Darlington
Past at Texas: Best career finish is 4th
Elliott is back at the top of the points after a second-place run Saturday at Bristol. Texas isn’t one of his better tracks, but he finished seventh in this race a year ago despite starting in the rear because of multiple inspection failures.Joey Logano
Points position: 2nd
Last three races: 27th at Bristol, 17th at Kansas, 4th at Darlington
Past at Texas: Won in April 2014, three top 10s in past four races
MORE: NASCAR executive fires back at Kevin Harvick’s commentLogano will be a favorite to reach the Round of 8, but he hasn’t won a race since early June. At Texas, he has nine top 10s in the past 11 races.Ross Chastain
Points position: 3rd
Last three races: 6th at Bristol, 7th at Kansas, 20th at Darlington
Past at Texas: Best career finish in five career starts is 18th
Chastain sits third in the playoff standings but faces a tall task at Texas, a track where he has never led a lap. He finished 28th at TMS a year ago after being involved in a crash on Lap 31.QUESTIONS TO ANSWERAustin Cindric
Points position: 12th
Last three races: 20th at Bristol, 12th at Kansas, 16th at Darlington
Past at Texas: First Cup race at TMS. Had one win and six tops fives in eighth Xfinity starts.
The playoffs’ lone rookie hasn’t won since visiting victory lane in the season-opening Daytona 500. He squeezed into the Round of 12 in the final position and is seven points below the cutline.Ryan Blaney
Points position: 8th
Last three races: 30th at Bristol, 9th at Kansas, 13th at Darlington
Past at Texas: Best career finish for a points race at Texas is 2nd in 2018. He won the All-Star Race there in May
Can Blaney continue the magic act that involves not winning races but staying in the championship hunt? He’s never won a points Cup race at Texas but has seven finishes of eighth or better in the past eight races.Denny Hamlin
Points position: 6th
Last three races: 9th at Bristol, 2nd at Kansas, 2nd at Darlington
Past at Texas: 3 wins
Top 10s in all three races in the first round of the playoffs keep Hamlin in contention for another shot at what would be his first Cup championship. He has a good record at TMS.

Drivers expressed some strong opinions about the Next Gen car’s passing ability after Bristol. Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin, among others, felt the car made it too hard to pass.Brad Keselowski agreed that it was hard to pass, but opined that it’s supposed to be hard.The passing complaints surprised me. NASCAR’s loop data reported 2,690 green-flag passes for the 2022 fall Bristol race. That’s 980 passes more than the 1,710 green-flag passes recorded for last year’s fall Bristol race.So are the drivers wrong? Perhaps their comments reflect the accumulated frustration of a long night plagued by so many equipment problems?Numbers don’t lie. But they also don’t give up their truths easily.Loop dataEach car carries a transponder that emits a signal unique to that car. Wire loops embedded in the track (and on pit road) record each of these signals. The loops capture a car’s precise position on track — and its position relative to other cars.The graph below shows green-flag passes by race for the 2022 season. Because races are different lengths (and tracks different sizes), it’s hard to compare data.But superspeedway races stand out for having thousands more green-flag passes than other types of races.I’ve always been skeptical of passing metrics at superspeedways. Those extraordinarily large numbers just tell us that two or three lanes of cars traded positions a lot. That doesn’t measure passing in a way that illuminates the racing.What I hadn’t appreciated until I dove into these numbers is that they’re not exactly what you think they are at other types of tracks, either.According to loop data, Chase Elliott made more green-flag passes than any other driver at Bristol. But did it really take him 154 passes to go from 23rd to second?Although Elliott’s transponder switched positions with other cars’ transponders 154 times, not all of those events are what I think of as “passing.”I view passing as capturing a position and holding it for more than a straightaway. But that’s not what loop data is designed to measure.Old-school dataNASCAR doesn’t make detailed loop data publicly available. What I can access is each driver’s running position each lap. Using that data, I developed a different kind of passing metric.I’ll use Kyle Larson as an example. Bristol is a good race for this type of analysis because there were no green-flag pit cycles. Counting accurately is confusing enough as it is.The next graph shows Larson’s running position as a function of lap number. Caution laps are shaded yellow, although you can probably infer cautions from the position changes.I examined each green-flag segment, noting Larson’s positions at the start and end of each segment, and how many times he changed position in-between. The table below shows the results.Larson started fifth at Bristol and finished fifth. Over the course of 420 green-flag laps, he made 31 passes and was passed 15 times. That produces a pass differential of +16, meaning that he gained 16 more positions than he lost.If he gained so many positions, how did he end up fifth? He lost 16 positions during pit-stop cycles. That’s not the number of positions he lost on pit road. That’s positions lost including factors like other drivers staying out.Loop data attributes 109 green-flag passes to Larson. It’s not that one number is wrong and one is right: They’re measuring different things.More passing or not?At this stage of the metric, I only feel confident in my results for drivers who finished on the lead lap. Five drivers accomplished that feat at both the 2021 and 2022 fall Bristol races. I compare their passing data in the table below.My metric shows passing up by 11.9%, while passing loop data on the same set of drivers shows it up by 55%. If you think of my metric as defining successful passes and loop data as measuring attempts, it shows that drivers had to make more attempts to pass for each successful pass this year than they did last year.By that measure, the drivers are right that it is harder to pass.But they are passing.At this point, it’s impossible to tell whether the limitation is the Next Gen car itself or a level of competition that’s produced 19 different winners this season already.

Welcome to the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, Round of 12.Next up is Texas Motor Speedway, which will be hosting the first event in the second round of the playoffs. Ryan Blaney won the All-Star Race in May there.A dozen drivers will continue pursuit of the 2022 championship in Sunday’s 334-lap race. The second round will continue Oct. 2 at Talladega Superspeedway and conclude Oct. 9 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval.MORE: Toyota executive: “We cost Kyle Busch shot at third championship”Chase Elliott has the point lead entering the weekend. Below the cutline are Chase Briscoe (-4 points), Alex Bowman (-6), Daniel Suarez (-6) and Austin Cindric (-7). After the Roval race, the bottom four drivers will be eliminated.This weekend also marks the start of the Xfinity playoffs.Here’s a look at the TMS weekend schedule:Texas Motor Speedway (Cup and Xfinity)Weekend weatherFriday: Sunny and hot. High of 97.Saturday: Sunny and hot. High of 97.Sunday: Mostly sunny. Stray shower or thunderstorm possible. High of 96. 15% chance of rain.Friday, Sept. 23(All times Eastern)Garage open
1 – 6 p.m. — Cup Series
3 – 8 p.m. — Xfinity Series
Saturday, Sept. 24Garage open
8:30 a.m. — Xfinity Series
9:30 a.m. – 3 p.m. — Cup Series
Track activity
10:30 – 11:05 a.m. — Xfinity Series practice (USA Network, NBC Sports App)
11:05 a.m. – noon — Xfinity Series qualifying (USA Network, NBC Sports App)
12:35 – 1:20 p.m. — Cup Series practice (USA Network, NBC Sports App)
1:20 – 2:30 p.m. — Cup Series qualifying (USA Network, NBC Sports App)
3:30 p.m. — Xfinity Series race (200 laps, 300 miles; USA Network, NBC Sports App, Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio)
Sunday, Sept. 25Garage open
12:30 p.m. — Cup Series
Track activity
3:30 p.m. — Cup Series race (334 laps, 501 miles; USA Network, NBC Sports App, Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio)

Over the past two years, Charles “Red” Farmer has had COVID-19. Twice.He has had a heart procedure. Twice.He has had pneumonia. Double pneumonia.Yet the biggest news concerning Farmer occurred just last week.He won a race.Yes, Farmer, who will be 90 years old October 15, won a 10-lap heat race at the Talladega Short Track, a 1/3-mile dirt track located near Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.Farmer is a regular at the track. That is, he was until health problems limited his racing over the past two years. Some thought heart and breathing issues might finally sideline Farmer, who has won more than 700 short-track races and whose long resume in the sport earned him induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2021.Those who thought that didn’t know Farmer well.MORE: Ryan Blaney’s team loses crew members to penalty“He’s got a gene that nobody else has,” Donnie Allison, Farmer’s long-time friend and fellow member of the Alabama Gang, told NBC Sports. “Whatever keeps driving him, I’m glad he’s got it. I believe if he stops doing what he’s doing, he might die.”Farmer was hard at work in his shop Wednesday but stopped — somewhat reluctantly — to talk about his latest success.“I started on the pole and went into Turn 1 and came off Turn 2 in the lead,” he told NBC Sports. “Then I pulled away from the field. The car was real good, hooked up all the way.”Farmer talks about his racing as if he’s 29, not 89. There is little mention of his age, except when he runs into the reality that health problems sometimes ride along with him.“I talked to him the week before he won the race,” Allison said. “We were in his shop, and all he could talk about was his brand new car. He expected to do well in it.”MORE: Viewer’s guide for Texas Motor SpeedwayFarmer plans to be back in competition at the Talladega dirt track for three races over the next month.“I was sick for two years, and now I’ve got shortness of breath real bad,” he  said. “I’ve been able to run some hot laps but hadn’t been able to race until recently. I tried a heat race a couple of months ago, and I almost died before I got out of the car. I was so short of breath. But my doctors changed my medicine around a little bit trying to strengthen my heart.“After I won the heat race and went across the scales, I was breathing a little bit hard, but nothing like I had been.”Farmer, who has raced with a NASCAR license since 1953, said he realized after winning the heat race that his breathing issues would prevent him from completing the feature. He started on the outside of the front row and dropped out of the field on the pace lap.“I let the field go by,” he said. “I ran a few laps so I could get my ‘gas’ money, then got out and watched my two grandsons race.”The short track plans to celebrate Farmer’s 90th birthday with the Red Farmer 90th Birthday Bash race October 15.“I’m hoping to run the feature race on one of the weekends coming up,” Farmer said. “I’ll just have to play it by ear.”He already has circled the January Ice Bowl, which starts the season at the Talladega Short Track, on his schedule.Allison, 82, said he remains impressed by Farmer’s determination to run the next lap.“He’s trying to get his strength back,” Allison said. “It’s amazing even as long as I’ve known him to see him do what he’s doing. I’m a lot younger and a lot stronger, and I’d have a hard time doing it.”

The NASCAR Cup Series playoffs roll on this weekend to Texas Motor Speedway, which will be hosting its first points race of the season.Former champion Chase Elliott, a four-time race winner and the only driver with more than two victories this year, leads the standings, followed by Joey Logano and Ross Chastain.The Texas race (3:30 p.m. ET Sunday, USA Network) is the first of three races in the Round of 12. Events at Talladega Superspeedway (Oct. 2) and the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval (Oct. 9) will follow.Entering Texas, Chase Briscoe, Alex Bowman, Daniel Suarez and Austin Cindric are below the cutline.Chris Buescher won Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, becoming the third non-playoff driver to win during the playoffs.Three tough teamsThree teams account for nine of the remaining 12 drivers in the hunt for the Cup championship.Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske and Trackhouse Racing put all of their drivers in the second round.Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, William Byron and Alex Bowman are in the final 12 for Hendrick. Bowman is below the cutline.MORE: NASCAR official fires back at Kevin Harvick’s commentTeam Penske drivers Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney are in the top eight entering Texas. Teammate Austin Cindric is below the cutline.Trackhouse Racing drivers Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez remain in title contention. Suarez is below the cutline.In a playoff season marked by troubles of various sorts, Byron is the only driver who has not had a significant issue through the first three races. He has finished eighth, sixth and third in the opening races.A 20th winner?In a very unusual season, one of the most unusual statistics is this: Nineteen different drivers have won a race this year, tying the modern-era record set in 2001.Could there be 20 different winners? In a word, yes.Six drivers who won races last year haven’t won a points race this year. They are Martin Truex Jr., Ryan Blaney, AJ Allmendinger, Aric Almirola, Brad Keselowski and Michael McDowell.Truex, Keselowski and Blaney might be the best bets to be No. 20 this weekend at Texas.Truex is a three-time runner-up at Texas and has led 674 laps there, the most by any driver without a win at the track.Keselowski has finished second twice at Texas and led 654 laps there. He led 109 laps Saturday at Bristol as part of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing’s best race of the season.Blaney remains in the championship race despite continuing to haul a big zero with him. He won the All-Star Race at Texas this year and has finished in the top 10 in seven of the past eight Texas races.Playoff standings tightTwelve drivers will be hoping to advance to the Round of 8 as the NASCAR playoffs stop at Texas Motor Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval over the next three weeks.The point totals in the top 12 entering Sunday’s race at Texas are tight.MORE: NBC Sports NASCAR Power RankingsOnly 34 points separate leader Chase Elliott and 12th-place Austin Cindric. The point gap from first to 12th in recent seasons has been higher — 57 in 2021, 66 in 2020, 46 in 2019, 55 in 2018 and 56 in 2017.The battle around the cutline is tighter. Only seven points separate sixth-place Denny Hamlin and 12th-place Cindric.Entry listsThirty-six drivers are entered in Sunday’s 334-lap Cup race. Included in addition to Cup  regulars are Garrett Smithley and Noah Gragson.Texas Cup entry listThirty-nine drivers are entered for 38 spots in Saturday’s 200-lap Xfinity Series race. On the list are Tommy Joe Martins, Stefan Parsons, Matt Mills, Jeffrey Earnhardt and Garrett Smithley.Texas Xfinity entry listThis week’s schedule and forecast (All times Eastern)Saturday, Sept. 24Forecast: Sunny and hot. High of 98.
10:35 – 11:05 a.m. — Xfinity Series practice (USA Network)
11:05 – Noon — Xfinity Series qualifying (USA Network)
12:35 – 1:20 p.m. — Cup Series practice (USA Network)
1:20 – 2:30 p.m. — Cup Series qualifying (USA Network)
3:30 p.m. — Xfinity Series race (200 laps, 300 miles; USA Network, Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio)
Sunday, Sept. 25Forecast: Mostly sunny. Stray shower or thunderstorm possible. High of 95. 15% chance of rain.
3:30 p.m. — Cup Series race (334 laps, 501 miles; USA Network, Performance Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio)

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