What is NASCAR's In-Season Challenge? 2 drivers will settle $1 million title at Brickyard 400
Because a 32-driver field that for the last four NASCAR Cup series rounds has made for a bracket-style single-elimination in-season tournament of sorts will be decided through this weekend's Brickyard 400. No. 6 seed Ty Gibbs, a 22-year-old third-year Cup series driver of the No. 54 Toyota for his grandfather's Joe Gibbs Racing, will face off against the Cinderella story of the summer, No. 32 seed Ty Dillon, the 33-year-old driver of the No. 10 Chevy for Kaulig Racing who's bounced around and raced for 10 different Cup teams since he made his debut in 2014. In Round 1 of this summer's tournament, Dillon knocked off top-seeded Denny Hamlin in a crash-filled opening round at Atlanta Motor Speedway where half the crew presently top 10 in points, Hamlin included, crashed out and finished 30th or worse.
Here's what you need to know about NASCAR's In-Season Challenge:
With 36 full-season drivers in this year's Cup series field, NASCAR set a deadline of the June 1 race at Nashville Superspeedway at which the sanctioning body would include the top 32 drivers in points at the time in the In-Season Challenge field, leaving out Shane van Gisbergen, who would go on to win three of the next six races, all on road or street courses – as well as Cole Custer, Riley Herbst and Cody Ware.
The remaining drivers then had the next three Cup series rounds at Michigan, Mexico City and Pocono to decide their tournament seed via their best finish from those three races with ties broken by drivers' next best finish during the seeding period. Hamlin, Chase Briscoe, Chris Buescher and Christopher Bell landed seeds 1 through 4, respectively, with Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Todd Gilliland, Noah Gragson and Dillon in the final four spots. Other notables in the seeding process included former series champs Chase Elliott (No. 5), Ryan Blaney (No. 7), Larson (No. 10), Kyle Busch (No. 16), Brad Keselowski (No. 17) and Joey Logano (No. 25), as well as Hendrick Motorsports drivers Alex Bowman (No. 8) and William Byron (No. 18).
'So lucky': North Central grad living dream, from calling Indy 500 to first Brickyard 400 on TV
From that seeding, drivers were slotted into a five-round, single-elimination bracket, where drivers' finishing position in each race assigned to a given round would determine whether they beat their opponent or not.
By the end of Round 1, all drivers who had won a race at that point in the season — minus Atlanta race-winner Elliott — had been eliminated, setting the stage for the unpredictable rest of the tournament that would follow.
After Atlanta, the Chicago street course hosted the Round of 16, followed by the quarterfinals at Sonoma and the semifinals at Dover. Sunday's Brickyard 400 hosts the finale, which marks the final race of TNT's broadcast stint for this season, which has spanned the entire In-Season Challenge stretch.
The team of the winner of the In-Season Challenge will win a $1 million grand-prize.
Katherine Legge's debut Brickyard 400: She didn't get an Indy 500 ride. It led to running 2 NASCAR races at IMS
Though Gibbs and Dillon have varying levels of Cup series experience, neither has won a Cup race in their careers. Gibbs has twice finished runner-up — coming at Darlington a year ago and earlier this month at Chicago. Dillion's career-best finish came in 2020 at Talladega where he took third place.
Kyle Larson: Defending Brickyard 400 winner returns to IMS hoping 'to do a much better job' than Indy 500
On the road to the championship round of the inaugural In-Season Challenge, Gibbs has finished 14th (Atlanta, eliminating No. 27 Justin Haley), second (Chicago, eliminating No. 22 AJ Allmendinger), seventh (Sonoma, eliminating No. 14 Zane Smith) and fifth (Dover, eliminating No. 23 Tyler Reddick). Dillion has had just one top 10 throughout the Challenge, finishing eighth (Atlanta, eliminating No. 1 Hamlin), 20th (Chicago, eliminating No. 17 Keselowski), 17th (Sonoma, eliminating No. 8 Bowman) and 20th (Dover, eliminating No. 12 John Hunter Nemechek).
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