For most of Saturday night's race at Bristol, Ty Gibbs looked like he was going to interrupt the playoff drivers' party and win his first race in the NASCAR Cup Series. In a race that was somewhat similar to the wacky tire-preservation race in the spring of 2024, where Gibbs led 137 laps, he improved on that with a career-high 201 laps led on Saturday night, tripling his laps led count for the season, even though his teammate, Christopher Bell, ended up winning. Despite finishing 10th, Gibbs won Stage 2, scored the second-most points, posted the best driver rating (129.6), and had the fifth-best average running position. However, Gibbs was unable to decelerate quickly enough to make his final pit stop and got hit from behind. He ran slowly enough until he actually made his pit stop to fall a lap down, but he eventually regained it and finished 10th. Although it was a disappointing result, the performance suggests that maybe some people wrote him off too quickly.

Josh Berry was pretty outmatched in the NASCAR playoffs. Although nobody really expected him to advance to the Round of 12 since he's had a pretty mediocre season even despite his win at Las Vegas, Berry became the first playoff driver to finish last in each race of a playoff round with his 39th place finish at Bristol last night. While running seventh in Stage 1, Berry's brake rotors caught fire and he struggled to be able to make it into the pits as smoke billowed inside his car. He had to be extricated from the car while on pit road, but he appeared to be unhurt. There is a strong chance after this start that he will finish 16th and last in the playoffs since it's hard to see him overcoming the 40-point deficit to all other drivers, but few people expected him to make the playoffs to begin with so he arguably overachieved anyway.

It was really unlikely for Shane van Gisbergen to advance to the Round of 12 in the NASCAR playoffs on Saturday night since there were no road courses in that round, and two of the tracks in this round (Darlington and Bristol) tend to benefit the drivers with a great deal of stock-car experience as opposed to rookie outsiders like SVG. He was caught up in three incidents in Saturday night's race. Early in Stage 2, Riley Herbst sent Ricky Stenhouse Jr. into him, although SVG did not make significant contact and continued. Late in Stage 2, he was running very slowly and holding up traffic when he spun by William Byron. He spun out again at the start of Stage 3, but none of these incidents badly damaged his car. He finished 26th, three laps down, but didn't come close to making the playoffs. Admittedly, nobody really expected him to.

As expected, Austin Dillon wasn't even particularly close to being in contention to advancing to the Round of 12 in the NASCAR playoffs. For all the speed he has recently shown at Richmond, he's never been particularly strong at Bristol and last night was no exception as he started 23rd and finished 28th four laps down ad he never even ran better than 19th in a race where only three other drivers: Austin Hill, Cody Ware, and Chad Finchum had a worse peak running position. It was pretty obvious that Alex Bowman, Dillon, Shane van Gisbergen, and Josh Berry would be the four drivers to fail to advance since the 12 drivers who did advance pretty obviously had significantly better seasons than all of them.