Strategies vary on how to win at Talladega

Sitting 18 points above the cut line and needing to just finish 14th or better to secure a berth in the next bracket, Denny Hamlin would feel reasonably comfortable about advancing in the Chase for the Sprint Cup if this were a different round with a different elimination race.

But Round 2 is like no other in NASCAR’s elimination playoff format, as its elimination race is staged at Talladega Superspeedway, the sport’s most unpredictable track where the running order swings wildly from lap-to-lap and the “big one” is capable of erupting at any given second.

Hamlin is all too aware of Talladega’s chaotic nature. A year ago he witnessed firsthand teammate Kyle Busch enter the CampingWorld.com 500 in an even more advantageous position, needing just to finish 28th or better to advance. But despite employing conservative strategy, Busch caught a piece of a wreck not of his creation and finished 40th and wasn’t one of eight drivers who qualified for the next round.

So will Hamlin mimic Busch’s game plan, dropping to the rear and letting the race play out? Or, will he just race as he always does at Talladega -- attempting to stay up front with the leaders?

“I just don’t know the proper way to do it,” Hamlin said. “You always think that there’s going to be a big wreck there that takes out a lot of cars, but there wasn’t last year. ... My gut feeling is we’ll probably have to go there and race hard.

“I don’t think 18 (points) is enough to just go out there and ride around. I just don’t think that’s safe.”

Hamlin isn’t alone in fluctuating between whether its best run near the front or drop back to give himself a better chance of avoiding the “big one,” the descriptor for a multi-car wreck that has become Talladega’s trademark.

With the order ever-changing due to the draft, drivers are challenged to pinpoint an exact position that will ensure transferring. At one moment that spot may be around 20th, and then the next lap could change somewhere higher.

“It’s a balance,” said Jeff Gordon, seven points above the cut line. “If you have a car that qualifies up front like we did last time we were here, you want to try and maintain that track position. You have to be a little more aggressive. There’s a fine line that can get in trouble really easily, as well.

“I can tell you that it’s a lot harder when you get shuffled back to work your way toward the front than it used to be. People are smarter, cars are more equal and the draft and aerodynamics are different than they used to be. It’s hard to make that work if you get behind.”

Gordon is retiring at the end of the year and Sunday will mark his final Talladega race, a track where he’s visited Victory Lane six times. Though winless on the season, the four-time Cup Series champion led the most laps in the Daytona 500, had one of the better cars in the May Talladega race and finished in the top in July at Daytona International Speedway.

During the spring Talladega race the final 25 laps featured a bit of an anomaly with the front-running cars largely racing nose-to-tail, unable to form a second line of cars. That enabled leader Dale Earnhardt Jr. to control the proceedings and cutoff any of the few attempts that were made to pass him.

But the consensus is that Sunday won’t be a mirror of what transpired in May. The stakes are simply too high.

“There are certainly gonna be some people that race scared and racing scared, to me, means sometimes you race not to win, but to not lose as far as the points are concerned,” defending race-winner Brad Keselowski said. “At Talladega, that is a big effect on the strategy and the way the race plays out. We saw that (in the spring) where the race stayed single-file for a long, long time, which, to me, is kind of somewhat a showing of racing scared. Where you’re happy with where you’re running and you don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that, so you stay in line.

“The tactics certainly change when the circumstances around them change, and the Chase is certainly a change from a normal race weekend.”