3 winners and 2 losers after the first race of NASCAR’s Monster Energy Cup Series playoffs

Martin Truex Jr. would’ve been excused if he thought some bought of misfortune was going to erase his sizable lead during the waning laps of Sunday’s Monster Energy Cup Series playoff opener at Chicagoland Speedway.

Such an occurrence had cost Truex the past two races while leading. He blew a tire with three laps remaining at Darlington Raceway, which was followed the next week by a slower car scraping the wall to bring out a questionable caution with four laps left at Richmond Raceway. In each instance, Truex saw victory slip away and experienced the sting of losing races he should’ve otherwise won.

On Sunday, Truex escaped any calamity. Instead of bad luck manifesting itself in some way, his seven-second advantage held and he cruised to win the Tales of the Turtles 400. It was his series-best fifth victory of the season, but this one carried some added importance as it locked him into the second round of the Cup playoffs.

Not that there was any doubt that Truex wasn’t going to advance out of the first round. On the strength of his overall race wins, stage wins and superb weekly consistency, the Furniture Row Racing driver entered the playoffs as the No. 1 seed armed with a stockpile of bonus points where only a cavalcade of circumstances could prevent him from reaching the semi-final round.

And now Truex remains comfortably in the catbird position he sat coming into the postseason. He is now firmly in the next bracket and virtually guaranteed to advance beyond. Don’t write his name in pen as one of the four championship finalists, but that too seems like a near certainty as the points cushion he’s amassed affords him a mulligan in case more misfortune strikes at an inopportune time.

Besides Truex, here are the other winners and losers from the first race of the 2017 Cup playoffs.

Winner: Kevin Harvick

Recent playoff openers haven’t been kind to Kevin Harvick, who in the past two years was in the position Truex now finds himself only to leave Chicagoland in a points hole because of various incidents.

But Harvick enjoyed an uneventful and productive race on Sunday. He started fourth, led 59 laps and finished third, and is well positioned to be among the 12 drivers transferring into the second round. This is a vastly different situation than the previous two seasons where Harvick faced a virtual must-win situation at some juncture during Round 1.

Loser: Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

An admitted playoff underdog, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. knew he and his Roush Fenway Racing needed everything to go in their favor to avoid playoff elimination. That meant committing zero mistakes and maximizing finishes each week — none of which transpired on Sunday.

The rough day began when Stenhouse slapped the Turn 2 wall on Lap 25, necessitating a trip down pit road to fix the damage. But as he attempted to pit, he didn’t get all four wheels below the commitment line, compounding the problem and earning himself a pass-thru penalty. Another pit road penalty for speeding added to the freefall and he finished 25th.

Stenhouse dropped to 14th in the standings, four points behind Austin Dillon for the final transfer position. A small deficit, however one that feels larger considering RFR has shown little speed outside of restrictor-plate tracks to provide hope Stenhouse can move above the cut line over the next two races.

Winner: Joey Logano

Joey Logano was expected to be part of this year’s playoffs, except he shockingly didn’t qualify after a pedestrian regular season where he had only four top-10 finishes in the final 17 races. That’s placed him in unfamiliar territory after making the championship round in two of the past three years.

After missing the cut, Logano said the goal the remainder of the season was to win as many of the 10 races as possible. And although he didn’t win Sunday, his seventh-place finish offered encouraging signs that the speed which had largely been absent may be returning.

Loser: Kyle Busch

When Joe Gibbs Racing swapped Kyle Busch’s pit crew with teammate Daniel Suarez’s this week the idea was to give Busch an upgrade since he had qualified for the playoffs and the rookie Suarez had not.

So what happened the first time Busch, who started on the pole and led 85 of the first 87 laps, came down pit road? His new crew didn’t securely fasten the right-rear wheel, requiring their driver to make an unscheduled green-flag pit. And when the No. 18 Toyota did stop, the crew jumped over the wall too soon, forcing Busch to serve a pass-through penalty and dropping from two laps behind the leaders.

Busch would get one of those laps back, but he never got the timely caution he needed to return to the lead lap and re-emerge as a contender. A potential win morphing into a 15th-place finish, which left both Busch and crew chief Adam Stevens displeased.

Winner: Hendrick Motorsports

There was no flipping of the proverbial switch following an organizational-wide summer slump that raised questions whether Hendrick Motorsports would be a factor in the postseason. And though a single race is not indicative of what’s to come, Chase Elliott finishing second and Jimmie Johnson eighth shows promise that Chevrolet’s top team may be snapping out of its funk.

Yes, the positivity is stunted some with Dale Earnhardt Jr. (finished 17th) and Kasey Kahne (21st) turning in nondescript performances; especially playoff-eligible Kahne, who doesn’t give the impression that he’ll make it out of the first round. Still, Elliott led 42 laps and posted first top-five finish nine races, while Johnson now has back-to-back top 10s for the first since the spring when he won consecutive races. Both should have little concern about advancing to the next round.