Stewart Haas Racing teammates Kevin Harvick, Kurt Busch experiencing different playoff fortunes

The moment Kurt Busch slammed into the prone car of Kevin Harvick, Busch knew exactly the impact the collision had on his title hopes. He went from being well-positioned to continue on in the playoffs to not only on the wrong side of the cut line, but in a points deficit difficult to overcome with just a single race remaining in the first round.

Harvick had spun after contact with Austin Dillon during last Sunday’s Monster Energy Cup Series playoff race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, with his tire smoke virtually blinding those behind. So by the time Busch saw Harvick, it was too late. Busch couldn’t take evasive action and barreled into the front right of Harvick’s No. 4 Ford.

The contact was significant enough to end the race for the Stewart-Haas Racing teammates. However, the big picture ramifications for each were dramatically different.

Harvick is 25 points above the last driver below the cutoff line, Dillon, entering Sunday’s Round 1 elimination race at Dover International Speedway. Busch is 17 points behind Ricky Stenhouse Jr. for the final transfer spot, and essentially must win the Apache Warrior 400 to advance or will be one of four dropped from the 16-driver postseason field.

“It’s all in,” Busch said. “We’ll go there with everything we’ve got.”

That Harvick is still solidly poised to move on, while Busch will in probability be eliminated Sunday despite both crashing out at New Hampshire, underscores how NASCAR’s new stage-racing points structure that rewarded performance during the regular season is influencing the postseason.

Under the revised system introduced in January, drivers earned playoff bonus points for winning a stage (one point), winning the overall race (five points), and for ranking inside the 10 of the points standing at the end of the 26-race regular season.

The “playoff points” earned were then added to a drivers total when the standings reset at the beginning of the postseason and will also do so at the start of the second and third rounds. Drivers can continue to accumulate playoff bonus points during each playoff race with the exception of the best-finish-wins-the championship four-driver finale.

Harvick amassed 15 playoff bonus points during the regular season compared to the five Busch scored. It is that difference in regular-season consistency between the two teammates that has given Harvick a safety net guarding against a poor result in a playoff race.

And it’s not just Harvick who’s been aided by his playoff bonus points cushion.

Stenhouse opened the postseason with finishes of 25th and 15th, results that in years past would’ve likely had him buried in points and in a must-win scenario at Dover. But the Roush Fenway Racing driver won twice in the regular season and those 10 playoff bonus points earned him a tie with Dillon for the 12th and final transfer spot.

Now instead of being on the cusp of elimination, Stenhouse possesses a chance to advance. This is despite hitting the wall and having assorted issues in the playoff opener at Chicagoland Speedway, then just being so-so at New Hampshire.

“After our poor performance at Chicago I thought we were kind of out of it,” Stenhouse said. “We didn’t have a great Loudon, but we managed to gain some points there and that is what we have to keep doing. We have to keep our head down and fight to the end.”