It is finally championship weekend, NASCAR fans! And you know what that means–it’s time to talk about who should have made the Championship 4 and who just lucked their way in. Regardless of our thoughts on the Playoff format, there’s typically at least one driver in that final 4 who has their legitimacy as a championship contender questioned by fans. This year, it’s Joey Logano. The consensus is that Logano has had a pretty mediocre year, despite it being an even-numbered year. But a fuel mileage win at Las Vegas made him championship viable.
For this list, we’re going to take a look at all the other times someone made the Championship 4 under, shall we say, dubious circumstances. Also featured on this list are Champions (from all three series) that we, as fans, never saw coming. Without further ado, here are 5 of the most controversial Championship 4 appearances in NASCAR Playoff history!
Kicking things off, we’re going to talk about the most dramatic championship berth on this list–Ross Chastain’s 2022 bid. Heading into the fall Martinsville race, Ross Chastain wasn’t in a must-win situation, but he certainly needed to perform well. And he ran decently enough through the opening two stages of the race. But, as the laps wound down, Chastain found himself in a tight battle with his season-long rival, Denny Hamlin, as the two sparred just outside of the top 10.
But Hamlin put together a late-race charge, which had him inch away in points to the stagnant Chastain. In a dramatic move, a desperation (which eventually became dubbed as the “Hail Melon”), Chastain floored it into the final turn on the final lap, riding the wall. He picked up more positions than he even needed to advance to the 2022 Championship 4. This left Hamlin, probably a more deserving driver that year, eliminated. In the Chastain vs. Hamlin rivalry, the number 1 Trackhouse Chevy ultimately got the last laugh.
The next week, Ross Chastain was eventual champion, Joey Logano’s closest rival of the Championship 4 competitors. But that was mostly due to him getting into Chase Elliott earlier in the race, virtually ruining his day. Meanwhile, Christopher Bell was in his first Championship 4 experience and wasn’t much of a factor all day. Regardless, in the end, Logano won his second Cup Series title, and Ross Chastain finished runner-up. He almost completed the Cinderella Story for Trackhouse…but if it wasn’t for his controversial “Hail Melon” move at Martinsville, he wouldn’t have been in the final 4 at all.
2014 was the first year of the elimination-style NASCAR playoff format that we still have today. The idea was to put an emphasis on winning, which the format does…somewhat. Mostly it focuses on winning in the sense that the more wins you have in the regular season, the more points you enter the playoffs with. But in that first year, the system was almost exposed entirely (and it was eventually, which we’ll talk about a little later on this list).
In 2014, the Championship 4 consisted of Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano, and Ryan Newman. Newman was having a bit of a strange year. Following the 2013 season, Newman was dumped by his previous team of Stewart-Haas Racing in favor of Kevin Harvick. In what was virtually a driver-swap, Newman found home at Richard Childress Racing, driving their number 31 Caterpillar Chevrolet. RCR was a floundering team at the time, perhaps even worse off than they are now. But the partnership between RCR and Newman started off decent enough. Throughout the year, they ran mostly in the mid-teens but were able to muster up a handful of top-10s and a few top-5 finishes, qualifying him for the Playoffs.
During the post-season, Newman was quiet but consistent. In the championship cut-off race at Phoenix, he finished 11th, but the rest of the Round of 8 drivers finished so poorly (thanks, in part, to Jeff Gordon) that he was able to sneak into the final 4. Newman, winless, competed for a championship in 2014 at Homestead-Miami Speedway…and he nearly won it, finishing 2nd in that race to his SHR replacement and 2014 champion, Kevin Harvick.
Really, Newman was just happy to be there. They weren’t the most deserving team but, in 2014, they nearly exposed the NASCAR Playoffs for the gimmick that it was/became.
As far as controversial Championship 4 appearances go, this might be the most controversial entry on this list. Yes, I understand that Kyle Busch’s 2015 comeback was historic and certainly one for the record books. But did he deserve to be championship-eligible? Think about it: Busch was out due to injury through the first 11 races of the season. For most of the year, he ran outside the top 30 in points but was eventually able to meet that threshold so that he could use NASCAR’s playoff waiver.
It was a win at Sonoma in June that ultimately put Busch into the NASCAR post-season. Then he went on an impressive streak of wins at Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Indianapolis later that summer. Once in the Playoffs, he put together a string of top-5 finishes that eventually put him into the Championship 4 race. He then went on to dominate Homestead on his way to a championship victory. That’s great for him and is clearly a huge part of his legacy. But there are a lot of fans who question the legitimacy of that championship just because he missed so many races to start the year. Without that waiver from NASCAR, Busch never even would have been in the playoffs, let alone hoisting the Cup at seaon’s end.
Daniel Hemric’s 2021 NASCAR Xfinity Series championship victory may not be as egregious as the number 1 entry on this list, but it certainly raised some eyebrows. Hemric went winless in the 2021 regular season but qualified for the Xfinity Series playoffs due to his sheer consistency. In the 26-race regular season, Hemric earned 9 top-5s (including runner-up finishes at Las Vegas and Road America earlier in the season) and 14 top-10s. But he was racing for Joe Gibbs Racing, which expected him to win and win a lot.
Despite qualifying for the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series championship, Hemric was told that he would need to look for a ride elsewhere for the 2022 season. Heading into the season finale race at Phoenix, he was somewhat of an afterthought. But he was fast early, finishing second in the first stage and winning the second stage. As the final stage started to shape up, it was clear that the 2021 Xfinity Series title was going to come down between Austin Cindric and Hemric.
The chip on Hemric’s shoulder was that he was winless across all three national NASCAR series, and that became a huge talking point during the closing laps of the race. As NASCAR went into overtime, Hemric started below Cindric and gave him a run for his money, but he could never clear him. Coming to the white flag, Hemric ran Cindric high but still couldn’t get by. Coming to the checkered flag, Hemric sent his number 18 Toyota off the corner, making contact with Cindric, which killed his momentum just enough for Hemric to sneak away with the victory and the championship. To this day, it’s Hemric’s only win in any of the three nationally touring NASCAR series.
The one driver to truly expose the playoff format as a gimmick was Matt Crafton, who did so by winning the Truck Series championship in 2019, all while not winning a race all season long. That’s a pretty odd fact, considering that this format was meant to emphasize winning above all else.
Crafton is certainly a legend of the series, but in 2019, he was hardly the most dominant driver. He was quietly a top-10 driver with a couple of top-5s thrown in to make him seem a little more legitimate. All three drivers that he was up against in the Championship 4 were proven winners that season–Ross Chastain (3), Brett Moffitt (4), and Stewart Friesen (2). But all of them lost out to Crafton, who, luckily enough, finished 2nd at Homestead behind Austin Hill to win his third (and thus far, final) NASCAR Truck Series championship.
Crafton went down in the history books as NASCAR’s only winless champion, which didn’t sit well with many NASCAR fans. In fact, many fans call his 2019 championship win illegitimate and view it as the best example of why the NASCAR playoff format doesn’t work.
That does it for us, Daily Downforce readers! What did you think of this list? Would you have included any other drivers in it? Would you have maybe taken someone off? Let us know your thoughts! And be sure to keep tuning in back here all weekend long for all the latest silly season news and rumors in the world of NASCAR!
