MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — After a dominating season where three drivers — Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. — combined to win 57 percent of the races so far, it only seems fair they tangle one more time to see who really has the best car this season.
Harvick, Busch and the reigning champion Truex, dubbed NASCAR’s Big Three, are joined by Joey Logano, and the final four playoff drivers will race for the 2018 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series championship Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway in the Ford EcoBoost 400 (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC).
“You always want to beat the best, and I enjoy racing against those guys,” Harvick, the 2014 series champion, told USA TODAY Sports. “And if you’re going to win this championship, you’re going to have to beat three of the best guys that have been on the track all year.”
Busch and Logano each automatically advanced to the Championship 4 round of the playoffs with wins in the Round of 8. Busch took last weekend’s checkered flag at ISM Raceway in Phoenix, and Logano won at Martinsville Speedway late last month.
Both Harvick and Truex qualified through points. While Truex hasn’t won a race since July, Harvick won two weeks ago at Texas Motor Speedway, but his win was encumbered after NASCAR handed out a major penalty.
The Big Three don’t just enter the weekend with 20 combined wins in the first 35 races of the season — Truex has four, while Harvick and Busch each have eight apiece — they also represent three of the past four series champions. And each claimed his title by winning the Homestead race, rather than having the highest finish among the contenders.
“Absolutely,” Truex said about whether it’s a necessity to win the race to be the champion during a press conference while sitting next his three competitors.
“I think all of us come in here expecting that to be the case. There’s obviously an opportunity for a chance that that might not (happen), but I think that (there’s) about a 99 percent chance one of these guys is going to win it to win the championship.”
But Harvick and Busch have routinely proven they’re in a different league this year compared with the rest of the field. They each had stretches of three consecutive trips to victory lane this season, and of 9,983 laps raced in 2018 so far, they have combined to lead almost 34 percent of them.
That’s a lot of power for Logano to match.
However, he previously said he felt his No. 22 Ford team is the favorite to win, despite only two victories this season and a career-best fourth-place finish at Homestead — first in 2015 when Busch won his first Cup championship and again in 2016 when Jimmie Johnson won his seventh. He also won the pole in 2012 before finishing 14th.
But through the first nine playoff races, Logano’s car has increasingly picked up speed.
“It’s the Big Three and me,” Logano, whose only other win this season was at Talladega Superspeedway in May, said at the press conference.
“Honestly, you have to have that confidence. I’m sure everyone here has that same amount of confidence and feeling that they are the favorites. ... But for us, I feel like we’ve been able to overcome a lot this season and have a lot of momentum, have an amazing playoff at this point.”
For Truex, who has eight top-10 finishes in 13 Homestead starts, a win would mean more than just defending his title and becoming the first back-to-back champion in eight years. His team, Furniture Row Racing, announced in September that it’s closing up shop at the end of the season.
The No. 78 Toyota driver will become teammates with Busch next season at Joe Gibbs Racing.
“No matter what happens Sunday, we’re gonna enjoy it,” Truex told USA TODAY Sports. “We’re gonna celebrate afterwards, but we damn sure hope it’s on the stage with a big trophy.”
