NASCAR at Daytona: Austin Dillon wins, Martin Truex loses, Ryan Blaney makes a beer run

Generations of NASCAR fans would recoil at such a statement, wondering what type of actual hell everyone just went through to dare utter the following:

“Whew, let’s all get to Darlington so everything can settle down.”

But such is the nature of plate-racin’ at Daytona, where the only thing to expect is the unexpected.

No, scratch that. It’s expected. The only unknown is how it’ll be doled out and in what doses.

Austin Dillon got a big dose and liked it. Martin Truex Jr. got a big dose and liked it, right up until he got another big dose and didn’t.

Ryan Blaney was more of a lab rat, poked and prodded and put through all the paces until, finally, in the end, he threw his hands in the air and declared it Happy Hour.

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Technically, it was 4:20 Sunday afternoon when the checkers finally waved, but close enough to 5 o’clock for Ryan . . . and a lot of us, to be honest.

Let’s try to round it all up before leaving Daytona behind for the playoffs and, speaking of Happy Hour, a little rendezvous with the Lady in Black . . .

First Gear: Ryan Blaney declares it Beer-30!

Just in case you needed a reminder of why NASCAR made the dramatic shift of putting Daytona’s "other"  race at the end of the regular season, you got the whole range of emotions Sunday.

At one extreme there was Dillon, on the other was Truex. Blaney was somewhere between those two, but basically too wiped out to know which end was up, let alone know how to act.

Around the time some folks were cleaning breakfast plates, Blaney was victimized by the Big One and looked like a playoff goner. But the crew bandaged his Ford enough to keep it rolling, and roll he did, but slow enough to miss the Really Big One, which wiped out enough cars to get everyone doing math during the three-plus-hour rain delay.

Yep, if the race restarted, Blaney would eventually turn more laps than all those cars that went behind the wall and gain enough spots to save his playoff life . . . unless Truex could keep his own crippled car near the front.

In the end, it depended on your definition of near. Truex slipped from a top-three draft and finished eighth when he needed fourth (“ It was going to be hard to hang on to fourth or better with a car that torn up,” he said).

Blaney finished six laps down but in 15th place. That’s right, six laps down, 15th. He entered with a 25-point cushion over Truex and lost all but three of them.

“Mentally drained,” he said. “I want to go home, crack open a beer and relax a little bit.”

Grab two, will ya?

Blaney and Truex, by the way, finished the regular season third and fourth in the basic points standings. Fair is for corndogs and Ferris wheels, as they say.

Second Gear: Austin Dillon plays hardball to win Daytona

Was this any way to determine the final playoff field?

From a purely competitive perspective, of course not. Superspeedway racing at Daytona and Talladega — we’ll probably always call it plate-racin’ even though the plates have been replaced by other methods — is as much about happenstance as horsepower, as we witnessed yet again Sunday.

But the entire industry of professional athletics at the highest levels (i.e. network television) is commonly known as the sports-entertainment industry. You can’t overlook that.

Say what you want about fairness and the oversized role luck plays at Daytona, the entertainment level can be off the charts.

As for the actual competitive side, you can’t just shrug off Dillon’s win as a matter of snaking his way through that final massive pileup as the rains came — though his No. 3 Chevy emerging from the smoke, all alone on the backstretch, was a memorable image.

No, Dillon had to make a move to win, and the move was into Austin Cindric’s rear bumper entering Turn 1 with three laps remaining.

“He is racing for a playoff spot and I totally expected to get drove through," Cindric said. “It was just a matter of time.”

No, if Cindric hadn’t already clinched a playoff spot, he wouldn’t have been so understanding.

Third Gear: Chase Elliott is favored, but Joey Logano is rollin'

There’s no clear favorite, or even favorites, entering the playoffs this week at Darlington.

Yes, Chase Elliott gets the Vegas nod as well as the well-wishes of his adoring public. Those 40 playoff bonus points he brings along are worth more than all that, however.

Knowing there’s basically no way he gets knocked out of the first round is enough to look at him as a kinda-sorta favorite. But Joey Logano righted the ship recently and figures to have a say.

A road course followed by a plate-race halted the momentum Kevin Harvick had two weeks ago, but one good day at Darlington, where he’s always a threat, could get him back on a roll.

On the other end is Ross Chastain, who has lost a cylinder along the way. Look at the past three months. He had six straight top-10s in early summer, then in these past six weeks he’s finished no better than 18th, with an average finish of 26th.

Amateur psychology is a dicey proposition, but you have to wonder if Ross The Boss has been weighed down by his growing reputation — fair or not — as a caution flag waiting to happen.

Fourth Gear: Jeremy Clements crashes Xfinity playoffs with Wawa win at Daytona

We can’t pull behind the wall without delivering an attaboy to Jeremy Clements, the surprise winner in Friday’s night’s Xfinity Series race — the Wawa 250 — at Daytona.

He's clinched a spot in the Xfinity playoffs, which begin in four weeks.

Right place, right time for Clements, who actually repeated that a few times in the late laps, which saw three attempts at overtime.

And frankly, there could’ve been a fourth. But someone up in the officials booth ignored the caution button just long enough to let Clements cross the line to complete the first of two overtime laps, thereby making it an official finish.

Whew. Could’ve been there all night, except we were quickly running out of cars.

Clements, a popular veteran of 15-plus years in the Xfinity Series, had one previous win in 420 starts, and has finished top-10 in less than 10% of his career starts.

But Daytona, you know. Again, as odd as it sounds, let’s point it toward that Florence exit and get a little normalcy at Darlington.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR: Austin Dillon wins, Martin Truex loses, Ryan Blaney survives