Just eight drivers remain eligible to take home the $1 million NASCAR In-Season Tournament prize after a wild opening two rounds of action at EchoPark Speedway and the Chicago Street Course led to a lot of overwhelming favorites being bounced from the bracket.
Ty Dillon, who came into the tournament as the 32nd and final seed, will look to continue his improbable yet incredible run through the bracket as he will face off head-to-head against Alex Bowman, the No. 8 seed in the bracket, in Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.
While Dillon has ultimately moved through the opening two rounds of the tournament due to his opening two round competitors — Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski — getting knocked out due to early-race crashes at Atlanta and Chicago, Dillon has put in some solid efforts in both races, which may have moved him on had the others not found trouble.
The driver of the No. 10 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet nabbed his best finish of the season, an eighth-place result, in the Quaker State 400 at EchoPark Speedway two races ago, and last week, he overcame a late-race flat tire to finish a respectable 20th in the Grant Park 165.
But the question is, can he mount enough of a challenge this weekend to get past Bowman?
If you look at the career stats for both drivers at Sonoma Raceway, your intuition would tell you no.
In five career NASCAR Cup Series starts at the 1.99-mile road course in Wine Country, Dillon has a career-best finish of 23rd, and his average finish is a paltry 26.8 at Sonoma. Meanwhile, Bowman has finished outside the top-20 at Sonoma just twice in his eight career starts at the track, and both of those results came while driving for BK Racing in 2014 and Tommy Baldwin Racing in 2015. Since moving to Hendrick Motorsports in 2018, Bowman has not finished worse than 16th at Sonoma Raceway.
But the In-Season Tournament has been decided upon much more than career stat sheets, as we’ve seen.
While Dillon heads into the third round of the tournament with two of his better runs of the season under his belt, and has gotten there with very little noise, Bowman comes into this weekend’s event at Sonoma Raceway following the latest dust-up of his long-standing feud with Bubba Wallace. Last weekend at Chicago, Wallace and Bowman were matched up in the In-Season Tournament bracket, and what resulted was a knock-out drag-out fight for several laps, which eventually resulted in Wallace being spun out.
Both drivers said all of the right things after cooling off following last Sunday’s race, but you kind of wonder if the feud will spark up again at Sonoma if Bowman and Wallace find themselves near one another on Sunday. If it does, there is a realistic shot that Dillon could advance to the fourth round of the In-Season Tournament.
NASCAR In-Season Tournament Round 3 Matchups (Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma)
- No. 32 Ty Dillon vs No. 8 Alex Bowman
- No. 12 John Hunter Nemechek vs No. 20 Erik Jones
- No. 15 Ryan Preece vs No. 23 Tyler Reddick
- No. 6 Ty Gibbs vs No. 14 Zane Smith
