JOLIET, Ill. -- The biggest surprise of the opening race of the NASCAR playoffs was that no one had all that surprising of a day Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway.
Chase Elliott and Kevin Harvick finished second and third behind winner Martin Truex Jr., maybe running a little better than some predicted. If anything, the surprises were Jimmie Johnson and Matt Kenseth finishing eighth and ninth.
The playoffs are where these former champs should have had a breakout moment, with Kenseth building on recent strong runs still looking for his first win of the season and Johnson putting a crummy summer behind him.
They didn't need great days. With their finishes, Johnson is eighth in the standings, 20 points ahead of the current playoff cutoff, while Kenseth is ninth in the standings with a 13-point cushion.
"I'm really disappointed," Kenseth crew chief Jason Ratcliff said. "I think that we would be way more competitive. ... It just didn't seem like we could make any gains for some reason.
"We could change the car, but we kept getting stuck somewhere between seventh and ninth."
Johnson also was a nonfactor all day as he embarked on his quest for an eighth title.
"The cars are all so equal -- at least the guys from third or fourth on back, we are all so equal," Johnson said. "If you could get by somebody on a restart, that was really about it. But for me, my car just really wanted to run the bottom of the racetrack.
"The higher I would go, the looser it would get. I knew there was a lot of real estate up there to try to take advantage of -- I just couldn't make it work and had to chase the bottom all day long."
It is no surprise that drivers who have not had the best of seasons either didn't have the cars or had a mistake ruin their days.
Kurt Busch and Austin Dillon, who both had speeding penalties, are tied for 12th in the standings, which is the current cutoff with two races left in the opening round. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is four points behind them, Kasey Kahne five points back and Ryan Newman seven points behind going into New Hampshire next weekend.
Xfinity Series: End-of-race points swing
Justin Allgaier didn't just win a race in his home state in front of hundreds of guests from his sponsor.
Allgaier's victory, thanks to a couple of solid late-race restarts, resulted in him earning an extra seven playoff points -- five for the win plus two for his higher finish in the regular-season standings. It was a net switch of nine points between him and William Byron since Byron had been second in the standings and then dropped to third by two points after Allgaier's win.
So Byron, who had transmission issues at Chicagoland to finish 33rd and lose that second-place regular-season spot, enters the playoffs with a two-point lead over his teammate Allgaier.
"When I did see [Byron have trouble], I kind of changed my mindset a little bit, of, 'OK, he's having trouble, there is that opportunity to get those points, we know how crucial they are in the playoff format,'" Allgaier said.
"And that was the goal, to try to gain as many points as we could gain. Never did I think we could go to Victory Lane and get a nine-point swing."
Allgaier, Byron, Ryan Reed and Jeremy Clements made the Xfinity playoff field thanks to wins. Eight drivers made it on points, including regular-season champ Elliott Sadler. Others advancing: Daniel Hemric, Brennan Poole, Cole Custer, Matt Tifft, Blake Koch, Michael Annett and Brendan Gaughan.
Camping World Truck Series: Rhodes gets in
Ben Rhodes started the regular-season finale with a seven-point cushion on Ryan Truex for the final playoff spot. After the first two stages, that "cushion" shrank to two points.
That was just enough padding as Rhodes finished sixth, two spots behind Truex, to earn the final playoff spot. Rhodes and Truex tied in the points, and Rhodes' second-place finish (at Pocono) was the difference (the tiebreaker is best finish) as Truex didn't have a finish better than third this year.
Rhodes ran a couple of spots behind Truex for about the last 20 laps and knew that his day would be done if Truex could earn another spot.
"I was praying that nobody could pass me," Rhodes said. "I had nothing else left. I was racing the lapped cars as hard as I was racing for the lead [lap trucks]. ... I'm just glad we had the tiebreaker on our side."
Six drivers qualified for the truck playoffs with wins: Christopher Bell, Johnny Sauter (who earned his second win of the year at Chicagoland), Kaz Grala, Austin Cindric, Matt Crafton and John Hunter Nemechek. Chase Briscoe and Rhodes made it on points.
Truex had the typical first-man-out frustration in this win-and-in playoff format. He has averaged a finish of 11.1 this year, better than that of Cindric (12.0), Nemechek (13.6) and Grala (15.5).
"It sucks, but we're a top-5 truck and we're missing the playoffs," Truex said. "It's frustrating. ... Half the guys in the playoff field run 12th-to-eighth every week, and we run top-5 and miss it.
"But that's racing. If we didn't have any of the issues earlier in the year that we couldn't control, we wouldn't even be talking about this."