NASCAR Playoffs at Atlanta: Where to watch, start time, live stream, preview, picks for the Quaker State 400

For a long time, the Atlanta Motor Speedway was a track of champions. From 1987 until 2001, Atlanta marked the final stop on each year's NASCAR Cup Series calendar and the site of the formal crowning of the Cup champion. In a few cases, it was the site of epic battles for the right to claim that title, including the 1992 finale that is considered one of the greatest races in NASCAR history.

The years have passed, the way champions are crowned has changed, and the Atlanta Motor Speedway itself has changed too. But for Atlanta this weekend, that change is to the track that formally launches the battle for the 2024 Cup Series championship.

The NASCAR playoffs begin with Sunday's running of the Quaker State 400, which marks the start of the Round of 16 and the sport's return to Atlanta for the first time since one of the defining moments of the season back in February. A remarkable race ended with the leaders three-wide at the finish line, with Daniel Suarez beating both Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch by inches to win in the fourth-closest finish in Cup Series history, and the closest three-wide finish ever.

That victory put Suarez in the playoffs, but it far from assures his future in this round or the rounds to follow. For as action-packed as a race at the start of the season showed with 48 lead changes among 14 different drivers and four-wide passes for the top spot, anything is within the realm of possibility at what is quickly becoming NASCAR's new action track.

How to Watch the NASCAR playoffs at Atlanta

Date: Sunday, Sept. 8
Location: Atlanta Motor Speedway -- Hampton, Georgia
Time: 3 p.m. ET
TV: USA
Stream: fubo (try for free)

What to Watch

With Harrison Burton and Chase Briscoe going from the longest of playoff longshots to winning the last two races, there is an extra focus this weekend on potential surprise winners -- especially with Atlanta, with the character of a superspeedway confined within a 1.5-mile oval, serving as fertile ground for such an occurrence. Of the 14 drivers that led laps at Atlanta back in February, four have not won a race in 2024 with two of them, Front Row Motorsports teammates Todd Gilliland and Michael McDowell, combining to lead 85 of 260 laps.

Since 2022, Atlanta races have seen more than a fair share of surprise faces at the front of the field. Corey LaJoie, for instance, has two top-five finishes and was a serious threat to win all the way until the last lap in 2022. Journeyman driver J.J. Yeley, who is entered this week in the No. 44 NY Racing Chevrolet, earned his first top 10 in a decade with a seventh place finish in 2023. And six times in history, Atlanta has served as the site of a driver's very first Cup win. That list includes Bobby Johns (1960), Bob Burdick (1961), Jim Hurtubise (1966), Jerry Nadeau (2000), Kevin Harvick (2001) and Carl Edwards (2005).

News of the Week

• During NASCAR playoffs Media Day, Alex Bowman addressed a rumor that had circulated suggesting he would be out at Hendrick Motorsports after this season if he did not advance in the playoffs, saying that the rumor was "annoying" and that he had received assurances from Hendrick officials that it was not true. Bowman, who earned a playoff spot by winning at Chicago in July, is signed to drive the No. 48 for Hendrick through 2026.
  
  "It got to the point where I picked up the phone and called everybody, and everybody said, 'absolutely not,'" Bowman told reporters. "That's really all I have to go on and I don't have a reason to believe anything other than that. There's no -- oh, you need to do this to keep your job. Like it's absolutely not.. everything's fine.
  
  

  "Beyond that, we need to go run better. It's been a miserable month. We haven't executed on a high level at all, so we need to go run better the next 10 weeks. But we need to do that for us and our playoff run; for Ally and the No. 48 team. There's no like -- 'you need to do this to keep your job.' As far as I know, I'm not worried about that at all."

• Martin Truex Jr., set to compete in his final playoffs before retiring from full-time racing at the end of the season, shared more details on a prospective agreement he has to run the 2025 Daytona 500. Truex will be reuniting with crew chief Cole Pearn, who he earned 24 of his 34 career wins and the 2017 Cup championship with, and will run either his family No. 56 or the No. 78 he won the title with at Furniture Row Racing. While Denny Hamlin said that Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing are still figuring out the best avenue for Truex's 500 bid, Truex himself suggested that a deal is in place for him to compete.
  
  "I mean, we're doing it, so I don't know exactly the details of it, but it's all but done," Truex said.
• In the latest development on NASCAR's ongoing charter negotiations, Sports Business Journal reported earlier this week that the sanctioning body was hoping to have an agreement reached with its race teams this week in order to avoid such negotiations spilling over into the playoffs. Whether or not that is particularly close to happening, however, is unclear. Particularly not after comments by 23XI Racing co-owner Denny Hamlin, who categorized talks as "stagnant" and that getting a deal done will require NASCAR to "wake up and be reasonable."
  
  "There's probably a handful of teams that are just happy to take any deal that they can get and there's others with some business sense that says this is unreasonable," Hamlin said. "... We all want what's best for the sport. If the sport does great, we will do better, so I think we all just need to figure out how to lock arms and do it together. But we don't have any agreement in front of us that is locking of arms, it's all one sided."
• The Athletic reports that RFK Racing is progressing towards expanding to three cars in 2025, with Kroger joining the team as a sponsor and the team hiring Ryan Preece as the driver of its third car. When asked during playoff media day about expansion, team co-owner Brad Keselowski told The Athletic that he was hoping to be able to share something in "the next month or so."
  
  Should RFK's expansion is realized, it will mark the first time the team has had three full-time Cup cars since 2016. The team has fielded a third car, No. 60, in select races this year with a best finish of fourth by Joey Hand at Chicago.
  

Pick to Win

Kyle Busch (+1000) – Kyle Busch missed the playoffs for the first time since 2012 and the first time since the elimination-style format was introduced in 2014, but he enters Atlanta on a hot streak after nearly changing the fate of his season before settling for runner-up finishes two weeks in a row. With the playoffs now out of the question, Busch is trying to preserve his streak of consecutive seasons with at least one victory, a NASCAR record mark of 19 that extends from his rookie season in 2005 all the way to 2023.

Of course, everything described above may have been taken care of had Busch just had a few more inches over Daniel Suarez and Ryan Blaney in February. And by the way, Busch should factor heavily into how this weekend's Atlanta race plays out again. Speedways have been the strong point of Richard Childress Racing, and Busch has three-straight top 10s and two-straight top fives at this track since joining RCR last year.