Xfinity Series playoffs rev up at Kansas Speedway this weekend

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — NASCAR has taken over Kansas Speedway for the weekend, and it’s playoff time on the track with the Xfinity Series hitting the road on Saturday.

One of the drivers in the playoffs is 21-year-old Sam Mayer in the Number 1 car. His first race in the Xfinity Series was back in 2021, just one day after he turned 18.

Last year, Mayer made the championship round and finished third. With the start of the playoffs this weekend, he’s hoping to get to the top of the leaderboard. Now that he’s got a few years of experience, Mayer knows the value of taking things slow during a race.

“For anyone coming up, you’re going to have to learn patience a lot more than you think you do. You acknowledge it, you say, ‘Ah, yeah, I’ve got to be patient.’ And then you go out there and do it, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot to be patient,” Mayer described.

“So, you have to be really centered in yourself and focused, and patience, you really have to go above and beyond to do it right.”

The Kansas Lottery 300 gets going at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, you can watch all of the action on the CW .

The playoffs begin with Justin Allgaier as the playoff points leader ahead of reigning Xfinity Series champion Cole Custer. They are followed by Austin Hill, Chandler Smith, van Gisbergen, Jesse Love, Mayer, Riley Herbst, Sheldon Creed, AJ Allmendinger, Sammy Smith and Parker Kligerman, who is stepping back from full-time racing at the end of the season.

Basically, a win by a playoff driver in an Xfinity Series race earns them an automatic berth into the next round. There are three rounds and the field is cut by four drivers after the first two rounds, then the final four drivers remaining race for the championship at Phoenix in November.

Points are accumulated in each of the three races of each round, with the bottom four eliminated. The Xfinity Series races with the Cup Series the remainder of the season.

The first round is at Kansas Speedway, then Talladega Superspeedway, and finally the hybrid road course/oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The Associated Press contributed to this story

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