Dr. Diandra: Is Chase Elliott the championship front runner?

Based on his regular-season performance, Chase Elliott would seem to be the top candidate for championship front runner.

Elliott led the points coming into the playoffs and again entering round two. He retains the lead spot going into the Sunday’s race at the Charlotte Roval (2 p.m. ET, NBC). He will almost certainly make the championship four.

But making it to Phoenix and being most likely to win there are two very different things.

To weigh race performance against playoff points, I separated first-round points into:

Elliott started as the first seed but finished the round in fourth place.

Bell dominated. He was the only driver to get top fives in all three races. He beat the second-place driver, William Byron, by 22 points.

Bell’s 99 race points beat Byron by five and Denny Hamlin by one. But Bell tallied 50 stage points relative to Byron’s 30 and Hamlin’s 14.

Elliott earned just 62 race points and 18 stage points in the first three playoff races. That’s fewer than the three drivers ahead of him (Bell, Byron and Hamlin) and the two after him (Chastain and Larson).

Elliott’s saving grace was the 40 playoff points he earned during the regular season — 25 from race and stage wins, plus 15 for finishing first in the regular season. Without those playoff points, Elliott would have ended round one ranked between Chase Briscoe and Daniel Suárez.

A brief aside on the importance of stage points: Kyle Busch missed moving on by two points. Despite having the fewest race points, Busch’s 36 stage points almost got him to round two.

That’s how tight these playoffs are.

Alex Bowman is not represented in the graph below because he will miss the Roval due to continued concussion symptoms. He will be eliminated from the playoffs, along