Friday 5: Key questions while NASCAR Cup Series takes weekend off

As the Cup Series heads into its final off-weekend of the season, several questions remain.

Among those: How to describe what has happened in the first 16 races?

Unpredictable comes to mind quickly. Twelve different winners — including four first-time winners — have energized talk that all 16 playoff spots could be filled by drivers with a victory.

But is unpredictable really the right word? Martin Truex Jr. forecasted in January how topsy-turvy this season could be in a conversation with NBC Sports.

“There’s going to be a lot of crazy storylines early in the year,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of surprises, and there’s going to be a lot of guys that have a good week, bad week, good week, bad week, hit and miss.

“I just feel like until we get some time under our belt and find kind of a baseline of what (the Next Gen car) wants at certain tracks, we’re all going to be searching. We’re all going to be taking gambles on what we’re taking to the racetrack setup-wise.”

No example best highlights the hit-and-miss nature of this season as a week Joey Logano had in May.

He struggled at Dover, crossing the finish line 29th and four laps behind the leaders. A week later, Logano won the pole, led a race-high 107 laps and won at Darlington.

“It’s crazy to go from where we were last weekend in Dover, where we were just off … qualified mid-20s and really run mid-20s and get into wrecks and all that,” Logano said after his Darlington victory. “Then you come back the next weekend, fast off the truck, put it on the pole, lead a bunch of laps, win a stage, third another stage, and it’s a big day for us.

“I don’t know, but it just goes to show kind of what this Next Gen car is right now where no one really has it quite figured out