The real season starts now. In Austin, Tx, with Sunday’s running of the DuraMAX Texas Grand Prix on the COTA road course. What, you say? Haven’t we already run two races, one at Daytona and the other at Atlanta?
Yes, but they don’t count. Under current NASCAR rules, it’s impossible to race on superspeedways. They turn into demolition derbies and wreck fests. In fact, with fuel saving now critical to winning, the cars often run at less than full throttle, so they REALLY don’t race.
Two things determine whether or not you win on a superspeedway. First, you have to avoid the “big wreck,” and you don’t know when it’s going to happen – you just know it’s going to happen. So avoiding it is pure, blind luck.
Second, you have to be in the right line at the right time coming off the fourth corner on the last lap. And again, this is pure luck. You can be leading the race coming out of the turn, and if a bunch of cars decide to leave your line and form another, you’re cooked. You can go from first to 15th in a heartbeat.
Which is why Old Guy Sport doesn’t include them in its points standings. You can’t learn anything about how competitive a team will be from a superspeedway race because the tracks are so different from everything else NASCAR runs on.
Even Billy Scott admits that. Scott is crew chief for Tyler Reddick, who not only won the Daytona 500 but Atlanta’s Autotrader 400 as well, creating quite a stir.
Scott said, and virtually everybody in the garage would agree with him, that you can’t tell much about how you’re going to run during the season based on how you perform on superspeedways.
“I think, other than momentum and confidence, no, they’re very different tracks (compared to the others on the schedule),” Scott said after the Atlanta race according to NASCAR’s website.
“So many times, the outcome is out of your control,” Scott continued. “There are so many things that have to go right to win these kind of races, I think more so than the ones that are coming up.”
Keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at the upcoming season and make some prognostications.
Best driver in the sport right now: No, it’s not current NASCAR champ Kyle Larson or Denny Hamlin, whose laser focus has enabled him to stay at the head of the pack and defy his age.
It’s Ford’s Ryan Blaney. Blaney has done more with less than anybody else. He is the only driver in the Old Guy Sport competition index who has improved competitively each of the last three years despite the fact that Ford is arguably the least aerodynamically sound car on the circuit.
More importantly, Blaney is the only driver in Cup who has gotten better each of the last three years on both the intermediate and short tracks, which host 32 of the 36 Cup events.
Behind Blaney, the other top contenders for the Cup championship should be: 2-Chase Briscoe and 3-Hamlin. During the last half of 2025, Briscoe outran everybody, scoring 332 points on the Old Guy Sport competition index. Now that he has adjusted to running in first-class equipment, he should be very tough.
Hamlin is the most focused and thoroughly prepared driver in the sport. His physical skills may have diminished slightly as he has aged, but he has more than made up for it with his understanding of the cars, race strategy and ability to make the right move at the right time.
But because of the way NASCAR determines its champion; the point system is basically designed to keep as many drivers eligible for as long as possible and not to determine a true champion, it is quite possible some other driver will win the title.
Clearly, in 2025, Hamlin should have won, but he didn’t. NASCAR has made some improvements to the system for 2026, like eliminating the win-and-you’re-in automatic qualifier, but the standings still reward finishing races over competing in them and thus make crowning a true champion less likely.
Most underrated driver in NASCAR – Josh Berry. This guy just can’t catch a break. In 2023, he demonstrated that he was ready to drive first class race cars when he subbed for Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman while they were injured.
Subbing for Elliott, he consistently ran up front and had a second place finish at Richmond. Subbing for Bowman, he put the car in the All-Star race by winning the qualifier.
Now with the Wood brothers, Penske’s satellite team, he won last year at Las Vegas. Despite Penske’s help, the Wood brothers cars are simply not competitive off the superspeedways. That Berry was able to win at Las Vegas in their equipment is remarkable.
Also noteworthy as we head into a new season: Joe Gibbs Racing is now the most competitive team in the sport, replacing Hendrick Motorsports. Gibbs’ four drivers scored 1,793 points last year according to the Old Guy Sport competition index while Hendrick fell to 1,412.
Penske Racing, the third of the three powerhouse teams, had just 888. While Ford continues to make progress with its cars, it has never really gotten a handle on the Next-Gen body changes.
The most important off-track development in the sport this year will be what happens in the lawsuit brought by Joe Gibbs against his former director of competition, Chris Gabehart, which accuses Gabehart of giving proprietary information to another team.
Gabehart has countersued Gibbs, claiming the organization is dysfunctional and never allowed him to perform his duties. It also claims preferential treatment for Ty Gibbs, Joe Gibbs’ grandson, over the other drivers.
This could tear Gibbs apart. To be elite, you have to have clear operating procedures and strong leadership from the top down. Lacking that, a team will usually struggle.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at COTA Sunday: 1-Shane van Gisbergen, 2-Christopher Bell, 3-Ryan Blaney. Last year’s winner at COTA: Bell.
Top five at COTA last year: 1-Bell, 2-William Byron, 3-Tyler Reddick, 4-Chase Elliott, 5-Kyle Busch.
Old Guy Sport competition index 2025 final top 10: 1-Denny Hamlin 677 points, 2-Kyle Larson 530, 3-Blaney 516, 4-Chase Briscoe 507, 5-Bell 473, 6-Byron 446, 7-van Gisbergen 368, 8-Elliott 278, 9-Joey Logano 205, 10-Bubba Wallace 186.
OGS competition index 2025 top 10 on road courses: 1-van Gisbergen 368, 2-Bell 175, 3-Elliott 80, 4-Reddick 66, 5-Byron 60, 6-Briscoe 59, 7-Michael McDowell 58, 8-Chris Buescher 54, 9-Larson 53, 10-Ty Gibbs 51.