Okay, let’s give it up for Kyle Larson. He’s on a late season tear that, with his win at Talladega, has all but clinched the 2026 Chase championship. And with six Chevys taking the first six spots, you might think that’s a real show of force.
Except that superspeedway races are a mirage, something you think you see that isn’t really there. Winning is simply a matter of luck. Avoid the big wreck and be in the right place at the right time on the last lap and you’ve got a chance.
Now, we can throw Larson out of that equation. He’s an outlier because he’s demonstrated that he compete on other venues as well. But Chevy, not so much. The NASCAR point standings will tell you different, but they were never designed to reflect competitiveness.
Example. After the first 26 races this year, which is the last time they were compiled before being retabulated to create a separate point system for the 16 drivers in the chase, Larson ranked seventh with 724 points. And who was eighth? Well, I’m glad you asked. None other than Larson teammate Chase Elliott, who had 723 points. In other words, Elliott was running just as well as Larson.
Now if you follow NASCAR, you know that’s ridiculous. Elliott is emblematic of the crisis facing Chevy this year. He has not run well, he hasn’t been competitive since very early in the season and he appears to be getting worse, not better.
You can go through the NASCAR point standings and find all kinds of instances like this. Daniel Suarez, who drives for Spire, Chevy’s No. 2 team, has really only been competitive in one race, the spring race at Charlotte, a rain shortened event which he won. Yet Suarez is 11th in the final regular season point standings with 676 points, just 48 behind Larson.
One of the main problems with the NASCAR point system is that it is based on incremental scoring, which, after the first finisher, awards one less point per position. In other words, second place gets 35 points, third 34, etc. But this doesn’t tell you anything about how competitive the car was.
Which is why the Old Guy Sport competition index, which is based on top five finishes and leading laps under green, is a much better indicator of who is running well and who isn’t. And it shows that Chevy, despite Larson’s strong showing, is in deep trouble.
Two things are obvious from the OGS standings. One, Chevy was way behind Toyota and behind Ford early in the season, and while Ford has picked up the pace in the second part of the year, if anything, Chevy has gotten worse.
The OGS competition index reflects this.
Larson had 266 points in the first half of the season (remember, the OGS competition index does not include superspeedways) and 275 so far in the second half. Elliott had 181 the first half and 41, a drastic drop, since then. William Byron only had 76 the first half and has even fewer the second half, just 58, while Alex Bowman, who missed five races with vertigo the first half, had just 30 and has added 50 since.
Chevy was dealing with a redesigned car this year, so you expect growing pains, but despite all the attention he’s getting now, Larson’s team figured things out early on and has gotten better since then. The other three Hendrick cars, and particularly Byron and Bowman, have regressed and they were never very good to start with.
It has been said that the Chevy teams do not share technical information, that they keep things in house, but based on performance, you have to wonder if the Hendrick cars even share with each other. How can Larson be so much better than everybody else if the same resources are available to everyone?
And this is a major problem for Chevy, because unless it figures things out in the offseason, it will go into 2027 way behind the other brands, who continue to improve. Like they say, if you’re not getting better, you’re falling behind. And Chevy is falling behind; way behind.
“I would say early in the year I recognized that we weren’t where we needed to be with our car,” Larson said during his post-race press conference at Talladega as reported on NASCAR’s website. “Then you hear about all the different drivers in the sim (race simulator), them having good days, us not. I don’t do any sim.
“I kind of committed myself to, all right, let’s give the sim a chance,” Larson said. “That’s one area where I feel like it’s helped us. Then I just have more time. I just have more time to dedicate to the Cup stuff. I chose to race less this year in the sprint car stuff. I feel like I found a good balance there.”
But as NASCAR becomes more and more technical and analytical, the driver has become less important than the car he drives. Larson has proven he’s a winning driver, but if he’s not in a car that’s capable of winning it doesn’t matter. And Larson’s cars are capable of winning. The question is why the other Chevys aren’t.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Martinsville: 1-Ryan Blaney, 2-Joey Logano, 3-Christopher Bell. Last year’s winner in second race at Martinsville: William Byron. Top five in second race at Martinsville last year: 1-Byron, 2-Blaney, 3-Chase Elliott, 4-Ross Chastain, 5-Kyle Larson.
Old Guy Sport Talladega picks: No picks. OGS does not count superspeedway races.
OGS top 10 after 28 races: 1-Denny Hamlin 621 points, 2-Bell 558, 3-Larson 541, 4-Chase Briscoe 477, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 354, 8-Logano 319, 9-Shane van Gisbergen 226, 10-Elliott 222.
OGS top 10 on short tracks (tracks most similar to Martinsville): 1-Blaney 301, 2-Logano 246, 3-Bell 193, 4-Gibbs 188, 5-Hamlin 146, 6-Larson 140, 7-Briscoe, Elliott 102, 9-Reddick 74, 10-Bubba Wallace 57.
