Josh Berry is the odd man out, but he shouldn’t be. Berry, along with Stewart-Haas teammates Noah Gregson, Chase Briscoe and Ryan Preece, was left scrambling for a ride after Stewart-Haas, owned by former driver Tony Stewart and businessman Gene Haas, shut down operations following the 2024 season.
Not that it came as a huge surprise. Rumors started circulating about its demise a few years ago when the team’s performance began to fall off despite the fact it had full factory backing from Ford and strong sponsorship from a number of major corporations.
But Stewart, a three-time Cup champion and pretty much the go-to guy on the competition side and Haas, who founded the team originally, began to be more involved in other types of racing and the NASCAR program lacked leadership as a result.
Stewart became interested in drag racing and also bought some short tracks and Haas was concentrating on building a Formula One team, all of which left little time to supervise their NASCAR entry. Additionally, Ford support was ending in 2024.
With a lack of leadership at the top and drivers and everyone in the organization wondering what would happen next, Stewart-Haas started to drift into mediocrity and was unable to keep up, especially when NASCAR came out with the NextGen car in 2022.
The NextGen car was different from anything NASCAR had run before. Instead of being able to build their own cars, the teams were now required to buy virtually everything from single sources suppliers and were not allowed to modify the parts and pieces. Even Ford’s top team, Team Penske, had problems adapting to the change and those problems were compounded at Stewart-Haas.
Using the OldGuySport Competition Index we can measure how Stewart-Haas performed relative to Penske. The OGS Competition Index is a better indicator than the NASCAR point system because the NASCAR point system is still essentially based on order of finish and doesn’t indicate how the teams performed on the track.
Additionally, OGS does not use results from Daytona, Talladega or Atlanta because super speedway racing depends primary on luck. Where you finish depends on two things: avoiding the big wreck, which can happen at any point in the race, and being in the right line on the last lap, which is shear guess work.
Starting with 2022, the year the NextGen car first hit the track, Team Penske’s three drivers, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Austion Cindric, scored 770 points on the OGS scale. Logano had 434, Blaney 274 and Cindric 62. The four Stewart-Haas drivers had 424. Kevin Harvick had 246, Briscoe 165, Aric Almirola 9 and Cole Custer 4. In other words, by himself, Logano outpointed the entire Stewart-Haas team.
In 2023, the Stewart-Haas foursome of Harvick (124), Briscoe (48), Almirola (42) and Preece (25) managed just 239 points. That compared with Penske’s Blaney (311), Logano (202) and Cindric (1), a total of 514. Again, one Penske driver, Blaney, had more points than the Stewart-Haas foursome combined.
Once it was formally announced that Stewart-Haas was shutting down, the team fell apart. The focus was no longer on preparing and driving race cars, rather everyone was scrambling to find a new job. The performance on track was pitiful. Briscoe scored just 104 points to lead the way, Berry had 74, Preece 20 and Gregson one, a total of just 199.
In all, 12 drivers on the OGS Competition Index had more points than the Stewart-Haas team combined and a 13th, Ross Chastain with 183 points, was close. The three Penske drivers, Blaney (392), Logano (250) and Cindric (101) put up 743.
While Stewart-Haas was still considered a tier one team when it folded, towards the end its performance never demonstrated that. Briscoe was the most experienced and consistent Stewart-Haas driver, and he had won a race in 2022, but all four had bounced around with mediocre teams and from a talent standpoint, were relative unknowns.
The only one who had shown the ability to drive an elite car was Berry, who was in his first full season as a Cup driver.
In 2023 Hendrick Motorsports, arguably the strongest team in NASCAR, need a replacement for Chase Elliott, who had suffered an off-track injury. It is extremely difficult for a driver to move into an elite car and run competitively because the replacement driver has no chemistry with the team, and almost everybody put in that position fails.
Berry didn’t, despite the fact he had almost no experience at the Cup level. Over five races, he scored a 10th place finish at Los Vegas and amazingly was second at Richmond, proving he was ready to run at the highest level. When Hendrick’s Alex Bowman got hurt, Berry came back again and, in four starts, he had a 10th at Dover and won the NASCAR All-Star qualifying race to get into the main event.
But when Joe Gibbs needed a replacement for Martin Truex, he chose Briscoe. And when RFK (Roush-Fenway-Keselowski), Ford’s new top tier team, needed a third driver, it went with Preece, who has done absolutely nothing at the Cup level. “Ryan Preece is who we identified from day one when discussing this third entry,” RFK President Steve Newmark commented. Meanwhile Haas started a new one-car team and went with Custer, although that is not a truly competitive ride.
And Berry? Well, he ended up taking a sideways step, signing with the Wood brothers. Years ago, the Wood brothers were one of NASCAR’s big three, along with Petty Enterprises and Holman-Moody. Cale Yarborough drove for the Woods, Richard Petty drove for Petty Enterprises and David Pearson piloted the Holman-Moody entry. But this is simply not a competitive car, despite its alignment with Penske, and in recent years it has only won on super speedways.
And Berry, who is probably the best driver of the four, will have a hard time changing that.
