by Patrick Zier | Feb 28, 2025 |
Connor Zilisch is only 18 years old. He’s never run a single Cup race in his life (that changes Sunday when he competes in the Echopark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas) but already, he’s casting a big shadow over Justin Marks’ Trackhouse racing team.
Zilisch is the new hot young talent in NASCAR, and boy is he young and boy is he talented. If Zilisch can get around the track as fast as he’s climbed the ranks in NASCAR, nobody will catch him. He’s already won the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring and stopped for a moment to run four races in NASCAR’s Xfinity Series last year, winning at Watkins Glen and adding a pair of fourth place finishes in two of the other three.
So, no matter what he does Sunday – and some see him as a contender in his first race – Zilisch is here to stay. He’ll only make a brief foray into Cup this year, honing his skills at a lower level for most of the season, but he’ll be back.
Which means Daniel Suarez might not be. Suarez, never a golden boy but kind of a bright light pushed to the front with his Latino heritage and NASCAR trying to expand into new markets outside the United States, has faltered, and badly.
In fact the whole Trackhouse team has struggled with the Next-Gen car. The OldGuySport point system reflects this with Trackhouse compiling 579 points in 2022, 442 in 2023 and just 250 in 2024. On road courses, team leader Ross Chastain and Suarez each had a win in 2022 but there have been none since then and Suarez, who grew up on road courses, has been particularly brutal.
In 2022, he compiled 102 points, was competitive in four of the six road course races and had the win at Sonoma. In 2023, he dipped to 31 points, all accumulated in one race, and in 2024 he didn’t score a single point. Suarez had his contract extended after last year, but it was just for the 2025 season and if he doesn’t up his game considerably, he could be out the door with Jilisch waiting in the wings.
While anything’s possible and we have nothing to go on this year this being the first real race of the NASCAR season, it doesn’t appear realistic to expect a Trackhouse driver to win on Sunday although veteran New Zealand road racer Shane van Gisbergen, who won the Chicago street race in his first ever NASCAR start in 2023, is now running full time for Trackhouse and is probably a better pick than Zilisch.
Still, the road courses – and just about every other discipline as well – were dominated by the Hendrick drivers in 2024 and with no major changes in the Cup car this year, you would have to expect Hendrick and Joe Gibbs Racing, the other 500 pound gorilla in NASCAR, to set the pace again.
Last year, Hendrick drivers won four of the five road course races and captured eight, or about 33%, of the top five finishes. At COTA, William Byron got the win. But the Toyotas made some noise, particularly Christopher Bell. Bell finished second to Byron at COTA and had 100 points on road courses according to the OldGuySport Competition Index.
He was competitive in three races and his 100 points put him third behind Kyle Larson, 134 points, and Byron, who had 111. Tyler Reddick, the lead driver for Toyota’s Team 23XI, didn’t score a lot of points but was competitive in four of the five road course races, more than any other driver. He should be considered a threat to break through this year.
So, looking ahead to Sunday, and taking into consideration the fact that Larson did not run well at COTA last year and Bell came on strong to edge Byron for second place in the final road race of the year at Charlotte, the top three picks for this race are: 1-Bell, 2-Byron and 3-Larson.
by Patrick Zier | Feb 21, 2025 |
There was a time when the Daytona 500 was an actual race. You know, cars chasing each other down and passing on the track, managing tire wear, stuff like that. Real, actual racing. Not the demolition derby it is now. The Daytona 500 is NASCAR’s Super Bowl, the biggest race of the year, and winning it means absolutely nothing. Neither does winning the other race at Daytona, or any of the races at Talladega, or now Atlanta as well.
Atlanta was a perfectly serviceable mile-and-a-half oval until its owner, Speedway Motorsports, which didn’t have a super speedway of its own, decided it needed one. So it repaved Atlanta and tried to make it more like Talladega and Daytona. While it’s much shorter, the new Atlanta is serving its purpose, trying mightily to imitate the wreck fests that occur annually on its big brothers.
The green flag had barely dropped on the first Atlanta race last year when there was a 16-car pileup. In 2021, the last year Atlanta was a regular race track, there was just one wreck involving two cars in the first race. Combine that with the three-car wreck in the second race and you have just two incidents involving a grand total of five cars.
So what’s happened? And why? Denny Hamlin, one of stock car racing’s most articulate spokesmen and one of the few insiders in the sport not afraid to criticize NAASCAR, explained in one of his recent Actions Detrimental podcasts.
“We used to run 200 mph here (Daytona) and the cars were hard to drive and hard to handle,” Hamlin said. “The team that brought the best car that had a great setup under it had an edge. The giants of our sport that could navigate traffic and use it to their advantage had the best chance to win.
“That art is gone now,” Hamlin continued. “It’s just such a bleeping crapshoot now. It’s luck because you just have to avoid the wrecks. I hate the fact about how much luck is involved in NASCAR now. It’s just a matter of wrecks at super speedways and I feel like the Daytona 500 is a microcosm of our sport in general…
“It started with the competition group a decade ago when we started cutting horsepower because we wanted to look good on TV,” Hamlin went on. “We wanted you to think that they (the cars) can pass when they can’t really pass.” When a few cars got airborne, Hamlin said, NASCAR started reducing speeds to stop the flipping, and the lower the speed became the better the cars stuck to the track and the better the cars stuck to the track the more equal they became and the harder it was for one car to pull out and pass another.
This reached its zenith with the Next-Gen car NASCAR is running now. With teams no longer able to build their own cars and everybody using the same parts and pieces, and NASCAR allowing virtually no modification of those parts and pieces, there’s almost no difference between the cars on super speedways. That’s especially true because of the draft, which allows the cars to bunch up with the trailing car pushing the car in front and the car in front pulling the trailing car.
You can’t leave the draft by yourself, because then there’s no one to pull you and no one for you to push, which is why the cars form long lines which rarely break apart. And because the cars are all so close, you have the illusion that somebody might pass at any time, which they can’t, and that sets up the big wreck, which is almost certain to happen with the cars all running together.
So driver skill and team ingenuity play virtually no part in determining the winner. “The entertainment of it has far overtaken the sport of it,” Hamlin said. That’s why Michael McDowell, with two wins in his career, has won the Daytona 500. It’s why Ricky Stenhouse, with four wins in his career, has won the Daytona 500. His other three wins are also on super speedways. It’s why Austin Cindric, with two wins in his career, is another Daytona 500 winner.
All of this leaves you to wonder what NASCAR is shooting for here. True race fans are not interested in watching wrecks. They don’t want their favorite driver eliminated in a crash, like Chase Elliott was Sunday. Or Martin Truex. Or Kyle Larson. Or Kyle Busch and several others.
Like every other sport, NASCAR has sold it’s soul to television. This year, it starts a new seven year deal worth $7.7 billion. And television doesn’t care about the quality of the racing as long as it get viewers, many of whom are not real race fans. They are, as Hamlin pointed out, looking to be “entertained.”
And while NASCAR is genuinely interested in safety, it may have become a little bit complacent after watching drivers walk away from horrendous crashes like Ryan Preece did Sunday. NASCAR has the technical know-how to break up the packs that form on super speedways, to separate the cars, to bring back real racing. The question is, does it really want to?
While no one has been seriously injured – or worse – yet, and no matter how safe these cars appear to be, you can’t keep slamming cars together and hitting the wall indefinitely. You’re playing a game of Russian Roulette, and the hammer is not going to fall on an empty chamber forever.
Hopefully, it won’t take another Dale Earnhardt for NASCAR to figure that out.
by Patrick Zier | Feb 8, 2025 |
Michael Jordan has the cash. Denny Hamlin has the expertise. And Toyota, through Joe Gibbs Racing, has the cars. Put them all together and you get 23XI Racing, which combines Michael Jordan’s NBA number(23) and Hamlin’s car number to get its name (Hamlin’s still racing for Gibbs, even though he’s part owner of another team).
In NASCAR, 23XI is kind of the Hendrick Motorsports of the teams and drivers a level below the Big Three – Hendrick, Gibbs and Penske, the best of the rest if you will. That’s because it has, or has access to, the same kind of resources that make the Big Three the Big Three. And that’s rare at this level.
Jordan is the front man, a guy who still has star power and the ability to keep the money flowing. Hamlin knows how to build a winning organization, what the team needs to be successful and how to put it together. And 23XI and Gibbs are joined at the hip, which means the 23XI Toyotas are very competitive. In fact, with 23XI adding a third driver this year, it will be interesting to see how it compares with the Big Three.
Essentially, the second tier is composed of 23XI, RFK Racing, Richard Childress Racing and Trackhouse with Front Row and Spire Motorsports joining them this year. Front Row and Spire have been around a while and haven’t done much, but with more support from Ford and Chevy, respectively, they hope to be improved.
Putting them aside for the moment, the other teams have had varying degrees of success since the Next-Gen car came on line in 2022. As might be expected, 23XI has run the best. Using the OldGuySport competition index as a guide, 23XI, after a slow start with just 304 points in 2022, jumped to 472 in 2023 and 534 last year. Next best has been RFK, with 165 in 2022, 306 in 2023 and 484 last year.
The two Chevy teams, Trackhouse and RCR, both got off to hot starts; Trackhouse was No. 1 among the four teams in 2022 with 579 points and RCR No. 2 with 479, but both have collapsed in the interim and the deterioration of RCR, with the glory years of Dale Earnhardt now a distant memory, is especially concerning.
While RCR as an organization was already in a state of decline, that was covered up in 2022 by the success of Tyler Reddick and in 2023 by the performance of Kyle Busch. Reddick scored 386 points on the OGS competition index, second only to Trackhouse’s Ross Chastain, who had 410. Notably, Reddick had 205 on the intermediate tracks, tops among drivers on the four tier two teams. He also had three wins. That was the most by an RCR driver since Kevin Harvick won four in 2013.
In 2023, Reddick moved to 23XI where he has become one of the best drivers in the sport at any level and far better than anyone in tier two. His 439 OGS competition index points in 2024 were more, by themselves, than any team in NASCAR outside of the Big Three – Hendrick, Gibbs and Penske – And RFK Racing, which had 484.
Meanwhile RCR and Busch are scrambling to pick up the pieces. After 2022, when the Next-Gen car was introduced and RCR finished strong with 429 points, it fell to 317 in 2023 and just 153 last year. Busch, who had 313 points and three wins in 2023, dipped to just 99 and no wins in 2024.
Childress made some in-house changes after 2024, but it mostly involved shuffling people in the organization around. Busch has been careful not to be overly critical of RCR, but he is in a contract year and could leave if things don’t pick up. The problem is, he doesn’t seem to have anyplace better to go. And at 39, he wouldn’t be a long term fix for anybody.
In what is another problem for Childress, his team is the only one at a tier one or tier two level that doesn’t have at least three cars. But whether adding another team would help rejuvenate this organization is an open question.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is RFK Racing, which was built on the foundation laid by Jack Roush. Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox among other properties, and driver Brad Keselowski comprise the rest of the ownership group.
This team has simply taken off in the Nest-Gen era. It went from 165 OGS points in 2022 to 306 in 2023 and 484 last year. That was only 50 points less than 23XI, which sets the standard in tier two. Steady Chris Buescher, whose 205 points placed him 10th among all drivers in the OGS competition index in 2023 and who was 11th with 220 in 2024 has been the team leader.
Owner/driver Keselowski, now 40, doesn’t have a lot of time left and tapered off at the end of 2024, but he still totaled 248 points, eighth overall on the OGS competition index. Even more significantly, he had 198, fourth best, on the all important intermediate tracks.
The team added a third driver this year, Ryan Preece from the old Stewart-Haas team. Preece has never been competitive although in fairness, most of his career has been spent in second class equipment.
“We’ve had an amazing offseason,” Keselowski said during Fox TV’s preseason production days as reported by Bob Pockrass. “With adding a third team, that’s brought a lot of people with new ideas, fresh ideas, that we’ve been able to see some immediate gains out of, at least from what we can tell without being at the track.”
So, after reviewing the tier two teams, which drivers are likely to dominate in 2025? Since Reddick and Buescher have both been included in our overall top 10, neither are ranked here. The tier two top 10:
1-Ross Chastain, Trackhouse: Chastain is a solid veteran who was ranked as the fifth most competitive driver in the sport in 2023. If he regains his short track form, he will be tough.
2-Brad Keselowski, RFK: Keselowski has a top tier two car and seems enthused about his and his teams chances this season. Like Chastain, he has to run better on the short tracks.
3-Shane van Gisbergen, Trackhouse: An experienced veteran who dominated on New Zealand ovals, he won his first time out in NASCAR, winning the Chicago street race in 2023. He ran in the Xfinity Series last year and is a quick learner.
4-Kyle Busch, RCR: There is no one in this group with more talent or experience in first class equipment than Busch. If RCR gives him any kind of a decent ride, he’ll dominate. The car is the problem here, not the driver.
5-Bubba Wallace, 23XI: Wallace has been decent, but should be running better. He has not really been as competitive as he should be in a car this good and has gotten steadily less competitive each year of the Nest-Gen era.
6-Josh Berry, Wood Brothers Racing: This team is aligned with Penske, which hasn’t meant much in the past. But if you give Berry a competitive car he will get the most out of it. He deserves a better ride than this.
7-Riley Herbst, 23XI: Team owner Denny Hamlin thinks he’s got the goods, but he’s very inexperienced.
8-Daniel Suarez, Trackhouse: There’s not much to chose from among these last three. Suarez won on a road course in 2022 with this car and has shown flashes on intermediate tracks.
9-Michael McDowell, Spire: In what’s kind of a head scratcher, McDowell moved from Front Row, which is supposed to be getting tier one support from Ford this year, to Spire, which is ambitious but not very successful. Like Suarez, McDowell has a road course win in this car, in 2023.
10-Eric Jones, Legacy: Jones is still young and once drove for Joe Gibbs racing. He won in the Next-Gen car at Darlington in 2022 and is trying to revive his career. Legacy won’t help him much.
