by Patrick Zier | Feb 7, 2025 |
Hendrick Motorsports has pretty much figured it out. So has Joe Gibbs Racing. Penske? Not so much. Despite winning all three championships in the Next-Gen car era (Joey Logano two, Ryan Blaney one), Penske and Ford have simply not been competitive with Hendrick and Gibbs. And that says more about NASCAR’s present point system than anything else. What’s more, don’t expect things to change much in 2025.
Hendrick, with its four-car stable of emerging super star Kyle Larson, established veteran Chase Elliott who, at 29, is three years younger than Larson but has a Cup championship and nine years experience on the circuit; Williams Byron, one of three or four of the top young talents racing Cup; and Alex Bowman who, frankly, needs to get his act together to keep from being the weak link, is still the team to beat.
And only one other organization, Gibbs, is in a position to challenge Hendrick. Like Hendrick, Gibbs has the people, resources, analytics and engineering to compete at Hendrick’s level on a weekly basis. And it’s drivers can match Hendrick wheel-to-wheel.
Denny Hamlin is in his 20th season, has 54 wins and is one of the most prepared and cerebral racers in the sport. Christopher Bell, a maturing talent who, using the OGS competition index as a measure, ranked second only to Larson last year with 584 points, is at or near Hamlin’s level. Ty Gibbs ranks with Byron as one of NASCAR’s ascending talents. Only newcomer Chase Briscoe, who replaces the retired Martin Truex, has yet to prove himself.
Penske should be competitive with the other two but despite the three championships, it isn’t. Logano was a legitimate champion in 2022, the only time NASCAR and OGS agreed on the top spot, and Blaney also ran well. That despite the fact Ford felt is was at a disadvantage with the new car. Austin Cindric, the third Penske driver, has never made much of a contribution and is a younger version of Bowman.
The OGS competition index shows how Penske has struggled. In 2022, the first year with the Next-Gen car, the three Penske drivers totaled 802 points. In 2023, that dropped to 514. Penske rebounded some in 2024 with its redesigned car, but still had only 743 points. That compared with 1656 for Hendrick and 1456 for Gibbs.
Even taking into account that Penske has only three cars compared to four for the other two, those totals are disturbing. In 2022, Penske was 423 points behind Hendrick and 428 behind Gibbs. In 2023, it was 1,001 points behind Hendrick and 743 behind Gibbs. And in 2024, while it’s performance improved a bit, Penske was still 913 points behind Hendrick and, again, 743 behind Gibbs.
Essentially, the Penske cars ran poorly on NASCAR’s intermediate tracks (ovals more than a mile and less than two and one-half miles in length for our purposes) That was very apparent in 2023 when the three Penske cars combined for just 187 OGS competition index points, less than six individual drivers by themselves. That included Larson (360) and Byron (321) from Hendrick and Hamlin (326) and Martin Truex (209) from Gibbs.
Penske made dramatic improvement on the intermediate tracks in 2024, but with both Hendrick and Gibbs far ahead technically from the start and continuing to improve each year, the gap between those two teams and Penske continues to widen.
Hendrick is Led by Larson, by far the most dominant driver of the Next-Gen era. After a relatively slow start (by his standards) in 2022, when his 439 OGS competition index points placed him third, 34 points behind Logano, the 2022 season leader, Larson has simply crushed the competition. He led the OGS competition index in 2023 with 643 points and was first again last year with 739. That totals 1,851 points, almost as many as Penske’s entire team for the same three year period.
“I would say in 2022, the first year with the Next-Gen car, we were kind of a little bit off,” Larson told hendrickmotorsports.com before the start of this season. “But I feel like we learned a lot and in 2023 we were really strong, really fast.
“I feel like we’ve done a great job in the Next-Gen era,” Larson continued. “I haven’t looked at the stats of the other top guys, but last year we had six wins, led a ton of laps, won a ton of stages. I don’t know if anybody else has had a season like that in the Next-Gen era. News flash – they haven’t.
So, as we look ahead to Daytona and the 2025 season, and with Hendrick and Gibbs clearly established as the teams to beat, who will be the most competitive drivers of the new year? Let’s take a stab at it:
1-Kyle Larson: Larson is dominant on the short and intermediate tracks and in his prime. He will be extremely difficult to beat.
2- Tyler Reddick: This is a bit of a long shot but if Reddick can improve his abysmal short track record he could push Larson. Reddick (334 points), and not Larson (271), was the most competitive driver on the intermediate ovals in 2024.
3-Denny Hamlin: At 44, some think his best years are behind him and he’s going through some changes at Gibbs, but this guy still can take a competitive car to the front.
4-.Christopher Bell: Bell made a huge leap from 2023 to 2024 and has long been considered a top talent. At 30 he is starting to peak and if he can continue to build on 2024, he will be tough.
5-William Byron: Byron is young and talented, but fell off a bit in 2024 after a strong run in 2023 when he finished second to Larson in points, just 44 behind. He needs more consistency.
6-Ryan Blaney: Despite Logano’s two championships, Blaney, and not Logano, is Penske’s most competitive driver. He and his crew struggled with the Next-Gen car in 2022 while Logano started hot, but Blaney has continued to get better; Logano has gotten worse.
7-Chase Elliott: Elliott is only 29 and has a NASCAR championship, but something seems just a little off with this team.
8-Ty Gibbs: At 22, Gibbs is the youngest of the sport’s leading drivers but he is good enough to eventually challenge Larson. Not this year though.
9-Chris Buescher: Buescher has had a quiet career but until he signed with RFK Racing, he never had a good car. RFK, with technical assistance from Ford, has gotten better every year. So has Buescher.
10-Joey Logano: Logano has been called the most undeserving champion in NASCAR history, but that’s NASCAR’s fault, not his. He played by their rules and won and, according to the OGS competition index was more competitive than people give him credit for.
In the finale of this series, we will look at some of the top teams which aren’t part of the Big Three.
by Patrick Zier | Feb 6, 2025 |
The Daytona 500 is on the horizon and NASCAR’s 2025 season, which could be critical to the future of the sport, is already off to a roaring start with The Clash at iconic Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston Salem, N.C., once a regular stop on what was then called the Grand National Division and is now the Cup Series.
Looking at the competitive side, teams are continuing to adjust to the Next-Gen car, introduced in 2022 and bringing radical changes to how stock cars are constructed and put together. Before Next-Gen hit the track, everything was pretty much built in house.
Now, everyone gets their parts and pieces from a single source distributer and nothing can be modified, meaning that all the teams, from powerhouse operations like Hendrick Motorsports to tight budget operations like JTG Daugherty Racing, now Hyak Motorsports, have the same equipment. The goal here was to improve competition and decrease costs, but whether that will work is debatable.
Teams like Hendrick, Joe Gibbs Racing and Penske will just spend more money to find ways to break away from the field, and it might be something as simple as how the body is mounted on the chassis.
When a car goes into a corner, the wheels and chassis turn but the body wants to keep going straight, which is called yaw. To compensate for this, the rear of the body is shifted slightly to the left, which reduces the air flowing over and around the right side. With less air hitting the spoiler on the right, the car gets lose with the rear drifting up toward the wall and following the wheels and chassis through the corner.
We are only talking fractions of inches here. If the rear is shifted too much, the car will be slower down the straights and if it isn’t shifted enough, it will be slower through the turns, so getting the exact angle can give you an edge. This is where the big teams have an advantage because they can spend more on analytics to get it right.
Another critical component will be making sure you run the correct tire pressure. Low tire pressure gives you more grip and makes you faster on short runs, but if there are no cautions cars with high tire pressure, while slower at the start, will reach peak grip faster because they don’t have to build pressure and be be faster over the long run. And again, because they have more money to spend on technology, the top tier teams are more likely to hit the correct tire pressure than those which are underfunded.
So, heading into 2025, where do we stand? Using the Old Guy Sport competition index, we can determine which drivers and teams will be the most competitive and which ones are struggling. The OGS competition index is a better indication than the NASCAR point standings because the NASCAR system is essentially based on where you finish, while OGS measures how you compete on the track. For example you can lead half the race, crash and finish 30th or worse in NASCAR, which essentially gives you no credit for how well you performed.
Another difference between the OGS system and NASCAR is that OGS does not use results from the super speedways, Daytona, Talladega and now Atlanta as well, because they are irrelevant in determining the quality of the teams and drivers.
Two things decide whether you win or lose at these tracks, and both are determined by pure luck. The first is avoiding the “big wreck”. You don’t know when it’s going to happen and you don’t know whether it will occur at the front of the pack, the middle of the pack or the back of the pack, so you can’t do anything to stay out of it.
The second is being in the right line on the last lap. Again, this is pure luck. At super speedways, cars form long lines nose-to-tail because of the draft. When a trailing car pulls up to a car in front of it, the trailing car can run as fast as the lead car without going full speed because the lead car is pushing the air out of the way. At the same time, the trailing car is squeezing the air between the two cars pushing the lead car and making it faster.
The more cars you get in line, the faster everybody goes. This makes it virtually impossible to pass because if you pull out of the draft, you immediately lose speed and the line will reform and shoot by you. But on the last lap, more people are willing to gamble.
If three or four cars drop out of the lead line that breaks the draft, and as more cars form up with them, the new line can become faster than the old one. So, you might be leading the race coming out of the fourth turn at Daytona and end up 15th because the new line is faster.
Then there are the NASCAR playoffs, a pathetic attempt to imitate the so-called stick-and-ball sports. This simply doesn’t work in NASCAR because first of all, you have no chance to redeem yourself. If Pat Mahomes throws a couple interceptions early in a game, he can come back and throw for the winning touchdown in the fourth quarter. If a baseball player strikes out with the bases loaded in the first, he can win the game with a base hit in the ninth.
Not so in NASCAR. If you wreck, you’re out. No second chance.
Another problem is that in stick-and-ball sports, the team that plays best will win 99 percent of the time. In NASCAR, you can have the best car in the race and still lose because a slower car won’t let you pass or for some other reason beyond your control.
So, now that we’ve set the criteria, in future posts we will examine which teams and drivers are likely to succeed in 2025 and why, which teams and drivers are trending up – or down, emerging talent and other relevant information about the upcoming season. Stay tuned.
by Patrick Zier | Jan 21, 2025 |
This was not what they had signed up for. They had lost to Michigan – again. There was no Big Ten championship – again. And their coach was on the hot seat – again. The standards are high at Ohio State. Winning 11 games three years in a row means nothing if you don’t have anything to show for it except the wins, and Ohio State had nothing to show for it except the wins. No victories over its arch rival, no conference championships, no shot at the college football playoffs.
In today’s world, this is when college players start to bail. There is an old saying that there is no I in TEAM. Wrong. Ever since money started turning the college game into a mini-NFL, it’s all about the I. Miami’s Cam Ward, standing on the sidelines during the second half of the Pop-Tart Bowl, a 42-41 loss to Iowa State, after he had set the Division 1 record for most touchdown passes in a career during the first half, is the new standard.
So, it was reasonable to expect that, after the end of the 2023 season, with the lure of the NFL and possible greener pastures elsewhere, there would be some roster shuffling at Ohio State. The heart of this Ohio State team is its 2021 recruiting class, players like defensive end Jack Sawyer, receiver Emeka Egbuka, guard Donovan Jackson, running back TreVeyon Henderson and others.
Quarterback Kyle McCord was also a member of the recruiting class of ’21, but when Ohio State Coach Ryan Day would not promise him the starting job for this year, he left. And he was really the only player of consequence who did. Not only did the rest stay, they also played in the Cotton Bowl against Missouri, having decided, more or less as a group, that their legacy would not end on this sour note.
See, Ohio State has one thing going for it that is missing now at most schools. Players like Sawyer and Jackson and most others come to Ohio State not just because of the money; eight Buckeyes are listed among the highest paid college football players in the country according to On3’s NIL rankings, but because they actually want to play for Ohio State. Nineteen of this year’s starting 22 originally signed with Ohio State.
And through the years, a winning culture has been established there, a certain way of doing things, an understanding of what is expected of you when you don the Scarlet and Gray. When transfers are brought in such as quarterback Will Howard, they pick up on this, adapt to it.
With the revolving door that now exists in college football and the constant flow of players coming and going, few schools have this to fall back on. And the recruiting class of ’21 was an especially dedicated group, closer and more tight knit than most and determined to put Ohio State back on top.
When you examine Ohio State’s press conferences before the Notre Dame game, the players’ closeness and determination clearly stands out, and no one epitomizes it better than Sawyer. “It means everything to me,” Sawyer, who established his name forever in Ohio State lore with his scoop and score against Texas, commented. “Putting on the Scarlet and Gray is a dream come true, and the rest of the guys will say the same thing,” he declared.
“I remember being a little kid running around in the back yard every weekend with an Ohio State jersey on wanting to be like the guys I saw on TV.” Sawyer recalled that he “never took it (the jersey) off on weekends. My mom would be mad. It had grass stains on it and she had just washed it,” he said.
Jackson, one of the best offensive linemen in college ranks, echoed Sawyer’s sentiments. “A lot of us decided to come back for moments like this,” he said of the championship game. “You decided to commit to Ohio State to play in games like this.”
So if you were going to beat Ohio State this year, you not only needed to have top end talent, you needed to match that intensity. After another loss to Michigan, Ohio State reached a turning point in its season. It could easily have cratered then, but led by the Sawyers and Jacksons and Hendersons, the ’21 group, the players used the defeat to fuel their desire to save the season. And they did.
No team in college football history is a more deserving champion. To win the title, Ohio State beat Tennessee, the No. 7 team in the country; Oregon, No. 1; Texas, No. 4 and Notre Dame, No. 3, over four straight weeks. That’s never been done before, may never be done again.
“I think it’s a testament to everyone’s hard work in the athletic program, not just the players,” Jackson said. “With this extended format, it means a lot more games, a lot more high profile games. It means your body is banged up. You’re mentally exhausted, but at the end of the day, you want to go out there and win.”
They did. And if you knew anything at all about the make-up of this team, its quiet confidence, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Certainly it wasn’t to Sawyer and Jackson and the recruiting class of ’21. It didn’t surprise them, but it did give them a lot of satisfaction. Job well done.
