Last season, fans were treated to a first-time NASCAR Cup Series champion in Ryan Blaney behind the wheel of his No. 12 Ford Mustang.
Chevrolet dominated the opening weeks of the season, and veterans like Kyle Larson and other Hendrick Motorsports drivers emerged as the early season favorites to win the championship. Fords struggled throughout the middle of the season. But what happened then?
Attentive fans will remember that some of the first Fords to find speed outside of superspeedways last season were Brad Keselowski and Chris Buescher of RFK Racing. Their late-season push propelled Buescher into the playoffs, and Ford didn’t look back.
Fast forward to this year, and it might seem like a broken record. A Ford won at Daytona International Speedway, and Chase Briscoe, a Ford driver for Stewart-Haas Racing, won last week at Darlington Raceway.
To the naked eye, it might look like fast Fords coming on late again to sneak their way to another championship, but do the numbers back that up?
The last 10 races feel like a solid enough sample size, so let’s stick with that. Out of those last 10 races, it’s a true grab bag of tracks with short tracks, road courses, superspeedways, cookie-cutter 1.5-mile tracks and even Pocono Raceway rearing its head. It’s as diverse of a stretch of races as one can find on the 2024 schedule.
Out of those races, how many have Ford won? Five. That’s right, half of the last 10 races have been won by a blue oval: Ryan Blaney at Iowa Speedway, Joey Logano at Nashville Superspeedway, Blaney again at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, Harrison Burton at Daytona and Briscoe at Darlington. A pair of Toyotas have won in Christopher Bell at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and Tyler Reddick at Michigan International Speedway, and three Chevrolets in Alex Bowman, Kyle Larson and Austin Dillon (kind of with Dillon, anyway).
That’s all fun and cool, but what about 2023 over the same 10-race stretch? The numbers actually say Ford is doing better this season than the manufacturer was at this point last season. However, if the Olympic break was taken out of the equation and the 2024 regular season ended with Daytona like it did in 2023, the numbers would be the same.
Ford won four races over the course of that stretch: Buescher’s back-to-back wins at Richmond Raceway and Michigan, Michael McDowell’s victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and a win for Buescher at Daytona. Ford actually went winless in the playoffs last year until Blaney won the Yellawood 400 at Talladega Superspeedway.
It’s established, then, that Ford has more momentum right now than it did going into the playoffs last season. Out of the 16 playoff drivers, six of them are from Ford. Chevrolet has five, which of course leaves Toyota to claim the other five spots. Ford had the same amount last season, but three were eliminated after the cut to 12 drivers, making Blaney’s 2023 championship run even more improbable.
If Ford stakes a claim to this year’s championship, what would that do to the manufacturer’s perception in the sport? Early this season, columns all over the place, including this one, were skeptical of how Ford was running at every track outside of superspeedways.
Even Ford drivers said they saw tracks like Daytona, Atlanta and Talladega as bigger opportunities than others, so fans would be forgiven for agreeing.
The longtime NASCAR staple made sure to put its best foot forward and correct that way of thinking last season, but it apparently didn’t work. Now, riding an even bigger high going into the playoffs, Ford could be preparing to take the sport’s highest honor for the second year in a row.
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.