AJ Allmendinger’s Sunday (May 11) at Kansas Speedway lasted all of six laps, thanks to a blown engine.
“Hey ECR, you guys f*cking suck,” Allmendinger said over the radio. “… I mean, what the f*ck, you guys?”
The frustration didn’t end there, as the in-car camera picked up Allmendinger shouting multiple F-bombs as the No. 16 car was getting towed back to the garage.
Can you really blame him? After a crash at Texas Motor Speedway and the blown engine at Kansas, Allmendinger has freefallen in the point standings from 14th to 25th. Allmendinger also finished dead last in the season-opening Daytona 500 with an engine failure, and in just eight days, he’s gone from holding a playoff spot to being well outside the top 16.
Kaulig Racing is one of the three full-time NASCAR Cup Series teams that use ECR engines alongside Trackhouse Racing and Richard Childress Racing. And while reliability hasn’t necessarily been a problem in the past, the ECR teams are currently in the midst of a slump.
Those teams combined to win six races in 2023 (with the majority coming from Kyle Busch and Ross Chastain), but that number was halved to just three in 2024 — one each from Chastain, Daniel Suarez and Austin Dillon.
Suarez was the only ECR driver to make the playoffs last season, and 2025, so far, has been winless and much of the same. Chastain has fought tooth and nail just to be 11th in points after 12 races, while Busch — who had a hot start with three top 10s in four races and a near-win at Circuit of the Americas — has drifted back to 17th in points with five finishes of 20th or worse in his last eight races.
Dillon in 23rd in points, Allmendinger is 25th, Suarez is 27th, Ty Dillon is 30th and Shane van Gisbergen is 35th.
Chastain has looked nowhere close to the driver he was in 2022, when he took the NASCAR world by storm and finished runner-up in the championship. He’s now having to fight for top 10s, and after a runner-up finish at Texas, he voiced his frustration with Trackhouse’s lack of speed.
“Just no confidence in the car yesterday, y’all saw that, and just the speed of the Trackhouse cars is terrible,” Chastain told FOX Sports. “We’re just not confident, all three drivers.
“… I can’t drive an uncomfortable car, personally.”
Indeed, Chastain has an average start of 23.8 in 2025; in 2022, his average start was 14.4. It’s difficult for a team and driver to contend for wins when the entire Sunday is spent fixing and adjusting the car to find that speed.
Trackhouse also expanded to three cars for 2025, which has done no favors for it in the speed department. Even with a second-place finish at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Suarez is off to one of the worst starts of his career. Van Gisbergen still has his road course speed, but he’s frequently running tail end of the field on ovals.
RCR, Trackhouse and Kaulig are all struggling to score stage points — one of the biggest indicators of the “speed” a team/driver have. Allmendinger leads the pack with 34, while Chastain has just 19 stage points. Busch and Suarez each have 16, van Gisbergen has 14 (all at Circuit of the Americas) and Ty Dillon and Austin Dillon have 12 and four, respectively. Meanwhile, Kyle Larson has racked up 127 by himself.
Larson is obviously one of the best drivers with one of the best teams, so that’s not a fair comparison. But if winning races and showing race-winning speed is the goal, the ECR teams are well behind their Hendrick Motorsports counterparts.
It should be no surprise to see Hendrick do well with drivers, resources and equipment at its disposal. Its teams are currently first, second, fourth and 10th in points. But even the satellite teams that run Hendrick engines are seeing more benefits.
In just a few years, Spire Motorsports has transformed from a nonfactor on non-superspeedways to a team capable of contending. Carson Hocevar has led the way, and while the good finishes haven’t exactly been pouring in for him or his teammates, they’ve shown a ton of speed. Spire had a realistic chance to win, or at least contend for the win, in the races at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Bristol Motor Speedway and Texas to name a few.
Even Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Hyak Motorsports — who lost its decade-long primary sponsor in Kroger to RFK Racing — are 15th in points. Sure, they’ve been fortunate to have no finishes worse than 24th, but their start to the season has well surpassed expectations after all the organization turmoil in the offseason.
That improvement hasn’t been seen with the ECR bunch. Kaulig hasn’t necessarily taken a step back, but in no way has it taken a step forward. Trackhouse continues to struggle with the expansion to three cars, and while Austin Dillon has improved this year, Busch has reverted back to his 2024 slump.
Is that to say ECR engines have declined, especially compared to ones from Hendrick? No, but it is a common denominator. And when it comes to ECR’s star drivers in Busch and Chastain, their teams both share the same problem: a lack of speed on Saturdays, which leads to a game of catchup on Sundays.
And when it comes to winning races and showing the speed to do so, it is that much harder for a team to get ahead of the curve if they spend a majority of a race weekend treading water.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf