Did You Notice? … We’re now slightly halfway through the 2025 NASCAR regular season? Four months into the year, four key storylines have developed as the sport heads into its summer stretch that will prove decisive for who makes the playoffs.
NASCAR’s Top Teams… Are Not Changing
Last season, Tyler Reddick caused a stir by becoming just the second driver outside the Team Penske/Hendrick Motorsports/Joe Gibbs Racing triumvirate to make the Championship 4 since 2020. Reddick ultimately came up short in the title race, finishing fourth in points, but his presence gave hope the sport’s middle-tier teams could still achieve upward mobility in the Next Gen era.
Those hopes are fading.
Penske (Ford), Hendrick (Chevrolet) and Gibbs (Toyota) are the top teams by a wide margin in 2025. They’ve combined to win 12 of the first 14 races, their highest percentage during the Next Gen era, with a 13th going to a de facto Penske fourth team (Josh Berry) whose Wood Brothers operation is mostly run out of their shop.
A closer look at the nine winners shows that seven are from the Penske/Hendrick/Gibbs group, clinching those playoff spots in a year in which 16 winners appears unlikely. If the season ended today, they’d have 10 of 16 positions in the postseason field: Ty Gibbs is the lone driver on the outside looking in.
Instead of stepping up, the mid-tier teams have taken a step back. Ross Chastain won the Coca-Cola 600 but has been vocal about Trackhouse Racing’s problems with qualifying speed. 23XI Racing is embroiled in the NASCAR lawsuit, leaving their status as charter teams in question, and sits winless with Reddick, Bubba Wallace and Riley Herbst. And RFK Racing has been fighting off a Chris Buescher penalty and dealing with some bad racing luck, affecting Ryan Preece and leading to owner Brad Keselowski’s worst season of his career.
It’s notable all three of those organizations took on expansion during the offseason, perhaps in response to the charter cap of three teams going forward (Hendrick and Gibbs are grandfathered in). It takes time for a new group of personnel to settle in and growth to translate into on-track performance.
But right now, it looks like the title is heavily tilted toward the Penske/Hendrick/Gibbs group that’s claimed every one of them since 2018. There may be some surprises in who makes the field of 16 but it’s hard to see anyone outside that group making the final four.
The Next Gen Needs a Tune-Up
Four years into NASCAR’s Next Gen chassis, we’ve seen a troubling pattern emerge: the more teams and drivers learn about the car, the more the quality of racing gets worse.
An uproar continues over the way the Next Gen handles on short tracks: races at Martinsville Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway combined for just 13 lead changes this year. That’s despite a series of tweaks last year implemented to increase the level of competition there and on road courses. There’s also been rumblings among drivers and fans about the drafting races despite a high number of lead changes: fuel saving for track position often leaves them running at 80% during long green-flag stints.
Even intermediate tracks, which have been strongest with this car, have thrown up a few stinkers lately at Darlington Raceway and Kansas Speedway. The only track type that can make a strong case for improvement is road courses: Circuit of the Americas in March was arguably one of the top three races all year.
NASCAR is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Teams are constantly concerned about the cost of too many changes implemented quickly. And no one likes to see any rules shifted midway through the season: you don’t see the NFL making roughing the quarterback a 30-yard penalty in November, say, because they think the games have been too low-scoring for their taste.
At the same time, teams are able to master the technology thrown at them quicker than ever with spec cars. And as they do it… the parity achieved with similar setups, combined with limited horsepower, make passing in this car damn near impossible. Add in more resources for the top teams to find solutions first and you see why the first storyline is back in play.
NASCAR is talking about adding more horsepower, potentially before the end of the season. That’s a start but you also have to inject some handling and tire strategy back into play. When Ryan Blaney can run a third of the Nashville Superspeedway race this weekend with the same left side tires, that’s a problem! Cars don’t pass each other when they can easily run the same speed combined with crummy aerodynamics.
New Owners Nowhere To Be Found
Some of NASCAR’s best moments this season have revolved around new things. The Rockingham Speedway races for both the sport’s Xfinity and Truck series were well received. There’s been positive reviews for the sport’s new TV partners, Amazon Prime Video and the CW, the latter of which is producing strong ratings and interest for Xfinity. And there’s intrigue surrounding the return of NASCAR to Mexico City, the newest track on the Cup schedule just two weeks away.
Here’s where the buzz has been lacking: new ownership. An influx into the sport the past few years from people like Justin Marks (Trackhouse), Michael Jordan (23XI) and Keselowski’s investment in RFK has slowed to a trickle.
Where new owners might come from once followed a progression like a driver: you start in ARCA, then move forward to Trucks, Xfinity, then Cup. But a glance at Xfinity and Trucks show how barren the landscape is right now. Just two new organizations are running NXS this season: Cope Family Racing’s No. 70 and Viking Motorsports’ No. 99 (splitting off from Sieg Racing). Neither is higher than 25th in owner points.
In the Truck Series, the situation is even worse. Many of the full-time teams from last year — Hill Motorsports, Bret Holmes Racing (now Hettinger Motorsports), and Rev Racing — are nowhere to be found. There have been several short fields this season with 14 of 31 teams to start every race coming from just three organizations: ThorSport Racing, TRICON Garage and McAnally-Hilgemann Racing. As you might expect, it’s the top organizations from Ford, Toyota and Chevrolet simply keeping the series afloat.
The claim Dodge is eying the Truck Series in 2026 may help stem the tide there. But we’re already more than halfway through the year and there’s little public buzz around details; there’s also limited talk of new ownership. I worry about that with the current economic uncertainty the country’s facing.
I think this ownership issue remains one of the challenges of racing series going forward as they move toward franchise systems. Unlike in stick-and-ball sports, where athletes age out and there’s natural turnover, you can get stuck in place pretty easily without new teams pushing the boundaries, also creating new seats for people to compete and rise through the ranks.
Just look at Corey Heim as an example. He remains stuck in the Truck Series with limited opportunities to move up for 2026 despite one of the most dominant seasons in that division’s history. With just a handful of Cup drivers, if that, near retirement age, that further limits the options.
Must-Win Scenarios Creating Strong Summer?
Let’s end this one on a high note. With 12 races left to go in the regular season, the battle for the final playoff spots has become much tighter than normal. Seven drivers are separated by 19 points for the final two positions, with Buescher and Kyle Busch currently holding onto them.
That creates a high level of aggression among those drivers as they all fight hard for every point they can. But there’s also another interesting subgroup forming: a number of drivers who need to win to make the postseason who also clearly have the ability to do so.
Shane van Gisbergen, for example, sits 118 points behind but could stomp the field at the Chicago street course, Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen International coming up. Ditto for teammate Daniel Suarez, potentially fighting for his job as he heads toward a hometown race in Mexico City. There’s Keselowski, a former Cup champ who was running second as recently as Kansas last month before a tire blowout tanked his chances. Even Ty Gibbs, winless for his career but armed with the top-tier resources of JGR, can be thrown in this category.
Never before have we had so many capable must-win drivers, utilizing a different strategy to sneak in, paired with those who are battling amongst themselves on points. It could lead to a wild summer with a few upsets that squeeze the standings a little more than expected, perhaps throwing the playoff lives of drivers like Alex Bowman and Chase Briscoe back into play.
That’s a nice dose of good vibes for this sport as they hope the road course competition mirrors what we saw at COTA. Four of the final dozen regular season races are on this track type; add in the first ever in-season tournament and there’s hope the best is yet to come.
Did You Notice? … Quick hits before taking off…
- Kudos to Carson Hocevar for continuing to be authentically him. But his refusal to dial down an aggressive style has irritated so many drivers on the grid at this point it’s only a matter of time before someone spins him, right? It’s easier to make a list of who’s not mad at Hocevar compared to who is (add Ricky Stenhouse Jr. to that list after Nashville).
- The recent aggression toward Heim in Trucks the last few weeks has been interesting. It’s almost like it’s Heim versus the field; the field has realized it and has tried to rough up that Truck accordingly. How does Heim fight back?
- It’s not just Cup where Kyle Busch is struggling. With one Truck start left to go, he has just 80 laps led: that would be his lowest total in that series since 2004. Watching him run 15th with a Truck that just didn’t have the speed (penalty notwithstanding) was pretty surprising.
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @NASCARBowles
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.