For six drivers, Sunday’s (July 6) Grant Park 165 in Chicago lasted all of five minutes.
Points leader William Byron completed just one lap before a mechanical failure left him with a 40th-place finish. Two laps later, a Big One was triggered by Carson Hocevar misjudging a corner and smacking the inside wall. His No. 77 car then ricochetted off the outside wall before coming to rest in the middle of the track, and a total of eight cars were collected in a fender-bending traffic jam once oncoming cars were unable to slow down and stop in time.
Five of the eight — Hocevar, Austin Dillon, Brad Keselowski, Todd Gilliland and Will Brown — all climbed from their cars with terminal damage. Each driver had completed a total of two trips to the start/finish line before calling it a day.
Those five — plus Byron — each set an unfortunate record for the fewest laps completed in a race in their respective NASCAR Cup Series careers.
Of the 36 full-time drivers in the 2025 Cup field, 19 of them have at least one race where they failed to complete more than three laps. Sunday was the first such race for Hocevar, Keselowski, Gilliland, Dillon and Byron, whose previous lows for laps completed were five, 19, 28, 28 and 46, respectively.
Since Denny Hamlin’s lap 2 engine failure at Sonoma Raceway last July (which is what inspired the first rendition of this article), the Cup Series has seen a plethora of early exits.
Ryan Blaney only completed two laps in last year’s Southern 500 after a crash with Martin Truex Jr. Two weeks later was Watkins Glen International, where Blaney failed to complete a single lap after this crash through the bus stop.
At Kansas Speedway last fall, Josh Berry’s race lasted two turns before he, too, was collected in a lap 1 accident. Berry’s exit, like Blaney’s, came under controversial circumstances, as he only needed four new tires and a push to pit road. But because he was unable to drive away from the scene, the Damaged Vehicle Policy in place at the time ruled that the No. 4 team was done for the day.
Next was Ty Gibbs, who completed one lap in last year’s season finale at Phoenix Raceway. After hitting the wall at the exit of turn 4, he appeared to have a mechanical failure through the dogleg that sent him into a hard crash entering turn 1. It was the cherry on top of a brutal end to the season, as Gibbs ended 2024 with five consecutive finishes of 30th or worse.
And that brings us back to Chicago, where 15% of the field was in the garage before the completion of lap three.
A bad finish is one thing, but for a driver and a team, completing less than a handful of laps in a race after a full week’s worth of work and preparation has to be one of the worst feelings in the world.
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