Is Joe Gibbs Racing a shoo-in for the NASCAR Cup Series championship?
In racing, sometimes crazy things happen. Drivers come on strong late, wild crashes can flip races on their heads or the powers that be simply put their foot down.
However, that doesn’t appear to be happening in 2025, and with each of the last few runs to the NASCAR Cup Series championship being filled with fanfare, we’re due a boring one — if you aren’t a Joe Gibbs Racing fan, that is.
The Toyota camp in its entirety has come on strong late this season from the leading ranks of JGR all the way down to John Hunter Nemechek and Legacy Motor Club. It’s essentially swapped places with Penske and Ford from this point last year and have somehow found some speed late in the season.
Just look at the team’s win totals. Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe have both staked their names to the next round of the playoffs with their wins, and I’d be shocked if another Toyota, perhaps Hamlin again, isn’t squarely in the hunt for a win at Bristol Motor Speedway this weekend.
None of this, though, is what makes me say that it is unequivocally Toyota’s year.
Usually at this point in the year over the past few seasons, Ford will find some pace and figure out a way to game itself through the playoffs. Chevrolet will try to keep its season-long momentum high, and there will be one Toyota in the Championship 4 looking to surprise the field. That won’t be the case this year, and a moment toward the end of last week’s World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway race drove the final nail home in that argument.
Ryan Blaney fought back from the back of the field to finish well. In fact, in the closing laps, he and Chase Elliott were duking it out for position. Elliott might have had a faster car, but Blaney was on fresher tires, which should have been the great equalizer at Gateway, but it wasn’t. Elliott held him off from the middle lane and helped Chevy look a little bit better on the day as a result.
How does this affect the Toyotas? That’s the thing: It didn’t.
Multiple car lengths ahead of second place, Hamlin cruised to a win. He could have let off the throttle well before he got to the line and still coasted to the victory. The second-place finisher? Briscoe.
JGR is completely dominant right now, and judging by the schedule, it’ll continue to be dominant as we inch closer and closer to Phoenix Raceway.
Just how broken is Bristol?
Why do we race at Bristol Motor Speedway twice in a season?
I was at the Cup race this spring and vividly remember wondering if drivers were going to be able to keep tires on their cars or temperatures on the track, for that matter. Additionally (and this has more to do with the state of live sports in general than anything else), the grandstands were virtually empty. There’s not a large enough metropolitan area around the track to support the event in that time of the year.
The Bristol night races are so electric and are carried by the nostalgia and memories of the sport, and that makes for one amazing racing atmosphere, no matter what the product looks like on the track. Now, though, each night race is stained by the fact that nobody had a good time on the first visit of the season. How many house parties have you been to that sucked, but you went back again?
The causes of this debacle are multifaceted and complex, but a good place to start is the track surface. Ever since going to concrete, NASCAR has tried to spice up the racing there with different compounds, like the PJ1 that will be used this weekend.
Even one of, if not the sport’s brightest personalities in Dale Earnhardt Jr. has been vocal about the fact that the track surface needs to change if we want good racing to continue on the sport’s favorite short track.
Suffice to say that Bristol is, in fact, broken. To what degree? I’m not certain. The true time for raising an alarm will be the day that NASCAR takes its spring race away, but if changes only start to be made then, it will be far too late for the Last Great Colosseum.
Will Connor Zilisch break more records this weekend?
Connor Zilisch has been the most electrifying driver in the sport in 2025, and he’s not even at the Cup level full time. Let that sink in.
The current favorite for the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship is looking to win five straight races (counting the Daytona International Speedway victory that Parker Kligerman scored for him in relief) for the first time in series history this weekend at Bristol, and he’s in with a pretty good shot of doing just that.
If he did manage a win, it would mark his 10th on the 2025 season and ninth since missing the mid-season race at Texas Motor Speedway after suffering an injury the race before. Eight wins in any full season alone would be impressive, but Zilisch has managed that number in just 14 races and hasn’t finished outside of the top five in any of them.
At a certain point, this becomes a math question. If Zilisch is reliably winning a little more than half of the races that he competes in, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that he gets that 10th win, and it isn’t a bad bet by any means to say that he’ll break that aforementioned record of five wins in a row, even if one of them was technically because of Kligerman.
He’ll get it done this weekend. Zilisch has the best equipment and skills out of anyone in the field currently, unless someone turns up with a rocketship. Come the end of this season, the hype around him will reach levels we haven’t seen before in the modern era of NASCAR, and that should be an exciting day for the sport as a whole.
How concerned should fans be with Xfinity vs. Cup viewership?
Conversations this week on social media swirled around the fact that the Cup Series seems to be losing a bit of traction to the Xfinity Series in the TV Ratings. Mind you, there was still a 1 million person-sized gap between the two, but this is still much closer than to be expected during college football season, which tends to dominate Saturday television sets.
To answer the question of why, we have to get down to the basics of television. Having a home network always has been and always will be the easiest way to ensure audience retention. With the Cup Series moving around through various TV partners, there’s no consistent home channel for the sport’s highest level, and that’s greatly to its detriment.
Secondly, the racing is just flat-out better on average. The Xfinity car still drives like a stock car should, with its 16-inch tires and, in comparison to the Cup cars, unsophisticated chassis and gearbox. The drivers can actually slide these cars around tracks, showcase their skills and pick up speed in the process. It’s still stock car racing, which is rapidly leaving the Cup level if it hasn’t dissipated already.
There are arguments to be made around Zilisch and company bringing in more viewers, and that might carry a bit of weight, but it’s not enough to explain the numbers we’re seeing. It comes down to the level of competition and the series having a consistent home on a widely available network. The CW is becoming a larger player in the world of sports, and the Xfinity Series is a part of that equation.
This isn’t to say that we’ll see Xfinity overtaking the Cup Series anytime soon, but it should be viewed as a wake-up call. Fans are doing what they’ve always done: opting for the easiest route to watch the best racing.
And right now, that’s the Xfinity Series.
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.