Tyler Reddick is red hot to open the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, and if you think he’s in an exclusive group, he is. Reddick is just the sixth driver in Cup Series history to open the season with two wins in the first two races.
It’s something Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt or Jimmie Johnson never did, and Reddick is the first driver since 2009 to start the year with back-to-back wins. But is his hot start indicative of how his season will go?
The short answer: probably not.
Among the five drivers who accomplished the feat before Reddick, just one — Jeff Gordon in 1997 — finished the year with a championship. The remaining three drivers to complete the two-fer are a mixed bag, with a runner-up points finish and a 14th place for two full-time drivers.
Here’s a closer look at the five drivers who came before Reddick on this very short list.
Marvin Panch (1957)
Panch opened the 1957 season with wins at Willow Springs Speedway and Concord Speedway. Both races were, incidentally, run in 1956, as the season started in November and ran through October of 1957 with a 53-race schedule.
Panch went on to win six of his 42 starts that year, finishing second in driver points. It’s notable that in the pre-modern era, most drivers did not race every race, and no driver started more races than Panch. With 22 top fives and 27 top 10s alongside his six wins, 1957 was Panch’s best season statistically at the top level of NASCAR.
Bob Welborn (1959)
Just two years later, Welborn added his name to the list, the only time two drivers would accomplish the feat in the same decade. His wins came at Champion Speedway in Fayetteville, N.C., and the 100-mile Daytona 500 qualifying race at the brand-new Daytona International Speedway, which was a points-paying race until 1972.Â
Welborn ran 29 of the 44 races on the ’59 schedule, mostly in his own cars, and won a total of three races. He also had 13 top 10s but 15 DNFs, only two of which were for crashes with the rest being mechanical issues. Welborn’s third win that year came at Asheville-Weaverville Speedway in August, and it would be the last of his career, though he ran part-time for several more seasons.
David Pearson (1976)
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, winning both of the season-opening races often included an additional obstacle: the road course at Riverside International Raceway in a day when road-course specialists not only showed up but won regularly. Drivers like Dan Gurney, Parnelli Jones and AJ Foyt broke up the season-opening party for the regulars more than once.
Pearson was not deterred, however. Despite running a part-time schedule that excluded him from title contention in the modern era, Pearson won not only the opener at Riverside and the Daytona 500, but a total of 10 races in just 22 starts, the most of any driver that year.
That was good enough for a ninth-place points finish, ahead of six drivers who raced the entire 30-race slate that year. Pearson swept the season at Riverside, Darlington Raceway and Michigan international Speedway, leading over 1,200 laps and scoring 18 top 10s.Â
Jeff Gordon (1997)
Gordon opened his second championship-winning season with wins at Daytona and North Carolina Speedway (now Rockingham Speedway). He’s the only driver to open the season with back-to-back wins and also win the title the same year.
Gordon would also go on to win 10 times that year, with all of them coming at different tracks. With 22 top fives and 23 top 10s to go with his wins, Gordon won the title by just 14 points over Dale Jarrett, making those season-opening wins a crucial part of his title run in the full-season era. It was the second of three straight double-digit winning seasons for Gordon.
Matt Kenseth (2009)
Kenseth opened the year by visiting victory lane at Daytona and Auto Club Speedway, but he has the dubious distinction of being the only driver on this list who would not win another race that season.
He finished last in the third race of 2009 thanks to an engine failure six laps in, and he went on to have an uncharacteristically inconsistent year with just seven top fives and 12 top 10s. He didn’t qualify for the Chase — the only time in his career he failed to do so — and finished the year 14th in points, tying his rookie season in 2001 as his career-low points finish.
With The Chase 2.0 championship system back in place, wins don’t guarantee a spot in the final rundown. They absolutely help, but consistency matters more than it has in years. Reddick has put himself in a great position, but it’s a long season, and if there’s anything to be learned from past history, it’s that a great start is only just that.Â
No driver has opened the season with a trifecta of wins, but Reddick has a shot at becoming the first this weekend at Circuit of the Americas, a track where he won in 2023 and has finished in the top five in all five starts. With the speed the 23XI Racing stable has shown this year, Reddick certainly can’t be counted out. Could he go from a short list to a list of one?
History says it’s going to be awfully hard, but history is also a living, everchanging thing. A great start may not lead to a great finish, but it’s still a pretty good story.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.