Up to Speed: NASCAR’s Next Gen Parity Is Dead … Or Is It?

The first season of the Next Gen car saw 19 different winners, tied for the most all-time in a NASCAR Cup Series season. Those 19 winners came from 10 different organizations, and the Next Gen car proved to be an equalizer that allowed smaller teams to nail a setup and compete with the powerhouse programs on any given Sunday.

It only took five seasons for that parity to be completely undone.

So far in 2026, Toyota has won 10 of the 16 races. Tyler Reddick and Denny Hamlin alone have combined to win nine — more than half the schedule. Each driver has had a streak of three consecutive wins, and the two have been so absurdly dominant that they have gapped third-place Ryan Blaney by 146 points (almost two full races) in the points standings.

No driver in the Next Gen era has finished a full season with an average finish better than 11.0. Reddick and Hamlin have blown that mark out of the water nearing the halfway point of the season with average finishes of 7.2 and 7.8, respectively.

Chevrolet is struggling to adapt to the new body for the 2026 Camaro, and defending series champion Kyle Larson has been shut out of victory lane for more than a year. Chevy’s flagship team Hendrick Motorsports has only visited victory lane twice, both times with Chase Elliott. Ford has been virtually nonexistent outside of Blaney, who is responsible for Ford’s lone win in 2026 and the manufacturer’s last five. The last time a Ford driver not named Blaney went to victory lane was more than a year ago. Put it all together and 2026 has given Toyota and its top drivers the perfect storm to dominate.

Qualifying has become optimized. From 2023 to 2024, there was a 52-race stretch where the driver who started first went on to win just once. In the last 37 races, the driver starting first has won 15 times. In that same stretch, a driver starting on the front row has won 23 times.

Yes, that’s right: of the last 37 races, a whopping 62% of them have seen a driver starting on the front row end up in victory lane.

The road and street courses were once a bastion of parity with 10 winners in the 12 races between March 2023 and March 2025. They are now a parity black hole, as Shane van Gisbergen has absolutely obliterated the competition by winning five in a row and six of the last seven. He finished second at Circuit of the Americas in 2026, which is his only road course defeat in the last 15 months. Who won that race? None other than Reddick, who has won the most races and led the 2026 points standings from day one.

Even the drafting tracks are seeing fewer and fewer upsets. There have been nine drafting races between Daytona International Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and EchoPark Speedway in Atlanta since the start of 2025, and drivers from Team Penske, Joe Gibbs Racing, 23XI Racing and Hendrick Motorsports — the Cup Series’ four powerhouse teams — won eight of them, with the lone exception being Carson Hocevar’s first career win at Talladega two months ago.

To put it all together, Reddick and Hamlin have won nine. One of HMS’ former champions has won two and Ford’s best driver has won one. The road course king has also won one and is the heavy favorite to win two more.

The only real surprises have been the two first-time winners of Ty Gibbs and Hocevar, but it was a matter of when, not if, for both drivers. The one true shocker of the 2026 season has been Daniel Suarez, who held off the juggernaut Toyotas long enough for rain to fall and end NASCAR’s longest race short of 600 miles. Besides them, the 2026 season has been dominated by two drivers, with an occasional win from the usual suspects.

All that has made the parity of 2022 feel like a distant memory. It’s safe to say that the exciting era of unpredictability is over.

But is it?

The 2024 season saw the same discussion we’re having now, that the top teams had figured it out and that we wouldn’t see the smaller teams have the same chances as they did in year one of this car. It makes sense that conversation was rampant that year, as HMS and JGR dominated the start and combined to win the first nine races on non-drafting tracks that season.

That’s how it started, but how did the 2024 season end, you may ask? It ended with 18 different winners, one shy of tying NASCAR’s all-time mark.

Will the 2026 season end with 18 different drivers in victory lane? Probably not, but the point is that everything is cyclical. Toyota, Reddick and Hamlin have looked unstoppable to start the year, but they won’t be unstoppable forever. It might take other teams until July, until September, until 2027 or maybe even until 2030 to gain back an advantage, but that time always comes.

In 2017, the discussion was how dominant JGR, Furniture Row Racing and Toyota were. In 2020, that conversation moved to Ford, Stewart-Haas Racing and Team Penske. In 2021, it was Hendrick Motorsports. Now it’s 2026, and it’s back to JGR and Toyota, with 23XI joining the party.

Teams like Trackhouse Racing (on ovals) and Richard Childress Racing, which were finding victory lane more frequently at the start of the Next Gen era have taken a downturn, yes. SHR was another team finding victory lane on occasion, and now it no longer exists. But while those teams have fallen, teams like Spire Motorsports have been on the rise, and in the year where Cup has been dominated by two drivers, Spire has won more races in the last two months than it did in its first seven years of existence. Legacy Motor Club, another mid-size team, is arguably in the midst of its best-ever season since Jimmie Johnson took over, and it’s fresh off of what might be its best race as an organization at Pocono Raceway.

Every team, every driver and every season has its ups and downs. And as long as everyone in the garage has the competitive fire to learn, to improve and to win, no one will stay on top forever.