Championship Drivers Plowing Through a Drought

In my home state of Michigan, it’s been a bit of a heatwave the last couple of weeks, with heat indexes regularly surpassing 110 degrees.

Yes, 100-plus-degree ambient air temperature for multiple days this week, and now a thick, cloudy haze of Canadian wildfire smoke to help seal everything in like a big tin of Jiffy Pop with no rain in sight.

That made me think of a list of NASCAR Cup Series drivers who, while in position still to make The Chase, haven’t won a race since last year — or beyond.

Kyle Larson

The defending champion is probably the most glaring of those drivers who have yet to win a race this season. While he is sixth in the series standings and in no real danger of falling out, Kyle Larson has not won a race since May 2025 at Kansas Speedway.

He has maintained his points position on the strength of 11 top 10s and a boatload of stage points, but back-to-back 34th-place finishes have stalled the momentum he had been riding, with five top-five finishes in the prior six races. For all of the talk of the growing pains with the new Chevrolet body, the No. 5 team seemed to have things ironed out with it since Kansas.

While win-and-you’re-in is no longer a thing, it’s about time the No. 5 breaks the stranglehold that Toyota has had on tracks prioritizing downforce this season. Horsepower is not a concern, and Cliff Daniels rarely botches a strategy call.

The No. 5 team appears poised to start making moves once The Chase begins in September, but a win with some maximized points weekend would do well to get it in the top four or five in points to position itself for championship contention.

Joey Logano

It’s hard to find a driver with a more miserable season to date not named Connor Zillich or Noah Gragson. The three-time champion has not won a race since May 2025 at Texas Motor Speedway and has not had a top-five finish since Martinsville Speedway in March. That’s going on four months of floundering while teammate Ryan Blaney has a pair of wins, including last week at EchoPark Speedway.

Blaney sits third in points, 65 back of leader Denny Hamlin, while Joey Logano is buried in 17th, 29 points behind Shane van Gisbergen in 15th. Logano almost certainly needs a win to eclipse van Gisbergen, who has, unfortunately for the field, figured out how to race on ovals now, and 16th-place Erik Jones, who has heated up ever since Legacy Motor Club brought on some new partners (i.e., funding) and finished 13th or better in six of the last 10 races.

The outlook for Logano is encouraging, however. In the final six races of the regular season, there are four short tracks, a drafting track in Daytona International Speedway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway — a place his owner is rather fond of.

The short tracks are probably his best bet. Ford is clearly at a deficit at downforce tracks this season, and his one pole position came at Phoenix Raceway in March; his only top fives were third-place efforts at Martinsville and Daytona.

Christopher Bell

Christopher Bell has won a race this year … hasn’t he? Gun to my head, without checking, I’d say for sure he’s won at least one so far.

Nope, zero. He has five second-place finishes — an absurd figure that you’d assume would have him higher than eighth in points. But it’s been wins slipping away in the final laps at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Nashville Superspeedway, or getting launched head-on into the wall at 190 mph at Michigan International Speedway a month ago, breaking his wrist, that have held him back a bit.

He hasn’t let the injury slow him down too much, as he’s rattled off two runner-up finishes in the last two weeks, plus a top-five finish at Sonoma Raceway with the broken hand.

Driving a Joe Gibbs Racing or JGR-affiliated Toyota this year has been a license to print money and points. Bell has had the speed but has not yet managed to close it out. Last season he started the year off with three wins in a row and didn’t do anything until the Bristol night race in the playoffs. Looking at how he performed during that 10-race stretch, he’s right there putting together third- to seventh-place runs consistently, exactly what you need to do to win a championship under the wider scope of the Chase format.

A win and a max-points day, like for Larson, would do a lot to prepare him for The Chase before it starts at the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway come Labor Day weekend.

Brad Keselowski/Chris Buescher

I’m lumping these two together because the backbone of RFK Racing hasn’t won in two years. Chris Buescher has been bitten by the Ford bug this year — that is to say, decidedly off-pace to Toyota and Chevrolet for much of the season. A pair of top fives in April at Talladega Superspeedway and Texas has been the highlight of the season, along with a string of top-10 finishes, which has him solidly in seventh in points.

That said, not unlike Logano and teammate Brad Keselowski, the speed just hasn’t been there to suggest a win is imminent. Though Buescher did just recently sign a long-term contract extension with RFK, so he’s definitely the right guy for the No. 17.

However, Buescher and Keselowski are kind of in the same boat: Big win drought, and not a lot of speed to show for it recently. Keselowski’s best finish was a runner-up at Darlington in March. Since then, there have been a lot of crashes and Mustangs that have just been off the pace set by the Toyotas and a handful of Chevrolets.

While Buescher is solidly in the top 15 and not at risk of falling out, Keselowski needs to go on a run starting yesterday and score a win and stage points, post haste.

Doable? Yes. Unlikely? Unfortunately.

If it were still win-and-in for the final 10 races, I’d actually be a bit optimistic given Daytona is on the schedule, but with the Mustang being an also-ran at anything other than drafting tracks, it’s just a tough road being that far back for the 2012 champion.