Up to Speed: Hendrick Motorsports in Danger of Worst Season in 33 Years

It cannot be understated how much of a disaster Hendrick Motorsports’ 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season has been.

Kyle Larson, the reigning series champion, hasn’t found victory lane in 51 races. Chase Elliott has only finished in the top 10 twice in his last 16 starts. William Byron has gone from being a year-in, year-out championship contender to a mostly invisible driver who squeaked into the Chase as the measly 13th seed. And while he missed three races early in the year due to vertigo symptoms, the soon-to-be retired Alex Bowman is 29th in points, hasn’t led a single lap all year and is on track to record the worst average finish in his nine seasons at HMS.

With 75% of the 2026 season complete, NASCAR’s all-time winningest Cup team has only found victory lane twice in 27 races (both times with Elliott) and is currently riding a 16-race skid.

To find the last time HMS ended a Cup season with fewer than three trips to victory lane, you’d have to go all the way back to 1993. The team entered 1993 with 32 Cup wins to its name, debuted a hotshot 21-year-old rookie named Jeff Gordon and scored its lone win of the season with Ricky Rudd at Michigan International Speedway in June.

In other words, it’s been a while.

But while HMS has been NASCAR’s gold standard with a record 322 Cup wins since its debut in 1984 and a record 15 Cup championships since 1995, it has had its share of highs and lows, just like any other organization.

The team’s most significant downturn before 2026 was the end of the 2010s, when HMS won three races in 2017, three in 2018 and four in 2019. The final three wins of Jimmie Johnson’s Hall of Fame career were HMS’ only wins in 2017, while the first three wins of Elliott’s career marked HMS’ only trips to victory lane in 2018. Bowman scored the first win of his career in 2019, and Elliott added three more that season to slightly improve the team’s total, but it wasn’t until Elliott’s championship in 2020 and the acquisition of Larson in 2021 that HMS returned to the mountaintop.

But the key difference between the present day and the late 2010s is that HMS was in a rebuilding phase at the end of the decade. Gordon retired in 2015, Dale Earnhardt Jr. retired in 2017, Kasey Kahne left after 2017 and Johnson retired from full-time competition after 2020. Three NASCAR Hall of Fame members and all four of the team’s veterans retired within five years, and the late 2010s sowed the seeds for HMS’ dominance in the 2020s.

Elliott replaced Gordon and became champion in year five. Larson replaced Johnson and won the championship in year one at HMS. Byron replaced Kahne, won his first race in year three and made his first Championship 4 appearance in year six. Bowman replaced Earnhardt and began winning races in year two.

There’s a reason why the team was struggling in the late 2010s, but that reason doesn’t apply in 2026. HMS’ drivers are between the ages of 28 and 34 and should be enjoying the prime of their careers, just as they had done between 2020 and 2025.

The struggles of HMS in an era that it has dominated show that the new Chevrolet body has clearly knocked the team down a peg or five this year. But in 27 races, the team hasn’t made any significant progress catching up. Toyota and Team Penske continue to rule the Cup Series landscape with an iron fist, and if anything, HMS has only regressed since the start of summer.

The Nos. 9 and 24 teams have fallen off to the point that the Elliott-Alan Gustafson and Byron-Rudy Fugle pairings should be examined before the start of 2027. Elliott and Byron are now 72 and 114 points behind the points lead, respectively, after Darlington Raceway, and neither team has shown in months that they have the speed capable of erasing those deficits in the last nine races.

The team’s championship hopes lie with Larson, who still shows flashes of brilliance amidst inconsistency. To his credit, he came incredibly close to winning Sunday’s (Sept. 6) Cook Out Southern 500 and starting the Chase off with a bang. Larson’s led the third-most laps and scored the fourth-most stage points among all drivers this year, and even though the finishes haven’t always shown it, that speed alone will keep him in the championship conversation for the time being.

A championship would be great, especially after the year HMS has had, but a title won’t come without a return to victory lane. And while its drivers have come close to winning from time to time in the last four months, there are only nine races left for HMS to put it all together and score a third win, a mark it has achieved every year for a third of a century.