MOORESVILLE, N.C. — It has been a very entertaining beginning to the NASCAR Cup Series season.
Honestly, the only thing I can find to complain about is the constant hyping by the FOX Sports to talk about the races on television. But with TV ratings up for the first four races of the season over last year, it’s even difficult to find fault with that.
However, despite the frequent screams of commentators, I’ve yet to see cars racing five, six, seven or eight wide. The racing has been better than it has been in years and somewhat reminiscent of the on-track product of the late 1980s and early ’90s.
The Next Gen cars are nice to look at, there have been new faces at the front of the field and numerous milestones were achieved through the first six weeks of the campaign.
If one counts the Clash at the Coliseum, the first five races of the season were run on significantly different race tracks and the Next Gen machine performed well in each of this applications.
Series veteran Joey Logano won on the temporary quarter-mile track at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in the much-talked about preseason exhibition race that kicked off the Next Gen era.
Rookie Austin Cindric, one of Logano’s Team Penske teammates, surprised many with a steady drive to victory in The Great American Race at Daytona Int’l Speedway.
Consecutive West Coast stops at California’s Auto Club Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Phoenix Raceway provided non-stop action as Hendrick Motorsports, with reigning series champion Kyle Larson and Alex Bowman, claimed victories at the two-mile Fontana, Calif., track and in Sin City.
That set the stage for Chase Briscoe to drive the familiar Stewart-Haas Racing No. 14 Ford to victory at Phoenix. It was Briscoe’s first Cup Series triumph, and a historic one at that. Briscoe, the 2016 ARCA Menards Series champion with a sprint car racing background, won nine NASCAR Xfinity Series races in 2020 but struggled through his rookie campaign in the Cup Series last year.
Briscoe held off a valiant charge from a pair of rising Cup Series stars—Ross Chastain and Tyler Reddick—to become the 200th driver to win a Cup Series race. And he did it on a day when his boss, team co-owner Tony Stewart, also collected his first NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series triumph, courtesy of Funny Car pilot Matt Hagan during the prestigious Gatornationals.
Jim Roper won the inaugural NASCAR Strictly Stock race at Charlotte (N.C.) Speedway, a three-quarter-mile dirt track, on June 7, 1949. It was his only Cup Series victory. Roper is one of 66 drivers at this writing with a single series victory.
Another driver with only one Cup Series triumph on his résumé is Formula 1 world champion and Indy 500 winner Mario Andretti. Andretti’s lone victory in the series came in the 1967 Daytona 500 at Daytona Int’l Speedway. Andretti, who drove a Holman Moody Ford that day, was also the 100th driver to visit victory lane in the Cup Series.
Geoffrey Bodine was the 125th different winner in the series with Joe Nemechek the 150th winner, while Brad Keselowski’s wild victory at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway while driving for James Finch and Phoenix Racing made him the 175th driver with a Cup Series trophy.
Richard Petty tops the list with 200 victories, while David Pearson (105), Jeff Gordon (93), Bobby Allison (84) and Darrell Waltrip (84) round out the top five.Â
Kyle Busch is the active leader with 59 Cup Series victories, which puts him ninth the list of all-time winners—one victory ahead of Kevin Harvick. But if the early part of the season is any indication, it seems unlikely that Cindric and Briscoe will be the only first-time winners in the series this season.
Cindric (23), Larson (29), Bowman (28) and Briscoe (27) are all under the age of 30. Reddick (26), Chastain (29) and Daniel Suarez (30) are among the candidates to break into victory lane before this season is over.
Now one of the elder statesmen of the series, Harvick, 46, achieved another impressive stat with his sixth-place finish at Phoenix Raceway. It was his 18th consecutive top-10 finish at the one-mile oval, tying the record shared by Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt for most consecutive top-10 finishes at a single track.