Every week during the NASCAR Cup Series season, The Athletic will assess how full-time drivers stack up against one another. The assessment won’t just take into account results from the just-completed race weekend but the season as a whole.
Drivers will be divided into categories and, depending on their respective performances, can move up or down on a given week. Although one good or bad week isn’t necessarily going to dramatically affect a driver’s ranking, there will be occasions where a driver may jump up considerably — for instance, someone unexpectedly winning a race, as we saw in the season-opening Daytona 500.
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Tier 1: Championship favorites
1. Christopher Bell (1 win)
2. Kyle Larson (2 wins)
3. William Byron (2 wins)
4. Kyle Busch (2 wins)
5. Ross Chastain
6. Denny Hamlin
7. Alex Bowman
8. Joey Logano (1 win)
9. Chase Elliott
Kind of a typical Bell day at Talladega: He kept a low profile, stayed out of trouble and left with another good result. He’s now finished in the top 10 a series-best seven times, partly explaining why he’s leading the standings and why in this ranking he’s ahead of drivers who have more wins.
The last time Busch won on a superspeedway was July 2008, his first year with Joe Gibbs Racing. That same season he won a series-best eight races and won the regular-season points crown. Replicating that kind of dominance in his first season with Richard Childress Racing is unlikely, but two wins through 10 races is a great start for Busch, with reasons to think he and RCR will only get better as they gain greater familiarity with one another. And what’s really stood out about Busch thus far is how harmoniously he’s fit in with his new team.
It’s been two races since Hamlin proclaimed that he and his No. 11 JGR team were poised to go on a hot streak. Thus far, while he’s been in contention to win at Martinsville and Talladega, he still has a zero in the win column. With upcoming races at Dover, Kansas, Darlington and Charlotte, ample opportunity remains for Hamlin to assert himself as a player in this year’s championship, but we’re still waiting to see a complete, green-flag-to-checkered-flag butt-kicking like we’ve seen from this group so many times in years past.
Tier 2: On the cusp
10. Kevin Harvick
11. Tyler Reddick (1 win)
12. Chase Briscoe
Even with a broken finger on his left hand and having to overcome a spin onto pit road that left his car stranded like a beached whale, Briscoe posted another top 10 for the third consecutive race. Another reason he’s getting bumped up a tier this week is that his three top-fives on the season is more than or equal to the same number of top fives that the likes of Chastain, Bowman, Logano, Byron, Harvick and Hamlin have amassed.
GO DEEPERTop 5: Kyle Busch and Richard Childress shine at Talladega, Jordan Anderson's momentTier 3: Playoff contenders
13. Martin Truex Jr.
14. Ryan Blaney
15. Brad Keselowski
16. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (1 win)
17. Chris Buescher
The next four points races should offer a good gauge on where Truex and the No. 19 JGR team are at. Dover, Kansas, Darlington and Charlotte are four of his better tracks with multiple victories at each, so this combined with the speed the team has shown in recent weeks gives Truex a great opportunity to snap a winless streak that’s currently at 54 races.
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It was obvious the frustration Blaney was experiencing after the win slipped away Sunday through no fault of his own. Such frustration is understandable when your winless streak is now at 56 races and counting. What may be compounding that frustration is that Team Penske doesn’t appear to have the necessary speed in its cars to win right now on anything but a superspeedway or short track, which is problematic when looking at the NASCAR calendar over the next month-plus.
With 16 regular-season races remaining, it’s a given that a lot is going to change between now and when the playoff field is finalized. But it says a lot about the performance gains RFK Racing has made that both Keselowski (plus-38 points) and Buescher (plus-11) presently hold provisionally playoff berths based on where they reside in points. Working against them is that there are only two superspeedway races left in the regular season, the style of track that has been very good to RFK this season, with Keselowski and Buescher each having two top fives in three such races.
Tier 4: On the outside
18. Bubba Wallace
19. Ty Gibbs
20. Michael McDowell
21. Daniel Suárez
22. Todd Gilliland
23. Austin Cindric
24. Austin Dillon
25. Erik Jones
Understandably, Wallace was hard on himself after the race Sunday following his ill-timed block that sent him crashing, costing himself a potential win. But he should only beat himself up so much. That was a near-impossible situation to be in where he had to act decisively in trying to hold his lead. Unfortunately for him, he threw one block on Blaney too many and it bit him in a bad way. It happens; that’s a byproduct of superspeedway racing.
Tough break for McDowell on Sunday. He came into Talladega thinking he had a realistic shot to win only for a cut tire to send him into the wall, effectively ending any chance he had at a W. That the tire issue occurred on Lap 2 added salt to the wound as McDowell had to ride around the rest of the afternoon with a damaged car and do his best to stay out of everyone else’s way.
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It was a much-needed ninth‐place finish for Suárez. The result snapped a six‐race skid where he had finished 17th or worse, dropping him from third in points to 19th before rising back to 17th after Sunday.
On the subject of drivers needing a good result, Cindric could use one. He has just two top 10s on the season, none of them in the top five, and has led all of seven laps. Although some of this can be attributed to Team Penske going through a bit of slump, this is still not what was expected of Cindric in his second year in Cup. Interestingly enough, Cindric has the fifth‐best starting position (11.2) this season but ranks 24th in average finishing position (20.5).
GO DEEPERBubba Wallace, Ryan Blaney and a duel that left the friends winless at TalladegaTier 5: The rest
26. Corey LaJoie
27. Ryan Preece
28. Justin Haley
29. Aric Almirola
30. AJ Allmendinger
31. Harrison Burton
32. Noah Gragson
33. Ty Dillon
(Photo of Kyle Busch taking the checkered flag at Talladega: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
Jordan Bianchi is a motorsports reporter for The Athletic. He is a veteran sports reporter, having covered the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, college basketball, college football, NASCAR, IndyCar and sports business for several outlets. Follow Jordan on Twitter @jordan_bianchi
