1. What Was That You Said About Parity?
NASCAR’s most popular driver and 2020 series champion Chase Elliott scored his first win of the 2022 season at Dover, snatching the lead from Ross Chastain on a restart with 53 laps to go at the Monster Mile. Elliott is the fourth Hendrick Motorsports driver to score a victory in the season’s first 11 races, a NASCAR record for a four-car team.
The advent of the Next Gen car to the Cup Series has certainly brought about a new level of parity at stock car racing’s highest level – I’d like to meet anyone who predicted that the only two multi-time winners by this point in the season would be William Byron and Ross Chastain. Strong runs from previously mid-pack teams like Richard Childress Racing, Petty GMS Racing and JTG Daugherty Racing have grabbed headlines, and even perennial backmarker Rick Ware Racing is producing more competitive results.
The 2022 Cup Series season has been entertaining and unpredictable. However, it’s time to recognize that despite the near-endless list of changes between November and February, the one thing that hasn’t changed is that Hendrick Motorsports remains the class of the field.
Elliott leads the regular-season points with a team newly energized by their first oval track victory since 2020. Byron leads the series in wins and playoff points. Kyle Larson still enters each weekend the favorite simply by showing up, and Alex Bowman continues to put himself in position to win races he shouldn’t.
More often than anyone else, when push comes to shove, it’s one of Mr. H’s Chevys that ends up in victory circle.
Last year, HMS won 17 out of 36 races, an incredible 47.2 percent. So far in 2022, they average 45.5 percent. With Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske and Stewart-Haas Racing still on the back foot and adjusting to the new car, there is no reason to think that HMS can’t equal, or even exceed, its dominance from one year ago.
2. Are JGR and Toyota Turning it…
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