For a Stewart-Haas Racing team that has struggled to find consistent speed since the start of 2021, Sunday’s (April 16) NOCO 400 at Martinsville Speedway had to have been a surprise.
SHR’s four cars had combined to lead 85 laps in the first eight races of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season. With the exception of Kevin Harvick and the No. 4 team, everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong to start the new year.
This weekend, however, the four-car team put its early struggles aside and proceeded to have a monster race at Martinsville, as Ryan Preece (135), Chase Briscoe (109) and Harvick (20) combined to lead 264 of the 400 laps.
Preece won the pole, won a stage and led the most laps, all for the first time in his Cup career. Harvick scored his first stage win since 2020 and led laps at Martinsville for the first time since 2016, while Briscoe’s 109 laps led marked his career high in a Cup race. While Aric Almirola never spent any time as the leader, he had an average running position of fifth and ended the day in sixth.
The 264 laps led out of 400 meant that an SHR car was pacing the field for 66% of the afternoon, which is a percentage that the team hadn’t reached since the second Dover Motor Speedway race in 2020, where SHR led 245 of the 311 laps (78.7%).
But of course, Harvick alone accounted for 223 of those laps led at Dover. The second-to-last race where SHR combined to lead more than two-thirds of the event was the second race at Michigan International Speedway Speedway a month earlier, where Harvick (90), Clint Bowyer (43) and Almirola (nine) combined to lead all but 14 of the 156 laps for a percentage of 91.0%.
So, yeah, it’s been a long time since SHR had that much of a presence at the top of the scoring pylon between all of its cars.
However, there are few, if not any, moral victories in NASCAR; all that matters is the trophy. Hendrick Motorsports only led 30 of the 400 laps on Sunday (all by Kyle Larson), but the team is more than happy to claim Martinsville clock No. 28.
Sunday was certainly a step in the right direction for SHR, nevertheless. But to have its highest-finishing car end up fifth on a day where they mopped the floor is not something to be celebratory about.
Martinsville by the Numbers
3: The number of on-track passes for the lead on Sunday.
- Harvick p. Ross Chastain lap 167, Denny Hamlin p. Briscoe lap 257 and Larson p. Joey Logano on lap 371.
- Three on-track lead…
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