Brad Keselowski Becomes Next Gen’s 26th Winner. Who’s Next?

There are plenty of things to criticize about the Next Gen car, but the effect it’s had on organizational parity is not one of them.

By winning Sunday’s (May 12) Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway, Brad Keselowski broke a 110-race winless drought to score his first win with RFK Racing and become the 26th unique winner in the Next Gen era.

Twenty-six. Think about that for a moment. Two winners are retired, while another is racing part-time (Shane van Gisbergen), which means that 66% of full-time drivers (23/35) in the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season have won a Cup race with the Next Gen car.

Keselowski’s win means that only one full-time driver who won in the Gen 6 era has yet to win in the Next Gen car. And of the 11 full-time drivers that have yet to win a Cup race, only two have made more than 100 starts. More on them later.

Twenty-six winners. Who will be the 27th?

To kick this off, there have been six first-time Cup winners since the start of the Next Gen era in 2022. All but van Gisbergen scored their first win in the 2022 season, and half of the names on this list have gone on to win Cup multiple races.

In addition to first-time winners, the Next Gen car has seen not one, not two, but six drivers snap a winless drought that spanned at least two seasons (72 races). Keselowski was the most recent addition to the list and he’s the only driver with more than three wins to have that long of a dry spell before winning with the new car.