About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I love a report card. It forces you to say the thing out loud instead of hiding behind "they had speed." So here it is, all 15 full-time Cup teams, graded on what they actually did in 2026. Kyle Larson is the champion again (his third title, and the second in a row), Ryan Blaney won the finale at Homestead, and Tyler Reddick won more races than anybody with six. That tells you a lot about the year. The rest of it tells you even more.
I went in grade order, best to worst, because that is how a report card should read. Tell me where I got one wrong in the comments. I know some of you will.
This is the easiest grade on the page. Gibbs won 10 of 36 races, put all four cars in the Chase, and finished second, third, sixth and ninth in points. Denny Hamlin won four times and led the series with 24 top-10 finishes. Christopher Bell won only once, at Darlington to open the Chase, but he led the series with 16 top-five finishes. Chase Briscoe won three times. Ty Gibbs won the first two races of his career, at Bristol and Iowa.
That being said, an A is not an A-plus for a reason. Hamlin scored the most points across all 36 races and still did not win the championship. Again. Gibbs had the fastest garage in the sport and the deepest roster, and Larson still beat them to the title. The cars are there. The title is the homework for next year.
Larson won the championship, and I am not going to pretend that does not carry the grade. He won three times, at Gateway, Kansas and Talladega, and he clinched the title in Stage 1 at Homestead before finishing 12th and watching Blaney win the race. William Byron won at Martinsville in the Chase and finished eighth in points. Chase Elliott won at Martinsville in March and at Texas.
Here is the problem, and you know it if you watched the No. 48 this year. Alex Bowman missed four races with vertigo, went winless, finished 26th in points, and he will retire from full-time racing after 2027. Elliott and Byron were good. They were not great. Hendrick won a championship with one car carrying the other three. That works for a grade. It does not work as a plan for 2027.
Tyler Reddick had the best start to a season I can remember in a while. He won the Daytona 500, Atlanta, COTA, Darlington and Kansas in the first nine races, then added a sixth win at Phoenix in the Chase. Six wins, 15 top-five finishes, and he still finished fifth in points. That is a strange sentence to write, but it is true. His Chase just never matched his spring.
Photo Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images
Bubba Wallace went winless and still finished 11th in points with 17 top-10 finishes, which is the most consistent year of his career. And then there is Corey Heim, who won at San Diego and Indianapolis in a part-time car, in his sixth and eighth starts of the season, and now takes over the No. 35 full time in 2027. Riley Herbst is the reason this is not an A. He finished 30th in points with no top-five finishes. Heim fixes that seat on paper. Wallace still needs a win to go with the consistency.
Ryan Blaney is the guy I keep coming back to from the finale. He won four times, at Phoenix, Atlanta, New Hampshire and Homestead, and finished fourth in points. Joey Logano won three times, at North Wilkesboro, Richmond and Bristol, and finished seventh. Austin Cindric made the Chase and finished 10th.
So why only a B-plus? Blaney had six DNFs. Logano had three wins and only seven top-five finishes, which tells you his year was feast or famine. Cindric went winless. All three Penske cars made the Chase, and only two other teams can say that, but none of the three was racing for the title at Homestead. Penske needs clean races, not just fast ones.
If you want the biggest jump in the garage, it is Spire. Daniel Suarez won the Coca-Cola 600 in his first year with the team, his third career win, and finished 13th in points with a 15.2 average finish, the best of his Cup career. Carson Hocevar won his first career race at Talladega and finished 14th. Both of them made the Chase. That is a sentence I did not expect to write about Spire two years ago.
I am keeping it at a B-plus because the year ended badly. Hocevar was suspended for the Homestead finale after brake-checking Cindric at Martinsville, so Justin Haley drove the No. 77 in the last race of the year. Michael McDowell also went winless and finished 20th. Spire proved it can win. Now it has to prove it can keep all three cars pointed the same way for 36 races.
Ryan Preece is the story here. He won the regular-season finale at Daytona for his first career Cup win, made the Chase, and finished 15th in points. Preece also won the preseason Clash at Bowman Gray, setting some higher expectations for the season. Chris Buescher made the Chase too and finished 16th. Two cars in the Chase is a real result for RFK.
That being said, Brad Keselowski went winless, finished 19th in points, and he will not be back in 2027. Buescher went winless too. RFK has to replace its veteran leader and find winning speed for Buescher and Preece, not just Chase speed. Preece proved the cars can win on a superspeedway. Can they win anywhere else? That is the question for the winter.
Shane van Gisbergen did his job on road courses and not much else. He won at Watkins Glen and Sonoma, finished 17th in points as the best driver outside the Chase, and had six top-five finishes. Ross Chastain went winless and finished 18th. Connor Zilisch finished 33rd in his rookie season with two top-10 finishes.
Look, I like this team. I like the drivers. But all three cars missed the Chase, and that is the grade. Chastain has to get back to winning on ovals. Zilisch needs a steadier second year after a hard first one. And van Gisbergen has to turn road course wins into points on the other 30 tracks on the schedule. Trackhouse made it official on Monday: Blake Harris will crew chief van Gisbergen's No. 97 in 2027, after four years with Bowman at Hendrick. Stephen Doran is out after two seasons with van Gisbergen, and he is headed to Spire to crew chief Michael McDowell's No. 71.
Three cars, no wins, no Chase. Todd Gilliland led the team in points in 21st. Zane Smith finished 27th. Noah Gragson finished 31st, though he did finish ninth at Homestead. There were flashes. Flashes do not make a season.
Front Row needs top-10 speed on intermediates and short tracks, where its cars spent most of the year outside the top 20. Gilliland is the closest thing the team has to a weekly top-15 driver. Gragson is coming back in 2027. The team has stability. It needs results to match it.
Josh Berry finished 22nd in points with no wins and no Chase appearance in his second year in the No. 21. He finished fourth at Martinsville in the Chase, which showed you what the car can do with Penske support behind it. It just did not do it often enough.
Berry will not return in 2027. The grade reflects a season that never found a second gear after a promising start to his tenure. Jesse Love shows a lot of potential to raise the grade of Wood Brothers Racing next year. Love needs to make the alliance with Penske count every week, not once a month.
AJ Allmendinger finished 25th in points and Ty Dillon finished 34th, with no wins and no Chase appearance between them. Allmendinger is still a threat on road courses. Dillon ran all 36 races. Neither car was a regular top-15 car, and that is the whole grade.
Kaulig changed crew chiefs late, with Mike Cook taking over as interim crew chief for the final two races on the No. 10. That tells you the team knows the current package is not working. The road course speed has to carry over to ovals, and Dillon has to find the speed Allmendinger shows a few times a year.
Kaulig will also be Dodge's flagship team starting in 2027. In a series where data matters more than ever, don't expect to see the grade for Kaulig rise next year.
Erik Jones finished 23rd in points and John Hunter Nemechek finished 29th, with no wins and no Chase appearance. Jones had the better year. Nemechek had a crew chief change in September, with Chais Eliason replacing Travis Mack, and it did not produce a late run.
Legacy is expanding to three cars, and the sponsorship is in place through 2028 with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar. The cars need to catch up first. Jones and Nemechek need top-15 speed on intermediates, where the Toyotas around them won 18 races this season. That number should bother everyone at Legacy.
Cole Custer finished 32nd in points in the team's only full-time car, with one top-five finish and two top-10 finishes in 36 races. The team switched to Chevrolet in 2026 with an alliance with Hendrick, and the results did not follow the equipment change.
A one-car team has no margin for error, and Haas spent the year on the wrong side of it. Custer needs qualifying speed first. The team started too many races from the back and spent too many Sundays recovering from track position it never had.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. finished 28th in points with no wins in the first season under the HYAK name. He signed a multi-year extension in May, so he and the team are tied together for a while.
Stenhouse is still a superspeedway threat, and that is his clearest path to a win. The rest of the schedule is the issue. HYAK needs top-20 speed on intermediates and short tracks to give him a Chase case that does not depend on one drafting race a year.
Cody Ware finished 35th in points with no top-10 finishes and two top-20 finishes in 36 races. The team switched back to Chevrolet in 2026 and settled its charter dispute with Legacy Motor Club, which at least removes a distraction that hung over the garage for more than a year.
The results were the thinnest in the field, and I am grading results. Ware ran the full schedule and finished ahead of only part-time cars. The team agreed in 2025 to sell to T.J. Puchyr. The next step has to be a clear plan for what this car is supposed to be.
Some seasons you cannot grade on wins and points, and this is one of them. Kyle Busch died on May 21 at age 41, after pneumonia progressed to sepsis. He had run 12 races for RCR, with two top-10 finishes. The team retired the No. 8, renumbered the car to No. 33, and Austin Hill took over at Charlotte. Hill will drive the car full time in 2027.
On the track alone, the year was poor. Austin Dillon finished 24th in points with no wins and no Chase appearance. Hill ran the rest of the season while also racing full time in the O'Reilly Series. RCR announced a leadership restructure in September, with Richard Boswell moving to vice president of competition for 2027.
I am not putting a letter on that. RCR lost its lead driver in May and spent the rest of the year grieving and rebuilding at the same time. The work for 2027 is to give Hill a full offseason as a Cup driver, give Dillon a car that can run in the top 15, and rebuild a team that went through the hardest year in its history.
The top four teams won 31 of 36 races. Gibbs won 10, Hendrick won the title, Penske won seven, and 23XI won eight with Reddick and Heim. Spire, RFK, and Trackhouse were the only other teams to win. RFK and Spire both needed a career day to do it; Trackhouse needed the best road racer in Cup Series history to get two wins this season. That gap is the story of the season, and it is the story of the winter too.
The top four do not need a rebuild. They need a title, a second, or even a third car to match the first, or a Chase that looks like the regular season. Everybody else needs something bigger. Trackhouse needs oval speed. Front Row, Kaulig, Legacy and Haas need top-15 cars every week, not top-15 runs once a month. And RCR needs time and a clean start after a year no grade can cover.
That is my report card. Which grade did I get wrong? Let me know in the comments.
Source: Sports
