Is There Strength Among Teammates in the NASCAR Playoffs?

With four races left in the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season, eight drivers remain in championship contention. It is no surprise that five of those drivers come from either Joe Gibbs Racing or Hendrick Motorsports.

The JGR drivers still standing are Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Christopher Bell, all of whom were expected to make the postseason and have competed in the Championship 4 race at least once before. HMS has experienced a bit more upheaval this season with both Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman left out of the playoffs. But the two Hendrick drivers who did make it in, William Byron and Kyle Larson, are still in contention.

The other three drivers still chasing a championship this year are Ryan Blaney from Team Penske, Chris Buescher from RFK Racing and Tyler Reddick from 23XI Racing. All three drivers had exactly one other teammate who made the playoffs but have since been eliminated: Joey Logano (Penske), Brad Keselowski (RFK) and Bubba Wallace (23XI). None of Blaney, Buescher or Reddick have ever run the championship race as a title contender. In fact, Buescher and Reddick have never reached the Round of 8 before. They will be facing a serious challenge to avoid elimination one more time.

Some fans might suggest that Blaney, Buescher and Reddick actually have an advantage from this point forward because their teammates have been eliminated. The argument is that, because they are the only drivers from multicar organizations left in the championship battle, those drivers will get all the focus, resources and energy from their teams in order to win the title.

Teams like Gibbs and Hendrick, on the other hand, will have to divide their attention on several drivers racing each other for the championship, thereby making the organization’s title hopes weaker overall. It is an interesting theory, but in practice, the opposite is usually true. Especially during the playoff era, the eventual champion tends to be a driver who has at least one other teammate in title contention late in the season.

Take last year, when Logano won his second championship, as an example. The key to Logano’s success in 2022 was how he and the No. 22 team caught fire late in the season. Logano’s win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the third round locked him into the championship race before anyone else, setting up his dominant performance at Phoenix Raceway in the season finale. Yet Logano was not the only Penske driver who was fast at the end of the season. Blaney advanced to the third round and scored four top fives in the last seven races. Even rookie Austin Cindric made the playoffs and narrowly missed joining Blaney and Logano in the round of eight. Having Blaney and Cindric gunning for wins and a championship did not hurt Logano at all in 2022. 

The championship runs before that, by Larson in 2021 and Elliott in 2020, demonstrate that HMS has no issues with multiple drivers in title contention. All four Hendrick…