After going winless in the final 18 Cup races last season, a key question entering this year was when Joe Gibbs Racing would win again.
Denny Hamlin’s back-to-back victories at Martinsville and Darlington give JGR five wins in the first eight races of this season.
The question now is if Joe Gibbs Racing is the best team nearly a third of the way through the regular season.
“I don’t think that we’ve been, short of (Martinsville, that) was domination, but there hasn’t been a lot of dominating Gibbs wins this year,” Hamlin said after his Darlington victory. “(Martinsville) was one of the only ones.
“You see (Christopher) Bell at Phoenix was dominating. I see it as we had two times that we had the best car, won the race. Then we’ve had other things kind of just fall our way.”
Hamlin led 274 of the final 275 laps to win at Martinsville. Bell led a race-high 105 of 312 laps to win at Phoenix.
In the other three JGR wins this season, the team led very few laps. Bell led only the last lap at Atlanta (JGR led just 2.3% of that race). Bell led eight laps at Circuit of the Americas — the only laps JGR led in the 95-lap event. Hamlin led only 10 of 297 laps in his Darlington victory.
Even with JGR’s success, Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron lead the points heading into Sunday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway. All four of Hendrick’s drivers are in the top 10 in points: Byron (first), Chase Elliott (fourth), Kyle Larson (sixth) and Alex Bowman (10th).
A year ago, Byron won three of the first eight races. This year he has one victory but has more top-five finishes (four this year to three last year) and has led more laps this year (354) compared to last year (149).
“I feel like we’re a way stronger team this year,” Byron said after leading 243 laps on the way to finishing second at Darlington last weekend. “I don’t feel like we ever had this performance last year in us. We won some races (last year), sure, but they were mostly on capitalizing on the end of the race or things like that, or having just good track position.”
While Hendrick has all four drivers in the top 10 in points, Joe Gibbs Racing has two of its four drivers in the top 10: Hamlin has vaulted from eighth to second in the past two weeks with his victories and Bell is third.
23XI Racing has two of its drivers in the top 10: Tyler Reddick is fifth and Bubba Wallace is eighth.
Team Penske has two drivers in the top 10: Ryan Blaney is seventh and Joey Logano is ninth.
“It’s the same crowd every year,” Elliott said this past weekend at Darlington when asked at what point in the season does he assess who the strong title contenders are. “We don’t have to beat around the bush. It’s going to be the same people that are going to be good in the last 15 weeks of the year.
“The people that are good right now are just going to get better. That’s just how it is. It will be the same crowd, as always, when we get down to it.”
