Are We Seeing a Changing of the Guard?

Ross Chastain’s #1 at Auto Club. Image Credit: TrackHouse Racing Twitter

Since the debut of the NEXT GEN car at Daytona last season, we have seen a sort of shift in the power house teams in the Cup Series. The Hendrick's & the Penske's are still out front, but the winds of change have started to make themselves known pretty clearly. Some of these new or even older teams are eating pretty heavily into the win tally for some of the legacy powerhouses. Here are the biggest upward movers team wise across the sport.

TrackHouse Racing - TrackHouse Racing took the NASCAR garage by storm. With 3 wins last season and a 2nd place title result last year, TrackHouse proved to the NASCAR world they are the real deal. Now coming into the 2023 season and Ross Chastain has won 3 Stages and led the most laps between the first 2 races of the year. Auto Club saw the Chastain/ Suarez duo score their first Top-5's of the season with Ross in 3rd and Daniel in 4th with both drivers showing serious speed.

Richard Childress Racing - RCR hasn't had a season with multiple wins in the Cup Series since 2017 with Ryan Newman winning at Phoenix and Austin Dillon's win at the Coke 600 at Charlotte. In 2022, that changed. Tyler Reddick scored his first career win at Road America and then followed that up wit h2 more, plus he nearly won several other races for the #8 team throughout the '22 season. Austin Dillon also scored the win at Daytona to lock himself in for a playoff spot for a combined 4 wins on the season. With the acquisition of Kyle Busch for 2023, everyone expected Kyle to come in with a vengeance and that came in display perfectly with Busch nearly winning his first Daytona 500 after working very well with teammate Austin Dillon, then the following week, Busch won race #61 and his first with RCR at Auto Club with Dillon finishing 9th. This is not a team you will want to count out in 2023.

Legacy Motor Club - It's no secret that Petty Motorsports was a hollow shell of what it once was. They fielded cars that produced next to nothing in terms of performance for several years, but when Maury Gallagher bought out the team for 2022 with the formation of Petty GMS, the results of the influx of funding and expertise was near immediate. With drivers Erik Jones & Ty Dillon along for the ride, the team scored 6 Top-10's in the first 15 races of the season and 14 in all. Jones also managed to score the teams first win and the first win for the legendary 43 car since 2014. For 2023 we haven't quite seen the magic as of yet for the newly rebranded Legacy Motor Club, but new co-owner Jimmie Johnson had a great performance at the Daytona 500.