On the final restart of Quaker State 400, Cole Custer looked like he might be able to post a Top 5. A great finish for the rookie but after the leaders Martin Truex Jr. and Kevin Harvick got together, the door opened for something special.
As the checkered flag flew, Cole Custer got his first career Cup win, and locked himself into this Wednesday’s All-Star race and more importantly, will now be part of the Playoff picture.
It may not have been a dominating win, but Custer will assuredly take the victory, the trophy and everything that comes with it. Meanwhile, the win also solidifies all the hype about the 2020 Rookie Class had coming into the season.
Yes, before possible hate crimes, Confederate flags, racist remarks, iRacing, Presidential tweets, COVID-19, and a near-tragedy at the Daytona 500, one of the biggest stories heading into the 2020 season was the crop of rookies including Custer, Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell and John Hunter Nemechek.
Custer, Reddick and Bell had been “The Big Three” of the 2019 XFINITY series, a year that was a dissimilar to many that had come before. Kyle Busch, of course, had to have his ego stroked by winning four races. But once he had won and done, the attention turned back to the series regulars.
In years past, the XFINITY series was almost unbearable to watch. The lineups were clogged with Cup regulars in obviously better equipment. The results (especially in terms of wins and even Top 5s) were pretty much determined by the drop of the green flag and the young up-and-coming drivers (for whom the series was supposed to give an opportunity to prepare for their Cup careers) were lucky to snag a Top 10 and even stay on the lead lap by the half-way mark.
But then, once Busch and a number of others were barred from competing for the season, a strange thing happened. The XFINITY Season actually gave a select group of young drivers a chance to shine and learn how to win in NASCAR’s upper levels.
Eight different series regulars won in the XFINITY season in 2019. EIGHT drivers for a total of 27 (TWENTY-SEVEN!!!) races. (And that’s even if you don’t include Ross Chastain’s July Daytona win, since he was technically running for the Truck Series championship.) This was a far cry from seasons in which only a handful of races the entire year (3 in 2013, as I recall) were won by series regulars. I would be willing to bet that you could probably find there weren’t twenty-seven races won by regulars in the previous five years in total.
I will hold off on taking about the benefits this has to the current and future Cup series for a paragraph or two. What I will instead point out is the effect it had on last year’s XFINITY Series.
The emergency of The Big Three gave a sense of uncertainty (in a good way) to the series. I remember tuning in on Saturdays and thinking “Okay, who’s going to win today? Is someone else going to lock themselves into the playoffs?” While Bell, Custer and Reddick won 21 races between the three of them, it was easy to forget that Michael Annett, Chase Briscoe, Austin Cindric (twice), Brandon Jones, and Justin Allgaier also got wins. (As mentioned, Ross Chastain who was a regular in the series and A.J. Allmendinger also got wins.)
While I still wish NASCAR would do something (in all three major series) about this rules package to limit the leaders from driving away to insurmountable leads once they get into clean air, having series regulars running up front was a lot more enjoyable than watching Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin, and others drive into the corner on each restart and basically leave the field in their rear view for the remainder of the run.
I remember thinking “How is running 9th and being in danger of going a lap down going to help these kids when they get up to Cup?” And the results speak to themselves, even among those drivers crowned XFINITY Series Champions. Look at Daniel Suarez who stumbled through three different Cup teams and currently runs about 30th every week. Ricky Stenhouse has a couple of Super Speedway wins but is more famous for dating Danica Patrick and wrecking people.
Even look at the Big Four of 2015: Champion Chris Buescher, Chase Elliott, Ty Dillon and Regan Smith. Elliott, who had won the Nationwide Series title in 2014, has a top-notch ride which he has translated into several wins and championship runs, but Dillon and Buescher have run mid-pack (a few stage wins for Ty and Buescher’s weather-shortened pit strategy 2016 Pocono win not-withstanding not-withstanding) while Smith is now an analyst for Fox.
Now one win by Custer doesn’t mean we should be ready to be crown him the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion and assume the Final Four will be made up of Reddick, Bell, and Nemechek. Certainly, any rookie season is filled with ups and downs, good runs and rookie mistakes. Add to the fact that COVID-19 has robbed these rookies of getting experience in a Cup car prior to taking their first green flag laps.
However, despite these challenges, the four rookies have put together some impressive runs given the circumstances. While rookies winning in the Cup Series isn’t always the expected result, there had been some speculation that at least one might find Victory Lane in 2020. With Custer driving for Stewart-Haas Racing (the same group that Kevin Harvick, Aric Almirola and Clint Bowyer all drive and content for wins for), perhaps it is no surprise that, of the four, he was the one who got the first win.
However, all four rookies have average finishes in the Top 20, with all having multiple Top 10s and no more than three DNFs. As I said, maybe Custer (two Top 5s, three Top 10s, only two DNFs) finding success with SHR wasn’t as much of a stretch as the others but look at Christopher Bell. Having been a Joe Gibbs Racing development driver, there was a lot of hype surrounding him, but you could forgive one for perhaps questioning how much success he might have driving for Leavine Family Racing, given Kasey Kahne’s struggles and Matt DiBenedetto over-achieving in that ride while the team killed time before Bell came to Cup. While Bell had the most hype only to be perhaps the quietest, his stats are equal to the other four, with five Top 10s, and only three DNFs.
He may have struggled a bit over the last few races, but Tyler Reddick certainly turned a lot of heads with his performances. He may be following up on back-to-back XFINITY Championships but, for some reason, there seemed to be doubt that he could compete in an RCR Chevrolet (because, according to social media, no one has ever won for RCR). However, no one has more Top 10s than Reddick.
John Hunter Nemechek was probably thought to be the fourth of the four rookies, an afterthought, driving for Front Row Motorsports, a far cry from Stewart-Haas or a Joe Gibbs affiliate. But Nemechek has a pair of Top 10s, an average finish of 20th, and the fewest amount of DNFs among the four rookies. And, while it will certainly have changed now, after last week’s race, Nemechek was second to Reddick in the battle for Rookie of the Year honours. (Reddick was first with Custer and Bell tied for third, but again, that will have changed after Custer’s win.)
All of these stats about the success of the Cup rookies goes to show the positive outcome that allowing these drivers to compete against each for wins in the XFINITY Series. While, as I insinuated earlier, we shouldn’t expect to see all four in Victory Lane in the Cup series on multiple occasions this year, they have the confidence in their abilities to know they can run up front, rather than just fill out the field.
A few years ago, there was reason to be pessimistic about the future of the Cup Series because the most NASCAR seemed to be producing in the XFINITY was a lot of boring racing, Cup drivers taking wins away, and maybe one or two “rising stars” – most of whom went on to brief and mediocre Cup careers.
Now, there’s reason to be optimistic, if NASCAR can limit the appearances by Cup drivers and instead allow the XFINITY regulars to shine. While the future in general may be uncertain at this point, having stars like Ross Chastain, Chase Briscoe, Austin Cindric and others battle for wins in the XFINITY, in preparation for their own elevation to the Cup Series, makes me feel more confident for the future of NASCAR. The threat that top stars like Johnson, Harvick, Newman, Hamlin, and others will retire with no credible future stars to take their place may have subsided.
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