SAD NEWS: NASCAR announced that Denny Hamlin is Leaving immediately after Facing…..
year with 18 different race winners. That’s when Tony Stewart won the title in a tiebreaker over just-inducted Hall member Carl Edwards.
The rare season when Jimmie Johnson didn’t hoist the Cup included the heavyweight likes of Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and the Busch brothers.
A traffic jam of talent so thick that David Ragan and Regan Smith both won races but still couldn’t crack the top 20 in points.
Those were all amazing seasons powered by amazing wheelmen, but let’s not commit the sin of allowing the nostalgia of the rearview mirror to cloud our vision and appreciation for what we are witnessing in this 4K UHD present day.
The argument for today’s roster as one of the most talented we’ve ever seen is about depth.
When Berry — the guy who not so long ago was running sim races before he was plucked out of the digital ether by Dale Jr. and dropped into the real-life short track world — pulled his No. 21 Ford into Vegas Victory Lane, the 34-year-old Tennessean was the 19th different race winner in the past 41 Cup Series races. And he did it by coming out on top of a field of 36 racers and becoming the 25th of them to win at least one Cup Series race. Yes, 25!
In NASCAR’s modern era, since 1972 when the Cup Series cut its schedule to 30-something races and fully shifted toward asphalt speedways, there have been only 14 seasons with 15 or more winners. Four of those years came in the past four seasons. After five races this year we already have three, even after Christopher Bell gobbled up three wins in a row.
As we all watched Josh Berry and the Wood Brothers celebrate their underdog victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, one thought kept swirling through my mind.
I couldn’t shake it that night and I have not been able to shake it in the days since. Truthfully, I’ve been swishing it around for a while now.
It is a simple question, a divisive question, but it is also a question that we need to ask.
Is this the most talented NASCAR Cup Series garage we have ever seen?
Now, before we try to answer that, let’s be up front with a major clarification.
I am not in any way, shape or aerodynamic form implying that the top of today’s talent scale is greater than it was in, say, 1974, when the still-newly named Winston Cup Series ran 30 races and all but one of them were won by the quartet of Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, David Pearson and Bobby Allison (shoutout to Canadian Earl Ross for his win at Martinsville).
They weren’t merely the four best of their time, they are all in the scrum for a spot on NASCAR’s all-time podium.
Nor am I saying that the leaders of today’s Cup standings are the demigods of 1992, when Alan Kulwicki drove his Ford Thunderbird to a championship by outsmarting Bill Elliott and outlasting Davey Allison and Harry Gant.
This on a grid that also included Mark Martin, Dale Earnhardt, Rusty Wallace, Terry Labonte, Darrell Waltrip and a paddock loaded top heavy with future NASCAR Hall of Famers.
In more recent seasons, I think of 2011. A year with 18 different race winners. That’s when Tony Stewart won the title in a tiebreaker over just-inducted Hall member Carl Edwards. The rare season when Jimmie Johnson didn’t hoist the Cup included the heavyweight likes of Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and the Busch brothers. A traffic jam of talent so thick that David Ragan and Regan Smith both won races but still couldn’t crack the top 20 in points.
Those were all amazing seasons powered by amazing wheelmen, but let’s not commit the sin of allowing the nostalgia of the rearview mirror to cloud our vision and appreciation for what we are witnessing in this 4K UHD present day.
The argument for today’s roster as one of the most talented we’ve ever seen is about depth.
When Berry — the guy who not so long ago was running sim races before he was plucked out of the digital ether by Dale Jr. and dropped into the real-life short track world — pulled his No. 21 Ford into Vegas Victory Lane, the 34-year-old Tennessean was the 19th different race winner in the past 41 Cup Series races. And he did it by coming out on top of a field of 36 racers and becoming the 25th of them to win at least one Cup Series race. Yes, 25!
In NASCAR’s modern era, since 1972 when the Cup Series cut its schedule to 30-something races and fully shifted toward asphalt speedways, there have been only 14 seasons with 15 or more winners.
Four of those years came in the past four seasons. After five races this year we already have three, even after Christopher Bell gobbled up three wins in a row.
Now, I’m not naïve. I know what this Next Gen car is, and I know that it was specifically designed with parity in mind, as are in-race and in-season rules that didn’t exist in any of those other seasons I already mentioned.
All of that has undoubtedly opened doors for teams and drivers that in another era would have been left behind in a literal cloud of brake dust.
However, before anyone starts touting the glory days of the second half of this century’s first decade, including that benchmark 2011 season previously mentioned, make sure to remember that was the age of the Car of Tomorrow, a shoebox with wings that had also been conjured up as a playing-field leveler.
But the Obi-Wan Kenobi-like voice that I keep hearing as I sort through all of that is really more of chorus.
Words first spoken to me by then-teenager Austin Dillon, racing in the NASCAR Truck Series for his grandfather, Richard Childress, and catching all sorts of flak from the Raise Hell Praise Dale crowd for running the slanted No. 3 made famous by “The Intimidator.”
“Have I had opportunities because of my Pop-Pop? Yes. Are the rules different now than they were back in the day? Yes. But you know what? When the green flag drops, my granddad and those rules don’t drive the race car. I do.”
Since that conversation, he’s won seven Truck races and also added nine Xfinity wins and five Cup victories, including a Daytona 500 title.
These days, he’s not winning much of anything and is currently mired back in 32nd in the rankings with nary a top-10 finish.
And Dillon’s words have been repeated to me so many times by so many racers.
“Everything out there is working against you, whether it’s the car or changes in the car or the racetrack and changes to the racetrack or the points and changes to the points, or just all those guys out there with you who are working to beat your ass,” Earnhardt Jr. said to me late in his career.
