The era of the Next Gen car is off to quite the beginning, with 25 different drivers occupying the 30 top-10 spots available after three events. It’s the most at this point in a Cup Series season since the 1973 campaign. Such a variety has left little room for repeat visitors, and one driver on his way to retirement has monopolized the top-10 realm so far.
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Six more drivers notched their first top-10 results of 2022 in Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Race winner Alex Bowman topped that list in posting the second straight victory for the Hendrick Motorsports organization. Third-finishing Ross Chastain followed closely behind as he led the most laps and carried Trackhouse Racing to a banner day.
The only driver to go 3-for-3 in top 10s in the early going? That’s Aric Almirola, who announced in January that the 2022 campaign would be his last full-time season in the Cup Series. So far, he’s taken the No. 10 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford to finishes of fifth (Daytona), sixth (Auto Club) and sixth again (Las Vegas) — figures that have him unsurprisingly in sixth place in the early Cup points standings. Interestingly enough, he also placed sixth in each of the last two races of the 2021 season.
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“We fight. That‘s the beauty of this race team,” Almirola said after Sunday’s 400 in Vegas. “We‘re still learning this car. There‘s a lot to learn about it and we‘re still trying to figure a lot of things out. Practice is great, but we‘ve got to make adjustments throughout the race and I feel like every race we‘re learning more and more and more and we‘re building a notebook. We‘re making adjustments throughout the race and trying to figure it out.
“This team has so much fight in it and so much grit that it‘s a lot of fun to race with these guys. We‘ll keep digging and try and keep this streak alive of all these top-10 finishes. It‘s a lot of fun when you run up front.”
The Next Gen car that debuted earlier this season carried at least the potential for shifting some of the balance of power in the Cup Series standings. It’s still too early to see if that trend has a longer-range impact, but the early results are encouraging.
Some familiar powerhouses have already risen to the top. Defending series champion Kyle Larson is back atop the points standings, and the season’s win tallies so far have been divvied up by Hendrick (two) and Team Penske (one). The only other drivers to cop two top-10 finishes through three races are all former Cup Series champs — Larson, Kyle Busch and Chase Elliott.
In a neat bit of symmetry, 25 is also the number of Cup Series drivers who have led laps this season. For all his consistency, Almirola has yet to scratch this category so far.
William Byron, Tyler Reddick, Martin Truex Jr., and Christopher Bell were the others who secured their first top 10s of the year last Sunday at Las Vegas. But several more are aiming to break onto that list in the season’s fourth race, scheduled Sunday (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM) at Phoenix Raceway.
Denny Hamlin — a Championship 4 qualifier the last three seasons — is prime on that roster of hopefuls, after enduring early retirements in two of this year’s first three races. Ty Dillon, in his first year with Petty GMS Motorsports, is the highest-ranked driver (19th in the points) without a top-10 result to date.