Handing Out The NASCAR Hardware For 2023 (So Far)
Put on your comically oversized victory hats, it's Midseason Awards time!
With NASCAR still on its midseason break before getting back to the action in Nashville next weekend, it’s a good chance to zoom out and take stock of the 2023 season so far. As usual, there’s been plenty of hard racin’, off-tracking feudin’ and fast drivin’ to assess, so let’s get right to it…
🏁 Driver of the First Half: William Byron, #24 Hendrick Chevy 🏁
Byron has long been fast, winning at least one race in each of the past four seasons, but this is looking like a career season for the 25-year-old Charlotte native. He currently co-leads the Cup Series in wins (tied at 3 with Kyle Busch) and ranks first in my Adjusted Points Index rating at 186, or 47 points higher than the composite of his Hendrick teammates. This marks the first season Byron has outdriven his teammates — he has an impressive 30-18 head-to-head record against them — and it might even signal a new pecking-order spot for Byron in relation to champion peers Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson. At a certain point, Byron was having one of NASCAR’s great feast-or-famine seasons, but he has been running consistently well even in non-wins recently.
Honorable Mention: Kyle Busch; Kevin Harvick
🏁 Team of the First Half: Hendrick Motorsports 🏁
I was tempted to give this to Joe Gibbs Racing for a split-second, given how much better they have been this year (fun fact: JGR’s average finish of 14.5 across all of its drivers is better than Hendrick’s 14.6)… but how can we not recognize Hendrick for the overall performance they’ve produced so far? While Hendrick’s crew has cooled down some from their early-season pace, when they collectively led more than 50% of all possible laps, they still have led a series-high 32.6% of all laps, to go with 5 wins, 14 podiums, 20 Top 5s and 30 Top 10s, all of which lead the Cup Series. And they’ve done it with flagship driver Chase Elliott missing nearly half the season and Alex Bowman missing 3 races as well, absences which saw frequent replacement Josh Berry mostly hold his own (99 Pts+, 100 Finish-, 51.1 Composite W%) — a true testament to not only Berry’s talent, but also to the quality of this team setup.
Honorable Mention: Joe Gibbs Racing; Team Penske
🏁 Biggest Breakout: Chris Buescher, #17 RFK Ford 🏁
At age 30, Buescher might be a little bit long in the tooth for some folks’ definitions of a “breakout” — by comparison, Bubba Wallace, another leading contender, is a year younger — but the average Cup Series driver is 32, so I think we’re safe picking either. And while Wallace has been impressive in improving from an 86 Pts+ in 2021 to 106 last year and now a 110, Buescher’s rise is even more dramatic. Before 2022, he never once had an average Pts+ in a season, peaking at a 96 in 2021; then he jumped to 102 last season, before having a quantum leap to 129 this season. That’s the seventh-largest improvement on a career-high Pts+ for any driver with at least 250 previous career races1, tracing Buescher’s path from just another backmarker to a guy who has 7 Top 10s in 16 races.
Honorable Mention: Bubba Wallace; Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.
🏁 Pleasant Surprise of the First Half: Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., #47 JTG-Daugherty Chevy 🏁
I listed Stenhouse as a candidate above despite it really stretching the definition of a “breakout” — Stenhouse is a 35-year-old, 13-year Cup Series vet — simply because his continued success this season has come so far out of left field. It started with a shocking win at the most prestigious race of them all, the Daytona 500, making Stenhouse one of that event’s most unheralded champions. But it was no one-off fluke performance: Stenhouse had four other Top 10s in the 15 races that followed, helping him produce an adjusted Pts+ of 126, by far the best mark of his career. (He had a 114 for Roush Fenway in 2017, literally the only other full season in which he was even an average driver.) Racing on a one-man team in a field full of better-funded squads running three or four cars apiece, Stenhouse has more than held his own: He has a 355-217 (62.1%) head-to-head record against opponents this year, including a 158-91 (63.5%) mark against fellow Chevrolets.
Honorable Mention: Corey LaJoie; Brad Keselowski
🏁 Unluckiest Driver: Aric Almirola, #10 Stewart-Haas Ford 🏁
Only one driver has more than a 4-place differential between their average running position and average finishing position: Almirola, who only has one Top 10 and zero Top 5s despite ranking a respectable 20th in average running position (18.7). Based on the surrounding drivers in that metric, we’d expect Almirola to have four times as many Top 10 finishes! Almirola has been running at the end of 13 races in 16 tries, so it hasn’t been an issue of crashing since early in the season; he just hasn’t converted early-race track position into favorable finishes.
Honorable Mention: Noah Gragson; Kyle Larson
🏁 Biggest Disappointment: Austin Dillon, #3 Richard Childress Chevy 🏁
Throughout Austin Dillon’s career, there’s been plenty of questioning whether he truly deserved the plum spot of driving Dale Earnhardt’s revered #3 car for RCR, or if he is just a reality-show-having, fake-cowboy nepo-baby. (After all, he is Childress’s grandson and his father is former Cup Series driver Mike Dillon.) But I come not to pile onto Dillon — I actually kinda like him — since over the course of his career he had been an above-average driver (102 Pts+, 87 Finish-)… until 2023, that is. After years of solid numbers, Dillon’s stats this season (76 Pts+, 115 Finish-) are horrid, particularly when we consider that new teammate Kyle Busch is dominating him with a 182 Pts+, 64 Finish- and a 13-3 head-to-head record. In similar equipment, Dillon has shown himself to be nowhere near Busch’s class — a bad look now that his points of comparison are no longer guys like Daniel Hemric, Paul Menard, a young Tyler Reddick and a past-his-prime Ryan Newman.
Honorable Mention: Erik Jones (and throw his fellow Legacy driver Jimmie Johnson in here while we’re at it); Austin Cindric; Daniel Suarez; Chase Elliott if he misses the playoffs
🏁 “Doing More With Less” Award: Kevin Harvick, #4 Stewart-Haas Ford 🏁
It sounds weird to give this award to a driver for Stewart-Haas, which has traditionally been one of the Cup Series’ stronger teams during its heyday with Tony Stewart, Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch, Clint Bowyer, Aric Almirola and others. But the outfit has fallen on hard times in recent seasons, as the soon-to-retire Harvick is basically the only thing keeping them from falling into total disrepair. Harvick has more than half of the team’s total Top 5s and Top 10s, with a 392-180 (68.5%) record versus the same field that his teammates have collectively gone 723-993 (42.8%) against. Though he hasn’t won a race yet this season, Harvick leads all drivers in my Composite W% stat — in part because he has run so roughshod over all of his competition, even if that is very bad news for his team when Harvick moves to the broadcast booth next season.
Honorable Mention: Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.; Corey LaJoie
🏁 Best Silly-Season Pickup: Kyle Busch, #8 Richard Childress Chevy 🏁
I wrote early in the season that Kyle Busch could be primed for a big year in his first season at Childress, given how rejuvenated he seemed in the first few races and how strong the #8 car had been for Tyler Reddick last season as well. All Busch has done in the first half of the schedule is win three races (tied with Byron for the Cup Series lead), drive circles around his teammate Dillon (as I noted above) and set himself on pace for his best season by Pts+ or Composite W% since 2019 — aka the year he won his second championship. Busch may no longer be the Candy Man in his iconic Joe Gibbs #18 M&Ms car, but the RCR #8 seems to be suiting him just fine.
Honorable Mention: Tyler Reddick
🏁 Best Race: Round 12, Advent Health 400 at Kansas 🏁
According to weekly “was this a good race” polls conducted by The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck, the spring Kansas race got a sparkling 93.3% approval rating by fans — tops of any race so far this season:
I can’t disagree! Not only was the finish a thriller — with Denny Hamlin hunting down and nudging Kyle Larson out of the way on a final-lap pass — but the post-race activities included the now-famous fight between Ross Chastain and Noah Gragson. Seldom do you get a 2-for-1 deal like that — and when you do, it tends to be extra memorable.
Honorable Mention: Goodyear 400 at Darlington; Coke 600 at Charlotte
🏁 Biggest Second-Half Storyline: Which big name(s) miss the playoffs? 🏁
With just 10 races left before the playoff field is set, things are going to heat up quickly over the next couple of months. Right now, 10 drivers have wins, leaving 6 playoff slots to be set by the points if no new winners enter the picture — which is unlikely, as 36.2% of races at this midseason stage of the schedule2 were won by drivers who hadn’t previously won in the season yet through Round 16. (Only once — in 2015 — did this stretch of the season go by without at least 1 new winner emerging; sometimes as many as 70% of these races were won by drivers who hadn’t already won earlier in the year!)
Those 6 drivers in points limbo above the cut-line are mostly big names: Ross Chastain, Kevin Harvick, Chris Buescher, Brad Keselowski, Bubba Wallace and Alex Bowman. And there are some equally heavy hitters lower down, sitting in even more danger of missing the cut (I’m thinking of Chase Elliott and Daniel Suarez specifically). Odds are, at least a few of these guys will see their championship hopes dashed prematurely — and it will be a fierce numbers game to not get caught up in that group.
Filed under: NASCAR
No. 1 was Dale Jarrett’s 68-point improvement in 1996.
Meaning Rounds No. 17-26 of a season.