Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar could see sweep not pulled off since 1957
By Asher Fair
If the NASCAR Cup Series championship turns out a certain way, Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar will see a sweep that hasn’t been pulled off since 1957.
Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden secured his second IndyCar championship in the 2019 season finale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca two Sundays ago, as he won his maiden title in his first season driving for Team Penske back in 2017.
Meanwhile, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport’s Lewis Hamilton is well on his way to securing what would be his sixth Formula 1 championship with just five races remaining on the 21-race schedule.
Through the season’s first 16 races, Hamilton has been victorious on nine occasions, and he has a 73-point lead over teammate Valtteri Bottas in second place in the driver standings. With a maximum of 26 points available for each driver in each race, this deficit is all but insurmountable, and it is really a matter of when, not if, Hamilton becomes a six-time champion.
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Assuming Hamilton clinches this championship at some point in the near future, how the NASCAR Cup Series championship plays out will determine whether or not Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar experience a sweep that has not been pulled off since 1957.
As stated above, Newgarden won the 2017 IndyCar championship. The 2017 Formula 1 season was also one of the five seasons in which Hamilton won the title.
In the 2017 Cup Series season, it was Furniture Row Racing’s Martin Truex Jr. who won the championship. Truex now drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, and he opened up the four-round, 10-race playoffs with two consecutive victories. He now has a series-high six victories through the 36-race season’s first 29 races; no other driver has more than four.
If Truex wins the 2019 championship, Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar will have the same champions this year as they did in 2017.
Only one time have the champions in all three series matched in two separate seasons.
The only time this happened was in the 1956 and 1957 seasons. On the IndyCar side, it was Jimmy Bryan who won the championships in both years. On the NASCAR side, it was Buck Baker, and on the Formula 1 side, it was Juan Manuel Fangio.
It hasn’t happened since then, but the driver of the #19 Toyota Camry has the opportunity to change that over the course of the next seven weekends.
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Will Martin Truex Jr. win the 2019 NASCAR Cup Series championship to finish off a sweep across Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar that hasn’t been pulled off since 1957? The Championship 4, for which Truex remains one of the favorites to qualify, is scheduled to take place on Sunday, November 17 at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Florida.