NASCAR: 2019 non-winners starting off 2020 hot

Grant Enfinger and Noah Gragson both won zero races in the 2019 NASCAR season. They both won at Daytona International Speedway to open up the 2020 season.

ThorSport Racing’s Grant Enfinger may have won the 2019 regular season NASCAR Truck Series championship, but he did not win any of the 23 races on the schedule.

Entering the 2020 season, his most recent win, which was the second of his career, came back in September of 2018 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

But he changed that in the 2020 season opener at Daytona International Speedway, winning by just one hundredth of a second over Jordan Anderson Racing’s Jordan Anderson.

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Anderson also did not win a race last year; in fact, he doesn’t have any Truck Series wins in his career. Neither do third, fourth and fifth place finishers Codie Rohrbaugh, Derek Kraus and Natalie Decker of Grant County Mulch Racing, McAnally-Hilgemann Racing and Niece Motorsports, respectively.

Each of the top five finishers in this 106-lap race around the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) high-banked superspeedway oval in Daytona Beach, Florida recorded a career-best finish. The highest finisher who did not was Hattori Racing Enterprises’ Austin Hill, who won the race last year and finished in sixth place this year.

This trend continued in the Xfinity Series. JR Motorsports’ Noah Gragson went all of his rookie season last year without a win en route to an eighth place finish in the championship standings. But as the fourth highest finisher from a year ago to return to the series in 2020, he entered the year as one of the primary candidates to get his first win.

He did just that in the 120-lap season opener, and he did it by beating two other drivers who not only didn’t win last year but have never won. Joe Gibbs Racing rookie Harrison Burton, who did make nine starts a year ago, finished in a career-high second place, and MBM Motorsports’ Timmy Hill, who isn’t even a full-time driver, finished in a career-high third.

The highest finisher who did not record a career-high finish was Joe Gibbs Racing’s Brandon Jones, who earned his first career victory at Kansas Speedway in October of last year. He finished in fourth place to start his season off strong.

Will this trend continue in tomorrow afternoon’s Daytona 500?

The 2019 Cup Series season saw 12 different winners. The four playoff drivers who failed to win were Stewart-Haas Racing teammates Clint Bowyer and Aric Almirola, Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron and Roush Fenway Racing’s Ryan Newman.

Of those four drivers, only Byron still hasn’t won a Cup Series race. Bowyer and Almirola most recently won in 2018 while Newman most recently won in 2017.

In total, there are 40 drivers slated to compete in the 200-lap season opener, and 20 of them have previously found victory lane in the Cup Series. Of these 40 drivers, 34 are full-time drivers, and 19 of those 34 full-time drivers have been victorious.

If the Truck Series and Xfinity Series season openers taught us anything, it’s that these numbers could very well change, and there are plenty of candidates who could very well contribute to changing them.

We could also see several other drivers vying for career-high finishes inside the top five given how unpredictable the opening weekend as been thus far. Plus, everybody knows that anything can happen at Daytona with how close the racing is and how common huge late wrecks are.

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The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season is scheduled to get underway at 2:30 p.m. ET tomorrow. The 62nd annual Dayton 500 is set to be broadcast live on Fox from Daytona International Speedway.

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