The 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season is in the books, with Kyle Larson becoming the first driver to win back-to-back championships since Jimmie Johnson won five straight from 2006 to 2010.
After a winless regular season, Larson found a new gear in the 10-race Chase postseason, winning three times to put himself in position to clinch his third title in the first stage of the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
He described it as "anticlimactic" himself, and he admitted afterward that he began "driving like an idiot" once he had already become the sport's 11th driver to win at least three titles. Yet at one point during the regular season, his odds to win the title were +3500, so the championship fight was anything but straightforward.
The countdown to the 2027 season is on, and there are 36 drivers who will be aiming to keep Larson from earning a three-peat. Can he stay on top? Here are three drivers poised to take a step back next year.
Kyle Larson, Hendrick Motorsports
If you look at Kyle Larson's regular season in 2026, it wasn't nearly as bad as advertised. He led a ton of laps and was a contender in several races that simply didn't go his way.
For as much as his 10-race Chase postseason was made to out to be one of the great championship runs since NASCAR added any kind of postseason format in 2004, you could argue it was really just the law of averages finally going his direction after he couldn't previously catch a break.
Hendrick Motorsports obviously did take a significant step forward during those 10 races, evidenced not just by Larson's success but by William Byron's late-season surge, one that would have generated tons of added publicity had NASCAR still been using the Championship 4 format.
But there's a reason no driver had won back-to-back titles in nearly two decades, and there's a reason there has been just one three-peat since the 1970s. If anybody can win a third straight, it's Larson, who has proven himself as this generation's top driver. But should we really expect another generational postseason run? Anything less than the Bill France Cup for the two-time reigning champion would be considered a disappointment at this point.
Denny Hamlin, Joe Gibbs Racing
Part of me firmly believes that Denny Hamlin will get the send-off he's spoken about for years. He'll have no need to retire early just because he wants to go out on top, as he'll finally become a Cup Series champion in what has long been expected to be his final season.
The other part of me looks at the fact that he didn't win a single race over the final four and a half months of the 2026 season. The other seven drivers in the top eight in the standings all won at least one postseason race, whereas Hamlin entered the postseason already on a win drought of nearly three months. And that drought extended.
He deserves credit for actually managing to extend his full-season points lead during that stretch (even during the postseason, despite fans and the media predictably labeling his championship loss a "choke"), but as we saw with vintage Larson, it's going to take more than just a string of top 10 finishes to win a championship under this new Chase format.
Unless Hamlin, and really all of Joe Gibbs Racing, can recapture their form from late spring and early summer, that's going to be a tall task. His average finish of 8.9, by far the best of the Next Gen era, was more than three full spots better than any other driver in 2026, yet he still only finished third.
Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing
Tyler Reddick would be the first person to tell you that his historic start to the 2026 season had a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. He became the first driver in the 78-year history of the Cup Series to win three races in a row to start a season, and that run included two superspeedway wins and a road course win.
He then somehow won at Darlington Raceway, despite a battery issue, and won at Kansas Speedway following a late restart, after the race's only non-stage-ending caution happened as Hamlin was about to take the white flag as the leader. The Kansas win gave him five in nine races to start the year.
He led more than 10 laps in just three of those five wins.
Reddick did add a sixth victory six months later at Phoenix Raceway, which was a good sign for a team that and driver that had historically struggled at that particular track. But if there were ever a case of regression to the mean, it was the post-April stretch of Reddick's 2026 season. Another six-win season in 2027 feels like a massive stretch.
Fox is set to provide live coverage of the 2027 NASCAR Cup Series season-opening 69th annual Daytona 500 from Daytona International Speedway on Sunday, February 21.
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