While the argument that "parity is dead" and the usual suspects are back on top has been a go-to for NASCAR fans in 2026, the ongoing struggles of Hendrick Motorsports go to show just the opposite.
It's no secret that this has been Rick Hendrick's team's slowest start since 2018, another season in which Chevrolet introduced a new car body.
All Chevrolet teams not named Spire Motorsports have taken an apparent step back to start 2026, aside from Shane van Gisbergen carrying Trackhouse Racing to the usual road course dominance simply because nobody else can currently hold a candle to what he's doing on tracks with both left and right turns.
Hendrick Motorsports' struggles more concerning than they seem?
Reigning series champion Kyle Larson, who is riding a five-season streak of at least three victories, hasn't won in over a year and finds himself in an uncharacteristic eighth in the point standings, 55 points above the playoff cut line.
He led the team at Watkins Glen International in the series' most recent points race, but he did so with a 23rd place finish, marking a new low point for the struggling organization.
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William Byron, who himself has won multiple races in four straight years and was the only driver to qualify for each of the final three Championship 4s of the previous playoff era, is 12th, just 32 points to the good.
Sure, Alex Bowman missed four races due to vertigo, but even with recent back-to-back third place finishes, his points per race average of the year is only good for 28th in the series; he'd still be 93 points below the cut line with that average.
The lone bright spot has been Chase Elliott, who has won two races earlier than he had ever managed in any of his first 10 seasons in the series. However, his win at Martinsville Speedway came down to pure strategy, after he didn't score a single stage point. Still, he's third in points, simply because he knows how to get the most out of his equipment and take care of it at the same time.
For a traditional powerhouse, it's not a great look across the board. Yet in reality, it's arguably even worse than it looks.
Take away stage points, and Larson is only 13th in the standings, just 22 points inside the top 16, and he's behind three Chevrolet drivers excluding those within his own team.
Byron would be slightly higher than his actual position in 11th, but only three markers ahead of Larson. Bowman would only be 31st, and that's even if he had he run all 12 races and maintained his current average throughout the four he missed.
Let's add some perspective. RFK Racing's Ryan Preece hasn't finished higher than eighth all year. He's still five positions (not points) higher than Larson in this category.
The bright spot, again, is Elliott, who would be second. Even if he hadn't won at Martinsville, he'd be third, which is a testament to how his style of not overdriving the race car fits under the new format, a format which places a greater emphasis on points than it does wins.
But we're not done with Larson and Byron, two perennial championship contenders, just yet.
Larson is second in the series in laps led. But the majority of those laps led came at Bristol Motor Speedway. And if Ryan Blaney had anywhere close to even an average pit crew, Larson leads nowhere near as many laps, and his tally for the season is far less inflated.
His average finish of 17.3 is his worst since 2015, and it's a series-worst eight positions worse than his average starting position.
So again, while his eighth place position in the point standings is alarming in itself, there actually might even be more cause for concern than that alone would appear to indicate.
As for Byron, he's led fewer laps than Corey Heim, who has made three starts all year in a part-time, non-chartered fourth Toyota for 23XI Racing. His average starting position and finishing position are his worst since 2020, and he's on pace to lead fewer laps than he's led in any season since his rookie year, when he missed the playoffs and finished 23rd in points.
Sure, every great driver has, at some point, gone on a lengthy win drought. So in that way, overreacting to Larson's now one-year drought is just that: an overreaction.
But Hendrick Motorsports doesn't have a win outside the No. 9 camp since early August 2025, and while Elliott has won three times since then, even he had endured back-to-back win droughts of over a year in a span of under three years, prior to winning at Atlanta Motor Speedway in late June.
And let's not pretend that any of those other metrics pertaining to his teammates indicate any particular kind of imminent turnaround, either.
The good news is that, after the team's early 2018 struggles, they did turn it around. The bad news is that they only turned it around with Elliott, who accounted for all three of their victories, the first three of his career, that year. Bowman didn't get his first win until 2019, and Byron didn't until 2020. Elliott won eight more races and a championship across those two seasons, and Larson arrived in 2021.
At this point, with Carson Hocevar and Daniel Suarez sitting seventh and ninth in the purely results-based standings, it's not a stretch to suggest that Spire Motorsport currently find themselves as the sport's top Chevrolet team.
And this is team with one total win over the past six and a half years.
While we don't doubt Hendrick Motorsports' ability to turn things around and retake that spot at some point, that turnaround needs to happen sooner rather than later.
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