Front Row Motorsports announced on Friday that the organization has re-signed Noah Gragson, cementing the team will field the same three-man driver lineup for the third consecutive year in 2027.
Gragson is 31st in Cup Series points while his two teammates are 23rd and 24th. Meanwhile, Layne Riggs has won five races for Front Row's Craftsman Truck Series team this season and leads the points by a billion. With Cup drivers excluded from running the Truck playoff races, he might end up having a 2025 Corey Heim-esque stat-line by the time it's all over.
It's a completely indefensible decision, and funding isn't an excuse. But let's also make sure we lay the blame where it needs to be laid: directly at the feet of Rob Kauffman.
Charters have stagnated the NASCAR Cup Series field, and this is only the latest example
Front Row isn't the only Cup Series team that's pitifully content with mediocrity. Richard Childress Racing might give Austin Hill a full season next year when he shouldn't have even been the full-time choice to finish out this one. Kaulig Racing might give Ty Dillon a third year. Oh, and Cody Ware is still around for as long as he wants to be, too.
In a proper world, all of these teams would be forced to aim higher. And that's the way it used to be in the 1990s and 2000s. Back then, teams didn't even wait until the offseason to make changes. If you weren't cutting it, you could be out any given week, especially when the threat of failing to qualify for races came into play.
But not with charters around, where 36 teams are locked in every week and have no incentive to actually care about their performance. We've reached a point where the only times we see a roster change are if a driver retires or if a team shuts down and sells its assets.
Not only has this enabled longer leashes for underachievers, but drivers who deserve better opportunities can't find them. Ross Chastain is completely stuck at Trackhouse. Erik Jones is in Year 6 at Legacy Motor Club. Then there are those like Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Year 7 at Hyak Motorsports) and Todd Gilliland (Year 5 at Front Row), where it's impossible to tell how good they really are, because their situations never change.
There is certainly such a thing as too much movement. We see this in most other sports today, where a star will be traded or a coach will be fired because a team's season was so disappointing that all they could manage was a lowly Conference Finals appearance. We don't need that. But NASCAR has the opposite problem.
30th place drivers shouldn't be keeping their rides for years on end. And yet here we are. Thanks, charters!
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