During the first four years of NASCAR's Next Gen era, one of the most common complaints about the car was that it led to too much parity among drivers and teams.
No driver won more than six races in a season from 2022 to 2025, after every single season from 2017 to 2021 had produced at least one seven-race winner, highlighted by Kyle Larson's championship-winning 10-win season to cap off the Gen 6 era.
NASCAR legend Richard Petty even said before the 2026 season that the Cup Series lacked a "fox for the dogs to chase".
Ignoring the fact that the equal nature of the cars actually did, in some respect, allow the driver to be the one to make the difference, and therefore the aforementioned parity was not necessarily a flaw prohibiting the cream from rising to the top but a lack of cream itself, the 2026 season has already laid this narrative to bed.
Tyler Reddick is the fox the dogs can't catch
Through nine races, 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick has found victory lane five times, on five very different tracks, to open up a massive lead in the point standings.
He won at a superspeedway in Daytona International Speedway, a pseudo-superspeedway in EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta Motor Speedway), a road course in Circuit of the Americas (COTA), a unique 1.366-mile oval in Darlington Raceway, and a standard, cookie-cutter mile-and-a-half oval in Kansas Speedway.
Of those five tracks, Kansas was the only one where he had previously won. He did win at COTA before, but that was on an alternate layout.
The first driver in the 78-year history of the Cup Series to win three straight races to start a season is just one victory away from tying the Next Gen single-season wins record of six, and he is scheduled to have 27 chances over the course of the next seven months to do it.
Looks like the Cup Series has its fox, and all of a sudden the idea that nobody can separate himself from the dogs in the Next Gen era is out the window.
Now, of course, fans are complaining that the same guy keeps winning almost every week, and that the races supposedly aren't worth watching; Reddick has won all five race's he's led.
We saw similar complaints when Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch combined for 16 wins in 2018, and when Harvick and Denny Hamlin combined for 17 in 2020.
In an era where many NASCAR fans on social media are convinced that anything that seems remotely convenient for anybody at any given time is rigged, did you expect anything less this time around?
Sure, there are still plenty of flaws with the Next Gen car, even if those issues are nowhere near as problematic as those in the artificial Mario Kart-inspired series currently taking place across the pond.
Yet Reddick has completely laid to rest this overblown idea that everybody is equal in this Gen 7 era and that the cream is incapable of rising to the top.
The real question now appears to be whether Reddick can top Larson's Gen 6 record and Jimmie Johnson's Gen 5 "Car of Tomorrow" record of 10 victories (2007).
Can he make it six wins in 10 races at Talladega Superspeedway, where he won two years ago, and extend his superspeedway win streak to three? Sunday's Jack Link's 500 is set to be shown live on Fox beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET. Start a free trial of FuboTV and don't miss it!
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