Bob Pockrass
FOX NASCAR Insider
On this list, there is no doubt who would top it.
It’s the driver who possibly has been beaten by your favorite driver in this one category. It’s the driver who has never beaten your favorite driver in this one category.
Winning a championship.
As the NASCAR Cup Series launches into the 2024 season with its first regular-season event, the Daytona 500, on Feb. 18 (2:30 p.m. ET on FOX), there are five drivers who have proven themselves as the most likely to earn their first Cup title in 2024.
And on the top of the list …
1. Denny Hamlin
Hamlin has won 51 Cup races. He has made the Championship 4 three times in the past five years (but not in 2022 and 2023). He has finished top-five in the standings nine times (including third in his rookie season).
But Hamlin has never won a Cup title.
Either someone is playing a cruel joke on him or it just isn’t meant to be or he is learning the virtue of patience. Granted, he fumbled away opportunities early in his career when trying to handle the pressure. And his team has made mistakes, too, in prime situations.
Hamlin has shown no inkling of slowing down. He has won 20 races over the past four years with 80 top-five finishes in 180 races, an incredible stat of 44 percent.
And still, again, he has come up short. The 43-year-old Hamlin doesn’t have all that many years left.
“I know with the team I’ve got and the abilities that I’ve got on short tracks, intermediates, superspeedways — there’s nothing missing in the DNA to get it done,” Hamlin said last year when he was eliminated in the playoffs.
“It’s just sometimes luck is not on your side, and with the format getting a smaller and smaller sample size, luck is a factor in it.”
He’ll hope that 2024 is the year. He opened with a victory at the Clash.
That victory came in the debut of a new body style for Toyota. Both Toyota and Ford have new body styles this year. He couldn’t tell too much from that race about the new body, but he said during the preseason that he had high hopes.
“This is the first car that we’ve really been working around the rules that we’ve got,” Hamlin said. “It was a collaboration between Toyota, JGR, 23XI [teams] — all those guys to come up with this and hopefully it’ll be better.”
‘You know I beat your favorite driver again right?’ — Denny Hamlin on winning the Clash
2. Christopher Bell
Hamlin’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate has advanced to the Championship 4 in each of the past two years.
He has come up short and the odds of making the Championship 4 for three consecutive years are good but not great. Hamlin, Chase Elliott, Martin Truex Jr., Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch have had three-year consecutive Champ 4 runs. Busch is the only driver with a longer streak at five consecutive years.
But a driver can’t expect to get there every year, right?
“Watch me,” Bell said when asked about that. “Watch me.”
Bell seriously expects to be there every year.
“I definitely feel that way at least for myself,” Bell said. “I don’t think that the media thinks that — they probably think I’m just another guy out there. But certainly for me, myself and the [JGR] 20 team, I believe that we should be in the Championship 4 every year.
“Circumstances are very hard to get there. So I’m proud of the fact that we’ve gotten there two years in a row, but I expect to be in that title contention every year.”
Last year, his bid for the title came up short when a broken brake rotor ended his day early.
“My frustration was all before the brake failure whenever I started losing pedal during the race and I knew that the race was slipping away,” Bell said. “That was when I was mad and frustrated.
“Once the part failed and we were out of the race, I was pretty content with what we accomplished in the season and was looking forward from that point. We have a lot ahead of us and a lot of things we haven’t accomplished ahead of us. We’re all eyes forward.”
Bell has six career wins (all in the last three years) as he enters his fifth full-time season. Bell won the truck series championship in 2017.
Christopher Bell on brake failure in Phoenix last year and looking forward to 2024
3. William Byron
Bell is a young driver at 29 years old, but the youngest on this list is Byron at age 26.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver enjoyed a breakout season in 2023 with six victories and a spot in the Championship 4. He had four wins over his first five Cup seasons and had never finished in the top five in the standings. Byron knows how to win a championship — he was the Xfinity Series champion as a rookie in the series in 2017.
“I feel a little chip on our shoulder because I feel like we didn’t get the credit we deserve,” Byron said. “We’re going to go out there and prove some more and hopefully win a bunch of races and run up front and just take it to everybody.”
The 2023 season as far as wins was Byron’s best season since 2016, when he won seven truck races, but a blown engine ruined his shot at the title. His crew chief then was Rudy Fugle, who now enters his fourth season as Byron’s crew chief on the Cup car at Hendrick.
Byron said the key is improving their short-track package.
“We had a good car at [the championship at] Phoenix, but knowing how to get speed out of it the entire race on those style tracks, we struggled to keep our pace up throughout the entire race,” Byron said.
William Byron says he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder for 2024
4. Ross Chastain
Chastain is 31 years old, but he is relatively new to the scene as what one would consider an elite Cup driver. Competing for underfunded teams until 2021, Chastain has four wins in the last two years at Trackhosue Racing.
He finished second in the standings in 2022 and failed to make the Champ 4 last season. But … he won the 2023 season finale at Phoenix, a sign that if he can make the Champ 4, he can win it as his finishes in the last two season finales at Phoenix are a second in 2022 and the win in 2023.
This is the first year Chastain can feel like a championship contender after two relatively solid back-to-back years.
“I do,” Chastain said when asked if he now feels like a championship contender.
Why?
“I don’t need many words [to explain],” Chastain said. “I know my group. I know our processes. As we continue to evolve, we sustained a second year, and we plan on a third year.
“All we ask for is a chance to contend, a chance to go compete. As long as we have chance, then I do.”
‘He just drove through us’ – Ross Chastain on conversation with Tyler Reddick after the Clash
5. Chris Buescher
Except for Hamlin, the 31-year-old Buescher has the most Cup experience on this list as he will make his 300th start in the seventh race of the season.
He enjoyed his best season in 2023 as he led RFK Racing with three victories and a seventh-place overall finish in points.
Can he really win it? Yes. Buescher is unflappable and won the last NASCAR national series title for Roush — in 2015 in the Xfinity Series.
Plus, he has enough experience to build on 2023. He said the key is having success earlier in the season. Last year, he won his first race in late July (as part of a run where he won three of five races to end the Cup regular season).
“Understanding that last year was very difficult and we were able to show that we’re ready for it, we’re capable of doing big things — it will be difficult to repeat,” Buescher said. “But we don’t want to repeat. We want to do better. Bring on the challenge.
“And I think the big thing for us is trying to take 2023 and use that as our floor and as our baseline to figure out where to go from there and how to make it make it better.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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