Streak shakers: Where Cup race winners could snap year-plus skids

Ross Chastain ended a winless streak that spanned 42 NASCAR Cup Series races with a convincing triumph Sunday night at Nashville Superspeedway. According to Racing Insights, nine other former Cup winners who are carrying winless streaks of a year or more are aiming to follow Chastain's lead. Here's a rundown of those nine drivers, in order of their most recent win, plus a projection of where they might return to Victory Lane this season.

AJ Allmendinger

Winless streak: 36
Most recent win: Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, Aug. 15, 2021
Potential streak-ender: Watkins Glen. Four road courses remain on the back half of the Cup Series schedule, and Allmendinger is a threat to win at each of them. Here's the nod that points toward The Glen, site of the Kaulig Racing driver's first Cup win (2014) and where he was runner-up just last year.

Daniel Suárez

Winless streak: 37
Most recent win: Sonoma Raceway, June 12, 2022
Potential streak-ender: Michigan. Suárez's lone top-five finish this season came at Auto Club's similar, sweeping 2-mile layout, and the Irish Hills have been kind to the Trackhouse Racing driver in the past. Suárez notched his first Xfinity Series win there in 2016.

Alex Bowman

Winless streak: 42
Most recent win: Las Vegas Motor Speedway, March 6, 2022
Potential streak-ender: Kansas. Bowman's last victory came on a 1.5-mile track, and another intermediate might suit him even better than Vegas. Kansas rates among his career's top five in average finish, and he led a season-best 107 laps there last season before finishing fourth.

Chase Briscoe

Winless streak: 49
Most recent win: Phoenix Raceway, March 13, 2022
Potential streak-ender: Indianapolis road course. This Hoosier has fond feelings for his home-state track, where he won in the Xfinity Series in 2020. He's shown speed at Indy's twistier layout on the Cup Series side, too, starting second and third in the last two years and famously contending with Denny Hamlin for the win before a penalty knocked him down the finishing order.

Austin Cindric

Winless streak: 52
Most recent win: Daytona International Speedway, Feb. 20, 2022
Potential streak-ender: Indianapolis road course. Cindric's road-racing skills are a solid character trait, and he shares a penchant for Indy with Briscoe. Cindric hasn't finished outside of the top 10 in four national series starts there, and he was the runner-up to Tyler Reddick in last year's Brickyard event.

Aric Almirola

Winless streak: 67
Most recent win: New Hampshire Motor Speedway, July 18, 2021
Potential streak-ender: Daytona. The 2023 campaign has been a tough road thus far for Almirola, who sits 27th in the Cup Series standings. The SHR driver still could vault into the playoffs with a victory in the regular-season finale at Daytona, where he won a 150-mile qualifying race back in February.

Brad Keselowski

Winless streak: 79
Most recent win: Talladega Superspeedway, April 25, 2021
Potential streak-ender: Atlanta. The highest-ranked driver on this list in the Cup Series points, Keselowski has demonstrated significant improvement in his second year at the helm of RFK Racing as a driver-owner. Several tracks stand out as potential ripe spots (Talladega, New Hampshire and Bristol among them), but a return to Victory Lane feels like it's a sooner-than-later proposition. Here's a vote for Atlanta, where he led in the late going in March until a last-lap pass by Joey Logano foiled his bid.

Justin Haley

Winless streak: 86
Most recent win: Daytona International Speedway, July 7, 2019
Potential streak-ender: Talladega. Superspeedways have been the host to all of Haley's victories in the Cup and Xfinity Series. His Daytona victory in just his third Cup Series start four years ago rated as an underdog stunner, but his season sweep at Talladega on the Xfinity side in 2020 helped to establish his bonafides when it comes to the aerodynamic draft.

Michael McDowell

Winless streak: 88
Most recent win: Daytona International Speedway, Feb. 14, 2021
Potential streak-ender: Daytona. McDowell possesses a strong road-course skillset, but the Florida high banks have yielded top-10 finishes in a third of his Cup Series starts there (8 of 24). A win there in August would not match the prestige of his 2021 Daytona 500 win, but it would give McDowell his second taste of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.