For the 22 full-time Cup Series drivers who haven’t won a race yet in 2025, their playoff hopes basically come down to – one way or another – who wins Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway (7:30, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, Peacock).
This is true whether we’re talking about Tyler Reddick and Alex Bowman – who are both above the cutline, but one of whom would drop below it with a new winner – or the legions of drivers who sit below the line and need a victory as their only path to preserving a championship bid. The only way to feel safe Saturday is to take the checkered flag, and in that pursuit, Daytona has the potential to be either a cruel chaos agent or a miraculous lifeline, depending on how things shake out on the track.
We often talk about Daytona as though the results there are almost totally random, and certainly outcomes like Harrison Burton’s wild playoff clincher last year don’t exactly disprove the notion. But while it is statistically the most unpredictable track on the calendar, and Reddick and Bowman need to mentally prepare for someone to leapfrog them with a win, some drivers have always been able to “see the air” in the draft and manage pack-racing better than others. In fact, a number of them even reside below the cutline as dangerous dark-horse candidates this weekend.
So let’s dig into who the superspeedway specialists are right now, with a special emphasis on those names currently on the outside of the playoff picture who could win their way in. We’ll start by looking at which regular drivers set for Saturday’s field have the best Driver Rating (among other stats) at all drafting-style tracks – including not only Daytona, but also other similar tracks like Talladega and Atlanta – since the introduction of the Next Gen car in 2022:
Each of the top five drivers on the list (as well as seven of the top nine, and nine of the top 14) have already won races this year — Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott, Austin Cindric and two-time reigning Daytona 500 winner William Byron — which ought to make Reddick and Bowman feel a bit better, as there’s a decent chance the Coke Zero Sugar 400 victory will just go to someone who doesn’t even need it to lock into the playoffs. But given the way five of the past seven Daytona night race winners didn’t have a previous win already in the season, it’s certainly not a sure thing.
If a new winner emerges, it might be Kyle Busch, Bowman, Brad Keselowski, Chris Buescher or Ricky Stenhouse Jr., based on the superspeedway-racing stats in this current car. Busch and Buescher both have wins at superspeedway-type tracks since 2022, and Stenhouse has two victories of this sort in that span — the 2023 Daytona 500 and 2024 YellaWood 500 (Talladega). This would be the third consecutive season in which Stenhouse scored a drafting win if he comes through on Saturday. (Also, it’s generally worth noting Stenhouse has four career wins, and they’ve all come at superspeedways.) Bowman and Keselowski don’t have any of those in this generation, but both have finished top 10 roughly half the time in Next Gen drafting-style races — and of course, Keselowski has six Talladega wins and a Coke Zero Sugar 400 win in previous generations of Cup cars.
If not somebody from that group, the next-best candidates might be Reddick, Erik Jones, Todd Gilliland or Michael McDowell, who also have above-average Driver Ratings at superspeedways in this era. Reddick was not typically known as a drafting standout earlier in his career, but he won the 2024 GEICO 500 at Talladega and has generally been solid at these tracks the past few years. Jones, a former Daytona winner, has put together a string of fairly solid finishes, and the others have run better than their results — which can happen when the “Big One” threatens to ruin your night at any moment.
(Contrast that with Daniel Suárez, AJ Allmendinger and Carson Hocevar, who have worse Driver Ratings than their finishes might suggest, meaning they’ve benefited from the chaos around them — but that good fortune may not last.)
We can learn a lot about how Saturday night may go just by knowing our superspeedway-racing experts overall. But it’s also true Daytona runs with slight differences from those other drafting tracks. It’s narrower than the much wider berth you get at Talladega, for instance, and while Atlanta is now classified as a superspeedway-like track since its refit in 2021-22, it’s obviously much shorter than Daytona at 1.5 miles (instead of 2.5).
So what happens if we just filter down to Daytona races specifically during the Next Gen era? Here’s the same leaderboard, but just at the World Center of Racing:
Generally speaking, there isn’t much difference in the who’s-who of top performers when we cut our sample of tracks down to focus just on Daytona. For instance, Buescher and Busch are still among the best among 2025 non-winners, followed by Keselowski, Bowman and Stenhouse, who have been a bit less impressive at Daytona than the other drafting tracks — which accounts for their slightly lower placement on this second list — while Jones and McDowell have shined a bit more at Daytona specifically, fitting in the latter case for the 2021 Daytona 500 winner. And it might be worth keeping an extra eye on John Hunter Nemechek as your potential 2025 version of Harrison Burton, thanks to a pretty decent Daytona track record (albeit in a sample of just three races) despite his low placement in the standings overall.
Maybe just as big a question is this: Who punches below their weight at plate tracks? We can compare a driver’s rating at drafting-style tracks with his rating at all other tracks, and check who has a better rating in the former category than we’d expect from the latter:
Among 2025 non-winners, the top overperformers at superspeedways have been Stenhouse, Todd Gilliland, Busch, Jones, Bowman, Keselowski and Riley Herbst. And on the flip-side, the biggest underperformers are Reddick, Hocevar, Allmendinger, Cody Ware, Noah Gragson, Ty Gibbs, Cole Custer, Ty Dillon and Zane Smith.
That still doesn’t mean the second group can’t win — just that it might be more difficult for them to break through, or in the case of Reddick, maintain the advantage necessary to get in on points. But for the first group, it’s another indication that they might be dangerous threats to move the cutline and punch their ticket to the playoffs Saturday.
Because by the time the checkered flag waves after 400 miles, making it through the inevitable mayhem and simply keeping their playoff chances alive will take every edge these desperate drivers can get.