Turning Point: Josh Berry … Cup Series championship contender?

Here’s what’s happening in the world of NASCAR with Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the rearview and Homestead-Miami Speedway (Sun., 3 p.m. ET, FS1) up next.

THE LINEUP

1️⃣ Josh Berry is a Cup Series winner, but is he also a title contender?

2️⃣ Are we entering the Kyle Larson portion of the schedule?

3️⃣ Don’t call Berry’s Las Vegas win ‘lucky’ — he isn’t

4️⃣ Longtime tracks with no first-time winners

5️⃣ Catch the pack — news and notes from around the garage

1. Josh Berry is a Cup Series winner — is he also a title contender?

Team Penske has won three straight Cup Series championships, but its satellite teammate for Wood Brothers Racing, Josh Berry, just locked up his provisional playoff spot before all three of its drivers. Does he have a championship chance?

Wood Brothers Racing, no stranger to lengthy winless droughts in its 75 years of racing at NASCAR’s highest level, has now won two of the past 17 Cup Series races. Each victory put the winning driver — first Harrison Burton, now Josh Berry — squarely in the playoff picture. Each was an uber-popular win in the garage, seeing a well-liked driver land in Victory Lane for the first time in the premier series for arguably NASCAR’s most legendary team.

Each victory felt, however, distinctly different.

Berry’s win Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway marked a significant milestone not just for him, but also for the Wood Bros. The team now has its driver secured in the provisional playoff field just five weeks in and, notably, before its alignment partner in Team Penske — which has dominated the championship scene with three consecutive titles — has landed any of its drivers in it. Defending champ Joey Logano, though running well, hasn’t even secured his first top 10. Once again, for good measure because it’s still settling in: Josh Berry is penciled into the 2025 playoffs.

This isn’t to take anything away from Harrison Burton’s epic win at Daytona International Speedway to claim his first playoff spot last summer, but Berry’s Vegas achievement — fresh off a top-five at Phoenix last week, too — raises an intriguing question: Does he have a legitimate shot at the championship?

MORE: Full Homestead weekend schedule | Cup Series entry list

From competing in NASCAR’s Weekly Series to winning races in the Xfinity Series, Berry has consistently demonstrated his ability to adapt and succeed at higher levels. A squandered rookie season in the final throes of Stewart-Haas Racing perhaps lowered his stock a bit, but he was quite recently a very sought-after talent, and it’s possible WBR landed a hidden gem set to make an immediate shift to the title picture.

Through just the first five races with Berry as its driver, the Wood Bros. have achieved their most top fives since 2002 and most laps led (74) since 1982. Berry accounts for two of Ford’s five top-five finishes in 2025, including the only win, underscoring his importance to the manufacturer’s efforts as well. The team has now won in consecutive seasons for the first time since 1986-87, and it feels entirely possible Berry will give the team its first season with multiple wins since Neil Bonnett achieved it in 1981. Whereas Burton’s victory was more of a “one-hit wonder” — he’s now racing in the Xfinity Series just a handful of months after being a Cup playoff driver — Berry has fans already lining up to buy his next proverbial album.

Having access to championship-capable resources certainly doesn’t hurt, either. Being as ingrained with Penske as the Wood Brothers are is only going to further help elevate a No. 21 Ford program that has struggled to find its identity over the past few decades to solidify its foundation and build up from there. If Logano (who is just a handful of months older than Berry) and Ryan Blaney and Austin Cindric (who are both three-plus years younger) have paths to the title, so now does Berry.

The flip side, of course, is that, again, it’s only been five races. Speed and strong finishes at both Phoenix and Vegas, two incredibly important spring stops, with both being pivotal playoff tracks, portends a positive outlook for the rest of the season, yes. But can he sustain this level of performance to become a genuine championship contender over the coming months?

Good luck finding any reasons why he can’t because the list is lengthy and growing for why he can.

Christopher Bell’s three-race winning streak may have ended at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, but it feels like another dominant stretch might just be getting started.

No, not at the hands of Josh Berry (though the way he’s running, who can rule it out?) — but Bell’s friendly rival Kyle Larson, who was dominant at Las Vegas and in position to win before things went haywire toward the end.

The upcoming tracks are extremely favorable to the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series champion, and it would be a legitimate shock not to see Larson grab his first 2025 win by the time we hit Talladega Superspeedway in late April.

No. 5 already showed flashes of brilliance at Vegas, where the 32-year-old became the all-time laps-led leader at the track. Homestead-Miami Speedway, however, presents another opportunity to cash in — and one tailor-made for Larson’s skillset. Known for putting control in drivers’ hands more than most tracks, Homestead rewards those who can run high against the wall and manage tire wear over long runs. Few drivers excel in these conditions like Larson, who has consistently demonstrated his ability to do all of the above in crucial moments.

Larson’s 626 laps led at Homestead are also more than any other driver, and it’s a track he’ll almost definitely add more wins than the one he collected there in 2022. If you were to ask any driver in the garage who the guy to beat there is, a nary few would say anybody other than the California native.

Homestead isn’t just a one-off opportunity for him, though; it continues a stretch where we should get used to seeing a lot of blue and white paint zooming by at the front of the field. Martinsville Speedway follows Homestead on the schedule, and it’s a track that has blossomed beautifully for him since joining Hendrick Motorsports. The winner of this race in 2023, Larson has led 30 or more laps in five of the last seven races there for a whopping 332 laps total in that span.

From there comes Darlington Raceway, which often rewards aggressive yet precise driving — a hallmark of Larson’s style, of course — and a track where he won in 2023, had three straight runner-ups from 2019-21 and led 263 of 367 laps last fall. Hard to think he won’t be the favorite heading into this one, too.

And if that’s not enough, this stretch ends with what Larson himself deems to be his “favorite” stop on the schedule: Bristol Motor Speedway. How good is Larson at the Tennessee track? Tremendously. He’s won two of the past five races there — all of which were top fives — and his 462 laps led in last fall’s victory were, to put it into context, more than recently retired future Hall of Famer Martin Truex Jr. had there in his career … across 35 races.

Never one to put the cart before the horse, Larson demurred a bit when asked about this favorable stretch on Wednesday during a teleconference with reporters.

“I mean, you get excited about it, but I don’t know. I just feel like with experience, you don’t go into races with too much confidence, I feel like. You just try to go there and prepare well and try to execute good on the weekends,” said the 29-time Cup winner. “So yeah, they’re good tracks for us with good history, results and stuff, but you can’t let past results just let you be so content that you don’t work still. A lot of discipline goes into our weeks and studying, and it’s no different for any of the good tracks we have coming up, or even the tracks that we feel like we struggle at beyond those.”

Still, the timing couldn’t be better for Larson. Bell’s historic three-race streak hit a crescendo, Berry’s victory felt like a wake-up call to the rest of the series and other top contenders like Logano are still searching for consistency. Larson has an opportunity to seize control of the narrative heading into summer and could start to really separate himself from the field over the next month as he begins to set his eyes on the Regular Season Championship.

None of this will come as a surprise to the rest of the garage — it’s no secret that he’s an all-world talent capable of ripping off a winning streak at almost any time. But he’ll be looking to capitalize in the immediate future in this “Kyle Larson Portion” of the schedule (it’s worth noting that he has an average finish of 17.7 or worse at three of the four points-paying tracks following Bristol), and it remains to be seen if anybody will be able to hold him winless over the next four weeks.

But it sure doesn’t feel like he will be.