Turning Point: Hendrick’s dominance, pinpointing a Penske breakthrough

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

THE LINEUP

1️⃣ Will all four Hendrick drivers sit atop standings after Martinsville?

2️⃣ When and where will Team Penske capitalize on early speed?

3️⃣ Jeff Gordon on Hendrick’s pursuit of ‘victories and perfection’

4️⃣ Ryan Blaney and Denny Hamlin among best ever at Martinsville

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

1. Will all four Hendrick drivers sit atop standings after Martinsville?

Kyle Larson’s battle with teammate Alex Bowman to capture the second win in six races for Hendrick Motorsports continued to show the team’s dominance as the championship organization takes control of the Cup Series standings.

The last time Hendrick Motorsports raced at Martinsville Speedway in the spring, it left the Virginia short track with a 1-2-3 on the results sheet. Come Sunday night, the winningest team in NASCAR history might be looking at a 1-2-3-4 sweep of its driver corps atop the Cup Series standings.

With fellow top-tier organizations Team Penske and Joe Gibbs Racing shining in spots but struggling to maintain consistent footing throughout the season’s first month and a half, the power vacuum has been enthusiastically filled by Hendrick’s quartet. The core four of Daytona 500 winner William Byron and Homestead winner Kyle Larson, alongside Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott, have established a tier of dominance atop the Cup Series standings, currently occupying spots 1-2-3-6, respectively.

The 2020 champ Elliott is the low man there in sixth, but he’s just nine points short of being fourth on the board — as the series now heads to a track type he arguably had a better handle on than any other driver in 2024. No. 9 is currently riding a career-best, seven-race top-10 streak on short tracks, with the next closest drivers (Larson and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin) only at three apiece. He’s particularly great at Martinsville, with his 1,233 laps led there being the most he has at any track and more than double the amount at No. 2 (Phoenix, 553).

MORE: Full Martinsville weekend schedule | Cup Series entry list

Elliott also owns the distinction of having run the most laps in the top five at Martinsville in the Next Gen (1,645) by a healthy margin (Hamlin, 1,485). It’s not just him who dominates, though; Larson has run the most laps in the top 10 in the Next Gen (2,125) and sports a bonkers 2.8 average finish in the last five Martinsville races after averaging a 20.5 in the 15 previous races. Something has clicked for him there, and it’s bad news for everybody else.

The two drivers separating the Hendrick contingent in spots four and five — Tyler Reddick and Christopher Bell — are both capable of winning this weekend, but notably have combined for just five top 10s across 20 Martinsville starts. It feels safe to predict Elliott is likely to make up those nine points on them this Sunday; it’s then more just a matter of whether the other three maintain their pace.

Hendrick has won five of the last nine Martinsville races, with all four of its drivers winning at least once. Perhaps even more crucially, the team has yet to lose a spring race there in the Next Gen era.

Heading into the weekend, every other team in the garage must feel like they’re standing at the base of Mount Everest, just staring up in bewilderment at the journey ahead. Toppling Hendrick Motorsports this weekend won’t be impossible, but it’ll be a heck of a climb for anybody who wants to get there.

RELATED: Hendrick Motorsports finds itself in enviable early-season position

They say “it’s better to be lucky than good,” and in the case of Team Penske’s first six races of 2025, truer words have never been spoken.

The trio of Fords driven by three-time and defending champ Joey Logano, 2023 title winner Ryan Blaney and 2022 Daytona 500 winner Austin Cindric have shown exceptional front-of-the-field potential this year, topping the series with 247, 147 and 159 laps led, respectively, each being a 2025 stage winner for four total among them.

And what do they have to show for it? Next to nothing, with exactly zero race wins and Blaney the highest among them in the standings in 10th. Logano, fresh off locking up and throwing away the key on his Hall of Fame case with a third Cup title, doesn’t even have a top 10 yet. Blaney, first in passing and fourth in speed for the season per NASCAR Insights, is riding the longest DNF-streak of his career after retiring early in each of the last three weeks.

All of that is about to be flipped on its head, with Penske being perhaps so good that luck doesn’t even enter the equation.

While the team obviously, as alluded to above, will likely have its hands full working on ways to outcompete Hendrick on Sunday, it does have arguably the driver to beat at the track in its stable in Blaney, who has outclassed the field under an intense amount of pressure with clutch wins there to make the Championship 4 each of the past two seasons. Despite Hendrick winning each spring race in the Next Gen era, Blaney has the best average finish overall there in this car (3.5), and it’s easy to see him whittling that down further on Sunday, given how fast he’s been. Also worth noting: He’s always been good there, with his 8.3 average Martinsville finish in his Cup career best among active drivers.

Assuming no calamity — which you shouldn’t do for Martinsville, of course, but for the sake of the analysis here, we will — all three of them will have a shot at finally harnessing the speed that continues to show up on Saturdays and for half of Sundays before they’re left collectively scratching their heads by Sunday evening.

MORE: Team Penske searches for results indicative of speed

Logano’s 11 straight top 10s at Martinsville is the longest active top 10 streak at the track and his longest streak anywhere. He’s also finished sixth or better in five of the last six races there, and the first top-10 run of the year for a driver who has finished all 32 of his Martinsville starts feels like a near-certainty this weekend.

The 26-year-old Cindric’s Martinsville history obviously is not as deep as his veteran teammates, but he did turn in his best run there yet (fourth) in his sixth start last November, with both of his two career short-track top 10s coming there and each in the last three races.

The first stretch of the season has undoubtedly been a frustrating one for the back-to-back-to-back Cup championship-winning organization, but with that amount of speed on a consistent basis, it’s only a matter of time before things take a turn for the better and the sun starts shining again.

And it’s looking like it’ll finally be a bright, sunshiney day for Team Penske this weekend in Virginia.