The first quarter of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season was an incredible one for Joe Gibbs Racing. After new arrival Chase Briscoe scored a fourth-place finish in the opener at Daytona International Speedway, Christopher Bell drove the No. 20 car to Victory Lane in each of the next three races. A few weeks later, Briscoe and Denny Hamlin both finished inside the top five at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and then Hamlin won back-to-back races at Martinsville Speedway and Darlington Raceway. Finally, JGR wrapped up the initial stretch of the calendar with all four drivers in the top eight at Bristol Motor Speedway: Hamlin second, Ty Gibbs third, Briscoe fourth and Bell eighth.
But as soon as the 2025 schedule turned from the first quarter to the second, the JGR drivers haven’t been as hot — at least, unless we mean literally, in the case of Hamlin’s No. 11 car bursting into flames last weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. That led to a last-place finish for Hamlin, to go with Gibbs and Briscoe finishing outside the top 20, and it was on the heels of a Talladega race where none of the JGR cars finished any better than Briscoe at 15th. All of a sudden, the de facto co-best team of the first quarter — neck and neck with Hendrick Motorsports in my Adjusted Points+ index ratings (which rate every driver per race relative to a Cup average of 100) — has fallen among the worst of the three- or four-car teams to begin the second quarter:
The highs and lows of the 2025 season are unlike what we saw out of Gibbs a year ago, when each of their drivers finished at least 12 percent better than average (112 Pts+ or higher) per race in each of the first two quarters of the 2024 schedule, and the team as a whole was at least 50 percent above average in Quarters 1-2 of the year. In fact, in its entire 34-season history — stretching back to 1992 as a single-entry team with Dale Jarrett driving the Interstate Batteries No. 18 car — JGR has had only seven quarters with a below-average Pts+ index, and only one (Q1 of 2005) since 1995 as Tony Stewart’s elite start to that year was unable to cover for a mediocre early run by Bobby Labonte in the 18 and the many struggles of Jason Leffler, Terry Labonte and J.J. Yeley in the 11.
The good news for team Gibbs is the second quarter of 2025 (and beyond) is probably not going to end their streak of above-average performances by the time we reach midseason. This weekend at Kansas, a number of JGR drivers are projected among the highest Driver Ratings in the field, including Hamlin (third-best) and Bell (fifth-best), while Gibbs (13th-best) is predicted to be better than average. Briscoe (28th-best) may drag the average down as he carries a highly mediocre record at the track in his career — in eight starts, Briscoe has zero top 10s and an average finish of 21.5 — but the JGR group ought to be comfortably above average (81.4 projected Driver Rating) overall.
And it’s worth pointing out that, despite the rough stretch of finishes, the top-to-bottom quality of JGR’s drivers has been trending higher recently than earlier in the season. Here’s a race-by-race plot of each Gibbs driver’s rolling predicted Driver Rating at a “neutral” track, which tries to account for differences in driver talent at various track types (ovals, road courses, superspeedways, short tracks, etc.) to create an unbiased measure of overall skill:
Bell’s predicted performance has corrected some from the incredible highs he had during that early win streak, and Hamlin’s crash-and-burn at Texas hurt his rating some as well. However, Briscoe has been generally improving his expected performance as he’s logged more and more laps in the No. 19 car, to the point he now has the 15th-best average Driver Rating (76.6) of any Cup regular this season, which is on pace to surpass his previous career high of 71.5.
And maybe the most impressive thing that runs counter to JGR’s recent downturn in raw finishes is the ongoing improvement of Ty Gibbs in the No. 54 car. Gibbs had shown overall improvement last season, though he faded badly down the stretch. Then he began 2025 with a run of one top 20 (a 16th-place finish at Daytona) in his first six races. But ever since scoring a 13th-place finish at Martinsville, Gibbs has two top 10s, no finishes outside the top 25, an average finish of 13.0 and an 89.1 Driver Rating.
Obscured by the ups and downs of Bell and Hamlin, the improvements of Briscoe and Gibbs have caused JGR’s average predicted rating in the chart above to converge at a solid level of expected performance. There’s no doubt the Nos. 11 and 20 cars will be threats to win again, adding to their five combined wins in the early going — but it’s the steady ascent of the Nos. 19 and 54 that could ultimately raise the team’s floor and help reestablish it as the week-to-week juggernaut we saw earlier in the year after a rare hiccup in recent weeks.