The 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season is nearly upon us, with the Clash at Bowman-Gray Stadium set for this coming weekend and the 67th running of the Daytona 500 on February 16th.
With that in mind, here are five bold predictions for how this year might play out.
It’s never worth it to try predicting a champion in today’s NASCAR, given the utter randomness of the championship race format. What’s usually much easier is picking the four drivers who will make it there, and with that in mind, let’s go with Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, Ryan Blaney, and… Ty Gibbs.
Gibbs is the bold call here, given that the third-year driver has yet to even win a single race in his Cup Series career. That will change this year, though. He has a new, rising crew chief in Tyler Allen, who found success with a multitude of drivers last season in the Xfinity Series. More importantly, though, Year Three has generally been the breakout year for other young stars of this generation. It was for Larson. It was for Chase Elliott. It was for Tyler Reddick. Gibbs is next in line, and driving for arguably the best team in the sport, he’ll have a shot to compete for a championship.
The NASCAR Cup Series schedule has never been more diverse than it is now, with five road courses and a street course accounting for one-sixth of the races on the calendar. There has also arguably never been a greater display of road racing drivers, given all the practice they get now, and for that reason, the ones deemed as “specialists” have regressed to the norm.
Everybody expected Shane van Gisbergen’s dominance on the road courses to continue after winning his series debut at the Chicago Street Race in 2023, and it didn’t happen. A.J. Allmendinger is also back full-time in the series this year, but at 43, his chances are running out. Both drivers will once again be shut out in the win column on the tracks with both left and right turns in 2025 — especially given that road racing prodigy Connor Zilisch is set to arrive at the top level.
One of the rising stars in NASCAR’s top series who seemingly doesn’t get enough attention is Carson Hocevar, likely because the team he drives for, Spire Motorsports, isn’t a proven powerhouse. Nevertheless, Hocevar beat the now-defunct Stewart-Haas Racing’s Josh Berry to capture Rookie of the Year honors in 2024, and both he and Spire are poised to take a step forward in 2025.
There will be no sophomore slump for Hocevar, and somewhere along the way, he’ll find Victory Lane for the first (but certainly not the last) time in his Cup Series career. Look for him to be most dangerous on tracks such as Darlington, Homestead, and Richmond, where he’s had success at the lower levels and run impressively in Cup.
In his third year in the Cup Series, Todd Gilliland was one of the most-improved drivers in 2024 as he went from 28th in points his first two seasons to 22nd. He should only take another step forward this season, as he’ll be moving into Front Row Motorsports’ flagship No. 34 car while having a new crew chief in Chris Lawson who has impressed at every stop.
It’s hard to say whether or not Gilliland will make the playoffs, since much of that will depend on how many winners there are in the season’s first 26 races, and he’s not the type of driver who tends to have dominant, win-contending upside. However, he’ll be consistent enough to compete for a spot on points, and if there’s not much chaos with winners from outside the playoff picture, don’t be surprised if he ends up in the 16-man field.
It’s been said for roughly the past five seasons that each year is Denny Hamlin’s final opportunity to win a Cup Series championship. Though the title has continued to elude him, he has remained among the top contenders in the series year in and year out — but that changes in 2025. Why? He has lost his golden goose in crew chief Chris Gabehart, the sole reason he wasn’t mired in mediocrity years ago.
It’s easy to forget now, but Hamlin’s competitive career was on its deathbed before he was paired up with Gabehart in 2019. He was coming off half a decade of passable, but ultimately uninspiring seasons, and his teammates included a dominant force in Kyle Busch, a just-signed established veteran in Martin Truex, and the rising young Erik Jones. Joe Gibbs Racing additionally had the series’ hottest prospect in Christopher Bell waiting in the wings, and Hamlin was one more underwhelming campaign away from being on the chopping block.
In 2025, now six years older, he will remind the NASCAR world why that was. Hamlin may pick up a win somewhere, but his days of being considered a championship threat are over. His 2024 season ended with a whimper as it was, and he will only sink further into irrelevancy as Bell and Ty Gibbs establish themselves as the present and future at JGR.
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