2025 Stock Car Model Update

Both Xfinity Series title combatants now appear on the list.

Below is the update for my stock car model, including all drivers who have made at least one Cup Series start and were active in 2025 in some stock car division. The only two new drivers who were not in my 2024 model were the two Xfinity Series combatants, Connor Zilisch and Jesse Love. Zilisch enters the model with a well-above-average playoff-caliber .093 rating already after beating barely-below-average Justin Allgaier 19-8 in the Xfinity Series as a rookie, while Love starts out at a much more mundane -.175 because he still lost his teammate head-to-head to the below-average Austin Hill 16-10.

Apart from the traditional issue that my model keeps massively underrating all the post-Kurt Busch Penske drivers (and the Wood Brothers drivers, who I count as Penske drivers for these purposes) because Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski significantly improved at Penske in the period when they had no other teammates, for the most part, these ratings are reasonable. The other major outlier continues to be Tyler Reddick, who remains below average because his 2018 Xfinity season is heavily weighted since he had three teammates, and he lost badly to Elliott Sadler. In his Cup seasons, he has also been very unlucky as his actual teammate head-to-heads have consistently underestimated how much he has actually outperformed his teammates. Hopefully, his luck will even out, and he’ll be closer to the .09 range where he clearly belongs (although I’m willing to concede I overrated him in previous years).

Besides the Penske and 23XI Racing drivers all being underrated, I think most of this is fine. People will have occasional quibbles. I’m also willing to concede that I had overrated Corey LaJoie on the basis of my model because I had failed to realize how much faster the #7 Spire car was than the #77 in the years LaJoie was there, but there was a reason I wrote that column last year. Some of the drivers who made spectacular improvements, like Chase Briscoe, Corey Heim, and Ryan Preece won’t come as a surprise, as they were all quite strong this year, but I think they still all remain below average for a reason. I also think the Richard Childress Racing drivers have been overrated in recent years, as both Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon are worse than they were, and their single-season ratings are being inflated by the fact that they had inexperienced teammates like Love in both the Cup Series and the Xfinity Series.

Ryan Blaney remains the highest-rated driver this year, as I previously revealed. Hilariously, Ben Rhodes came out second after a mediocre Craftsman Truck Series season, but that has more to do with his teammate Matt Crafton being maybe the most washed-up driver in any NASCAR division than anything Rhodes did himself. Although I initially revealed that William Byron at .205 was the second-highest Cup Series driver this year, he fell behind Kyle Larson’s .204 when I took into account his other series results, as Byron finished second to Carson Hocevar when they were teammates in the truck race at Kansas, which dropped him to .198 and behind Larson when considering all series.

As usual, the single-season ratings tend to be more erratic than in my open wheel and touring car models, just because NASCAR races tend to be more erratic and gimmicky themselves. Except for the underrated Penske and 23XI drivers, most of the rest of this list passes the sniff test when looking at career ratings. Obviously, Shane van Gisbergen would have a very different rating if I considered road courses only, and he’d probably even be leading this list. However, the ovals count too, and he hasn’t mastered them yet (although I could totally see that happening next year). I acknowledge Zilisch is debuting with a spectacular rating, although it’s not as high as Hocevar’s rating a few years ago when he debuted. And as a relative Zilisch skeptic, I find it hilarious that he made Autosport’s top 50 list while Blaney didn’t (although he wasn’t the worst selection by any means; cough, Luke Browning). And I find it even more hilarious that people on Reddit were complaining that he was too low! He and Heim will still likely make the bottom of my top 100 list, but I still think most racing analysts overrate elite minor league performances, which are not necessarily better than second-tier major league performances, particularly in an era when the Cup drivers have largely been legislated out of the Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series. But admittedly, those minor league seasons may have been the best stock car minor league seasons since all the great grassroots stock car series like the USAC Stock Car Series, ASA, and ARTGO all died.