While drivers are the main focus of the playoffs, none would be there without their owners and manufacturers. Owners provide the cars, pit crews, transporters and everything else necessary to race. NASCAR’s cost-containment measures make manufacturers’ technical abilities even more important.
Chase Elliott’s failure to make the playoffs brought new attention to the owner’s championship. Here, however, I focus only on the drivers’ championship.
The most successful owners making the playoffs
Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell secured places in the 2023 Championship 4 with wins in the first two races of the Round of 8. Bell’s win continues Joe Gibbs Racing’s streak of placing at least one driver in the title race since 2014, when the 16-driver elimination-round format started.
Two more drivers will join Larson and Bell after the checkered flag at Martinsville. After that, there’s just one more elimination to determine the 2023 Cup Series champion.
The last 10 seasons provided 160 playoff spots, which were filled by drivers from 15 different teams. The graph below shows this year’s data at the top. Four teams had drivers in the playoffs every year: JGR, Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske and Stewart-Haas Racing.
JGR accounts for 34 of the 160 spots or 21.2% of the playoff field. HMS follows with 31 spots or 19.4%. Each team has placed four drivers in the playoffs multiple times. Hendrick has never had fewer than two drivers make the playoffs, while JGR has had at least three per year.
Penske and SHR each contributed 24 drivers or 15.0% of the field apiece. Penske has put all three of its drivers in the playoffs multiple times, while SHR qualified four drivers twice.
These four teams account for 70.6% of all playoff participants over the last 10 years. This year, though, they claim only 50% of the playoff spots.
Ten different owners had drivers in the 2023 playoffs, the most since the 16-driver elimination format championship began. While it might be tempting to attribute this to the Next Gen car, it’s a little early to make that conclusion. Last year — the first with the Next Gen car — tied with 2019 for the fewest different owners with six.
The most successful owners in the Championship 4
The distribution of owners narrows as the playoffs proceed. The current Round of 8 represents just five owners — half the original field. Three are usual stalwarts: Hendrick, JGR and Penske. SHR failed to advance their sole representative, Kevin Harvick, past the first round. The other two teams are the revitalized RFK Racing and relatively new 23XI Racing.
The graph below shows the owner distribution for the Championship 4. Only seven teams have participated in the final elimination race over the last 10 years. Trackhouse Racing and Richard Childress Racing each appear only once on the graph.
No owner has ever swept the Championship 4. JGR came closest in 2019 when they claimed three of the four spots. That final pit Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr. and Denny Hamlin against SHR’s Harvick.
JGR drivers occupied 13 of the 36 spots in the Championship 4 or 36.1% of the playoff field over the last nine years. Team Penske has the second-most representation with seven drivers or 19.4% of the field.
Hendrick Motorsports has only placed six drivers in the final race in the last nine seasons; however, HMS won three of the five championships they competed for. That gives HMS a 60.0% success rate.
JGR places more than twice as many drivers in the Championship 4 as Hendrick. They’ve claimed only two championships in nine contests, for a 22.2% success rate.
The most successful manufacturers in making the playoffs
The graph below shows playoff participants by manufacturer from 2014 to the present. The manufacturers started out with almost identical numbers of drivers in the playoffs this season but that isn’t always the case.
Keep in mind that Toyota fields fewer cars than its rivals. In 2023, Toyota has six cars while Chevy and Ford each run 14 to 16 cars per race. The only Toyota driver not to make the playoffs this year was rookie Ty Gibbs.
Remember also that Stewart-Haas Racing was aligned with Chevrolet until the 2017 season, when they switched to Ford.
Chevrolet has placed the most drivers in the playoff: 66 or 41.2% of the field over 10 years. In 2015, 56.2% of playoff drivers drove Chevys. That’s the only time one manufacturer claimed more than half the playoff cars.
Ford is second with 54 drivers or 33.8% of the field, while Toyota makes up the remaining 25% of the field.
The most successful manufacturers in the Championship 4
I show the analogous graph for the manufacturers in the Championship 4 below.
Although Toyota places the fewest cars in the playoffs, they have the greatest representation in the Championship 4.
Over the last nine years, Toyota accounted for 41.7% of the cars in the Championship 4. Chevrolet barely edges out Ford by 11 cars to 10 — or 30.5% Chevy to 27.8% Ford.
Five of the last nine Championship 4 classes lacked drivers from all three manufacturers. Ford missed out in 2015 and 2021. Chevy failed to put a driver in the Championship 4 in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Toyota and Chevrolet have each placed three drivers in the top 4: Toyota in 2019 (Busch, Truex and Hamlin) and Chevy in 2015 (Harvick, Truex and Jeff Gordon.)
Toyota has the best retention rate — the percentage of drivers who made it all the way through to the Championship 4 in six of the nine years. In 2019, three of the four Toyota drivers who made the playoffs survived to the Championship 4. The same year, only one of the seven Fords and none of the five Chevy drivers made it through all three rounds.
In nine years, Chevy converted 18% of their 61 drivers making the playoffs to the Championship 4. Ford took 20.8% of their playoff drivers to the final race of the year. Toyota comes out on top with 42.8% of their playoff drivers advancing to the final race.
A Toyota-Chevy showdown is already set for Phoenix. Will Ford be represented this year? Will Hendrick or Gibbs — or both — have two drivers in the Championship 4?
Martinsville (2 p.m. EST; NBC) will determine the answers to these questions and set the field for the final race of the 2023 season.
