NASCAR brought forth a change in the way that they hold races last year. See, a historic development was made for last season in their premiere series, with a high downforce, low horsepower racing package. They were hoping to create closer races.

In that first year, Toyota’s dominated. They took three out of the four spots in the Championship 4 including winning a NASCAR record 19 of the 36 points paying races — all the big ones at that (Daytona 500, Southern 500, Coca-Cola 600, Bristol Night Race). Now, as we sit eight races into the 2020 Cup Series season, the Chevrolet camp appears to be destined for the type of success that Toyota carried all through 2019.

Without much of a change in terms of the racing package from 2019 to 2020, how did Toyota lose their large advantage? If you dig a bit deeper, maybe it’s wasn’t as much of Toyota losing speed, but rather Chevrolet’s gaining on theirs.

See, Chevrolet was sick of getting the crap beat out of them. Last year, the Chevrolet camp came out with the new Camaro which was supposed to get them back to relevancy again. In 2018, the bowties won just four times in 36 races. That was the lowest for a single season out of them since they won three times in 1982. From 1994 through 2017, Chevy driver won at least 10 races in 23 seasons out of a 24 year span. The least amount that they won though was nine times as you’d have to go back to 1982 to find them winning less than eight races in a given season. Heck, from 2004 through 2015, they won at least 15 times 11 times.

Then, they won just 10 times in 2017 and four in 2018. So, in came a Camaro built specifically for this new package. The other two manufacturers had cars built for the old package. The advantage should have been on Chevrolet’s side in 2019 actually. Instead, they struggled a bit and it showed. This past offseason, was a chance for Chevy to further improve. The new car was slated to debut in 2021, so Toyota and Ford wasn’t willing to spend much money to make adjustments to their cars. I mean, why would they? The rules package was the same and the cars were going to be obsolete by late November. Chevy, well they decided enough was enough. The baseline was there, but they needed to find that speed advantage. So, while everyone else stayed stable, Chevy went to work, knowing that all the gains they were going to spend money on to find was going to be a one-year anomaly.

It paid off in a big way. The Hendrick Motorsports camp is the top dog in the series this year and it’s not really all that close to second. I can make a solid case to where they should have won six of the eight races run in 2020. Their peers agree.

“I think the best group out there right now is Hendrick,” said Ryan Blaney who earned two third place finishes at Charlotte this past week. “They have really great speed right now on the mile-and-a-halfs or the bigger tracks.  I’ve seen it.  They might not — they’ve kind of had some unfortunate circumstances, which is actually our team has capitalized on.  The Penske group has capitalized on at a couple of them tracks, but Hendrick is really strong.  I feel like we’re close with our group.  We’ve just got to find a little bit more.”

Denny Hamlin agreed, saying that their speed is a byproduct of their car being built for this package and that they finally have it right.

“Well, it’s just Chevys in general,” Hamlin said on why Chase Elliott has been so fast this season. “They’re fast, and they’re really the only manufacturer that got to build a car directly for the package that we run.  These other cars, the Toyotas and Fords, were built on the low downforce package and then we added a bunch of spoiler and splitter to them.  Certainly there was an advantage knowing that, okay, this is the real package, how can we optimize downforce and drag, and I think Chevys have done that.”

Ford and Toyota won a combined 29 times a year ago. Through eight races run in 2020, Ford has won half of the races, including their first Coca-Cola 600 victory in 18 years. But, it’s Chevy that’s gaining the most speed.

Hamlin, noted that the Ford’s have actually had to work harder to catch Toyota and Chevrolet and what they’re doing is impressive.

“They built the Mustang nose for the low downforce, third place finisher Ryan Blaney said too. “The low downforce is what it was meant for.”

Still, HMS is going to be a force here for a while. They big question coming out of this COVID-19 break was if they can keep the speed that they showed in the four races prior. Alex Bowman said that the pandemic was actually a good reason to why no one caught up to them in the 70 day absence.

“Yeah, I felt great the way we started the season,” Bowman said in Darlington. “Unloading in Las Vegas, I think we saw our racecars were going to be really strong.  To continue that after we got shut down and firing everything back up, to continue the strength that we had means a lot.

“I think it was an interesting time period, right?  Guys couldn’t really be in their shops developing new stuff.  You weren’t allowed to be in the wind tunnel, simulators, all that stuff.  Everybody is still at home working on their notebooks, trying to piece together what they can do to make their racecars better.

“In a sense it didn’t really give people maybe the complete opportunity to catch up, but it at least gave them some opportunity.  I think for everybody at HMS to stay on top of things, improve our racecars, I think we didn’t just come back with what we had in Vegas and Fontana, I think we came back with something better.  We need to keep working on it because everybody around us is constantly getting better, as well.

“It’s really different than how we started the season the last two years.  I feel like our cars, the biggest thing, when we’re off a little bit, we’re not running 20th any more.  If we have a bad run, we fall back to eighth.

“I think that shows a lot about the strength of HMS right now.  We’re just going to keep gaining on it.”

That means as long as HMS can stay out of their own ways and not catch a late race fluke caution, then Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, William Byron and Jimmie Johnson have to be your championship favorites at this moment.