Relatively speaking, the 2023 season has been slim pickings for Ford drivers. Joey Logano won at Atlanta Motor Speedway in the fifth race of the season, and Ryan Blaney picked up an intermediate speedway victory in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte.

That’s the sum total of wins for the Ford camp—compared with 11 for Chevrolet and five for Toyota.

Accordingly, Logano’s victory at Atlanta in March has been magnified as he tries to sweep this year’s Atlanta events.

“You assume the win is big, and it gets you in the Playoffs and all that, but you fast forward however many races it’s been since we’ve been here, and it’s bigger than what we thought it would be,” Logano said. “Unfortunately, you hope it’s not.

“You wish it was the other way around, but we’re 10th in points right now, and we’d have been probably in a decent spot to make the Playoffs I’m sure still, but it’s a lot more comfortable when you have a win and you know that you’re in the Playoffs and you can focus in on some other things and trying to grow your team and get smarter and all those things.

“We’re not where we need to be, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of hard work going on right now to try to close the gap, and we keep hustling and trying and swinging the bat and doing everything we possibly can do. There are only so many things you can do, but work in the areas we’re allowed to and keep trying to find something.”

Ford qualified 1-6 on Saturday evening. That comes after them having the top 8 starting spots this past spring.

However, starting position typically doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot on drafting tracks. Plus, Chevrolet had won 5 of the 6 races on drafting tracks in his Next Gen era including sweeping both here a year ago.

Which gave in March?

It was Ford dominating to where Chevrolet struggled.

Ford’s led 221 of the 260 laps and took home the top two spots and 3 of the top 7. That equaled the amount of laps led the first four weeks of the season too (221).

In fact, Ford has led the most laps in all three drafting tracks this season. They led 122 of 212 laps in Daytona, 221 of 260 laps here and 88 of 196 in Talladega. 

That’s 431 of 668 (64.5%) of all laps led on these tracks by the blue ovals. When equating that to the rest of the season, Ford’s have led 1,144 laps all year. That’s 37.6% of their laps led all year coming on these three tracks. 

They led nine or fewer laps in a race in five of the last eight including one at Sonoma, two in Nashville and ?? in Chicago the last three races. 

Chevy is 2-for-3 this year on superspeedway’s and went 5-for-6 last year. However, even being 2-for-3 this year, they led the least amount of laps among the manufacturers in two of them. 

They led a combined 106 laps on these tracks this season but won two races. By comparison, Toyota has led 131. 

Chevy led 44 laps in Daytona, trailing Toyota’s 46 too. For here, they led 19 laps, Toyota led 20. In ‘Dega, they led 43 laps compared to Toyota’s 65.

Ford’s are leading, Chevy’s are winning and Toyota’s are just there.

Back in March however, Toyota’s actually had 3 of the top 6 finishers which was a far better finish than we’d have expected out of them. We all figured they’d struggle that weekend, especially after qualifying on Saturday. Just one Toyota even made the final round of qualifying with them starting 10-14-16-19-29-35.

Plus, they’ve won just twice in the Peachtree state and have failed to reach victory lane there since 2014. They’re 2-for-the-last-18 in Talladega and 1 for the last 8 at Daytona.

Chevrolet only had 3 cars in the top 11. 

Which happens this time around?