Could a Two-Time Champion Finish the 2026 Cup Series Season Winless?
Championship hangovers are not a new thing in sports; the 2022 LA Rams come to mind. Kyle Larson may be experiencing a very bad championship hangover in 2026. After a disappointing run in the Iowa Corn 350 last weekend, Larson currently sits 10th in points with just seven top-fives and 11 top-10s. The two-time champion is on an excruciating streak of leading laps in stage one before wrecking later on after bad luck. If Larson cannot find his footing, he could go winless for the first time since 2020.
Larson hasn’t gone to victory lane since May 2025 at Kansas. He still managed to complete the Championship Four field and win the 2025 Cup Series Championship, making him the only champion in the elimination playoff era to not win a single race in the Chase. Now he is on a 45-race-long winless streak and running into bad luck every week. The five machine is on the verge of being outside the top-10 in points with just three races until the Chase begins.
Larson isn’t the only driver who is underperforming in 2026, or at least not meeting his expectations. All of Hendrick Motorsports, except for Chase Elliott, who has two wins and sits sixth in points, are also struggling to keep up. Alex Bowman missed four races earlier this year due to vertigo. Even after returning, he hasn’t run in the top-10 almost at all, and he announced his retirement after 2027. William Byron is also winless, with only four top-fives on the season and nine finishes below the top-30. He sits 11th in points.
Toyota having a threshold on the Cup Series field is the biggest reason for the 32-year-old’s championship hangover. Denny Hamlin, Ty Gibbs, Tyler Reddick, and Chase Briscoe are four out of the top five in points. The Toyotas have won 14 of the 23 races in 2026 on all types of tracks from superspeedways to short tracks. The only non-Toyota to lead the points at any point this season was the Napa Nine of Elliott, who only led for three days after his Daytona Duel win until the Daytona 500.
Some fans fear that the possibility of the California native going winless might affect the rest of his career due to concerns about his transition to the points-only format, but this likely isn’t the case. Larson came back from a bad stretch from 2018 to 2020, where he only recorded a single win at Dover in 2019. He only ran four races in 2020 before he was fired from his ride at Chip Ganassi Racing. He came back in 2021 with a bang, when he won 11 races and the Cup Series Championship. There are multiple reasons to believe that Larson won't be too affected by a winless season, and could adapt to a format that he had not raced in since 2013.
