Breaking News: Martin Truex the top racer driver has signed a contract to…

a team must replace a driver with 34 career wins and a Cup Series championship on his resume, it’s a big decision to make.

That’s exactly the situation Joe Gibbs Racing is facing after last week’s news that Martin Truex Jr. is retiring from full-time racing after the 2024 season. Truex has been a staple of the team since the dissolution of Furniture Row Racing following the 2018 season, winning 15 races and scoring 106 top-10 finishes over that span. Before that, Truex had already established himself as a champion by outdueling future teammate Kyle Busch with the title on the line at Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2017.

Anybody tabbed to follow one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history in the seat of the No. 19 will face big expectations. But Gibbs has had to replace legends before, from when Bobby Labonte succeeded Dale Jarrett as the driver of the No. 18 in 1995 to Gibbs handing the keys of Tony Stewart’s No. 20 ride to young Joey Logano in 2009, or even when Kyle Busch left the No. 18 after the 2022 season.

So let’s rank the top candidates to replace Truex, by both their current series and their performance so far this season. We’ll be measuring the latter according to my Adjusted Points+ Index metric — which gives points to drivers for their finishes in each race and then compares their per-race performance to the average driver in their series (scaling everything such that average is 100, while a rat

ing of 120 is 20% better than average, etc).

Despite difficult circumstances, with the news of SHR shutting down operations after the season, Gragson has bounced back from 2023 with Legacy Motor Club to be one of the Cup Series’ most improved drivers this year. He has five top 10s in 17 starts, scoring one of SHR’s lone podium finishes of the season with a third-place run at Talladega in April. Gragson is also just 25, and a vastly more professional showing this season (both on and off the track) has helped him reclaim the potential that made him one of the sport’s most promising up-and-coming drivers when he narrowly lost the 2019 Xfinity Series championship. (The winner there, Ty Gibbs, would be a new teammate/rival at JGR if Gragson is Truex’s successor.) Finally, Gragson has past experience with Toyota in the Gibbs pipeline, having driven three Xfinity Series races for them in 2018.

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