What’s Happening?

The 2025 NASCAR season is now in the books. While some drivers delivered breakout performances or rebounded from a challenging 2024, others are eager to put this season behind them. So, who were the biggest losers from NASCAR’s 2025 season?

Justin Haley

This time last year, if you had polled fans on what Justin Haley’s future was, they probably would have predictided a 2025 Playoff apperance, or a run at Alex Bowman’s seat in the No. 48. After all the 26 year old had worked his way out of the Rick Ware Racing No. 51, on speed, unseated Corey LaJoie, who Spire built the foundations of their team around, and was set to take on the season with top free agent Crew Chief Rodney Childers.

Now that the plan is up in smoke, Childers will be the crew chief for JR Motorsports’ No. 1 team next season, after being released not even a quarter of the way into the season, and Haley is heading back to Kaulig Racing to race full-time in the Craftsman Truck Series.

Some will look at this timeline and point to Haley’s stats, the free agency of Daniel Suarez (due in part to Connor Zilisch’s unexpectedly fast rise), or Haley’s lack of major sponsorship, and say that this is understandable; he choked under pressure, it’s over. But, in reality, it’s worth asking if this was Haley’s fault or the situation itself.

After all, it seemed like Haley never had any real stability within the team, losing his crew chief, his pit crew, and being publicly put on the hot seat. Is Suarez the right move? Maybe, who knows, could be discussing his downfall on equal ground this time next season, but the Haley 2026 redemption tour has a chance to be something truly special.

Riley Herbst

Expectations were not too high for Riley Herbst entering this season, but that doesn’t mean that fans expected the dreary results of his first year in the NASCAR Cup Series.

Though many would’ve liked to have seen 23XI Racing prospect (and newly dubbed 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Champion) Cory Heim in the car this year, Herbst got the nod and started the season with consistency. Though, as expected, his performance was far from that of his teammates, Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick.

But from there, his season took an interesting turn, with Herbst and fellow rookie Shane van Gisbergen sharing the bottom of the point standings alongside Noah Gragson and Cody Ware throughout the early portions of the season.

Even as SVG started to pull away with his road course wins stacked up, Herbst maintained his position at the bottom of the heap, despite his top-quality ride and his decent record in the NASCAR Xfinity series.

Only adding to this difficult rookie year for Herbst was the stellar campaign put on by Cory Heim in the Craftsman Truck Series, in which the prospect broke nearly every single season record he could.

Now entering 2026, with Heim sitting in Truck and Xfinity purgatory for at least a season, and her maintaining the No. 35 next year, not only does Herbst face an uphill climb in what seems to be a lame duck tenure for 2026, but perhaps a complete depletion of fan support, with Heim waiting in the wings of 23XI.

Front Row Motorsports

For the most part, we’re going to leave Front Row Motorsports’ ongoing lawsuit with NASCAR to the side for this conversation.

Much like Spire Motorsports, Front Row Motorsports saw an overhaul entering the 2025 season.

This was due in part to the departure of longtime driver Michael McDowell to Spire, with the team reshuffling to put Todd Gilliland into the No. 34, bringing on Zane Smith back into the fold to take over the No. 38, and hiring fan favorite Noah Gragson to drive a newly minted No. 4.

Not only would this No. 4 return the team to three full-time entries for the first time since 2013, but it would bear a very similar look to that of Kevin Harvick’s time at Stewart-Haas Racing.

Despite the high hopes for this season, a glance at their on-track performance this year suggests that expanding to three cars may not have been the best move for them.

Much like Ford brethren RFK Racing, most expected FRM to struggle this year, but their performance, in which none of their three full-time drivers finished in the top 25 in points, was a far cry from last season, in which the team looked to be headed for a new level of competition in the years to come.

This effort was low-lighted by Gragson, who had a team-worst 25.2 average finish and finished 34th in points, making 2024 comparable to his 21 starts and his rookie year with Legacy Motor Club for the worst effort from the now veteran driver.

Where the team goes from here is unknown; all three drivers are extremely talented, but this year proved to be much more challenging than most expected. It was a shame that a team that had such high momentum in 2024 fell to such depths this year, but that doesn’t mean they can’t rebound next season.

Kris Wright

When Kris Wright signed to race with Our Motorsports in 2025, fans mostly looked at it as a harmless signing.

Although Wright didn’t have the statistics of the driver he was replacing, Anthony Alfredo, it seemed like a typical NASCAR move, where a driver with a little more sponsorship leaps to a new level to see what he has.

However, by May, the fans appear to have grown tired of the driver of the No. 5 team.

Whether it was his run-ins and social media feud with Josh Bilicki and DGM Racing early on this season or his wreck with Justin Allgaier that essentially cost the No. 7 the race at Texas Motor Speedway, fan support for the No. 5 team had dwindled to almost zero by the end of the year.

This whole storyline came to a head in July, when Our Motorsports announced that they had parted ways with the driver. Some fans took this as a performance issue, but it soon became apparent that the team was closing its doors after that weekend’s race at Dover.

Even though NASCAR fans have moved on to their next point of contention in the sport, it will be interesting to see if the heat has cooled off for the veteran driver when 2026 rolls around, or if fans will carry their opinions with them into the new year.

The Playoff System

Entering this past weekend, my thoughts, like those of many others, were hopeful that the chaos would reign supreme one final time, and we could laugh off this system as it rode into the Arizona sunset one last time. But, seeing the pain on the faces of Connor Zilisch and Denny Hamlin, hurt.

Even the thought that Corey Heim, who had done what I once thought was impossible by one-upping Mike Skinner’s legendary 1998 season in almost every way, almost lost the championship, still hurts my brain more than my heart.

Everyone is tired of talking about the playoffs, changes to the playoffs, and how to “fix” the sport.

But, as NASCAR fans, are we ever truly done talking about the playoffs? If NASCAR eliminates the system, including the Chase, 3-3-5, or a one-race winner-take-all format, what will we bicker about next year?

If this past weekend, the culmination of a season in which fans who once supported the playoff system flipped their views on it, was the end of the playoffs or even just the one race system, it wasn’t a celebration of the outlandish chaos of the playoffs, it wasn’t even a begrudging goodbye, it was a funeral for a frutstrating, overly complex creation that represents all the wrong moves made in this sport over the past two decades.

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