What a Record Is Worth

Josh Berry has the best New Hampshire record of anyone entered Sunday. He ran 2nd here in 2025 and 3rd in 2024, an average of 2.50. Everywhere else this season he's averaged 25th with one top five. Two races say one thing. This season says the opposite.

So we went and measured what two races are worth. Since 2005, 170 Cup drivers have arrived at a track where they had exactly two prior starts and a record there at least ten positions better than their season form. Here is how that group actually did:

They finished far closer to their season form than to their track record. About a quarter of the edge was real. The other three quarters was two races of noise, and the median driver in that group came home 19th.

Our table still has Berry 8th with a median finish of 10th, which is more generous than that history. The reason is last Saturday. He qualified 3rd at Richmond and ran a 7.72 average running position, his best of the season, at a flat track that wears tires the way this one does. Most of those 170 drivers did not have a fast car. Right now he does.

Berry is the loudest version of a question the whole table is asking this week. How much should one racetrack's history count against everything else a driver has done this year? At the top of our table it gets answered the other way around.

The name at the top

Joey Logano ranks 1st on our table for Sunday, and he holds the best win chance in the field at 18.5%. He was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and Loudon is the closest thing he has to a home track. He won here in 2009 and again in 2014. Last Saturday night he won at Richmond. Then you look at his season average finish, which is 17.25, and the tidy version of the story falls apart.

A 17.25 average finish across 24 points races is not what a favorite usually looks like. It is, however, what Joey Logano has looked like in August for four straight years. In each of the last four seasons his average finish improved once the final ten races of the year began. All four times.

The improvement averaged 3.63 positions, and the two biggest jumps are the two most recent: 3.75 positions in 2024 and 6.22 in 2025. What is different about this year is how he arrived. Logano has led 423 laps between race number 8 and race number 24 of this season, more than in any of the four seasons on that chart and nearly triple his 2024 total of 151. Leading laps in bulk is normally the part of his year that shows up in October.

The record that argues back

None of that makes Sunday his. Christopher Bell ranks 4th on our table with a 12.9% win chance, and New Hampshire is the best racetrack of his life. Across Cup, O'Reilly, and Trucks he has twelve starts at Loudon and seven wins. In O'Reilly he is four for four, a 1.00 average finish with 473 laps led. In Cup he has won two of the last four.

He also has not won a Cup race this year. He has 24 starts, zero wins, and has finished 2nd seven times. Our sim ran Sunday's race 10,000 times and put him 4th. His record at this track says 1st. Where Berry's case rests on two races, Bell's rests on twelve, and our table still will not put him on top.

Loudon stopped rewarding the long drive

Part of the reason is that the track has changed underneath all of them. Logano's 2009 win here came from 24th on the grid, and Denny Hamlin won from 32nd in 2012. In the current car nothing like that has happened. The last four winners at New Hampshire started 5th, 2nd, 4th, and 2nd, an average starting position of 3.25. Track position out of qualifying decides more here than it used to, which is exactly why a Thursday table is a starting point and Saturday's grid will move it.

The quietest name on the table

Kyle Larson sits 9th on our table with a median finish of 11th. Every driver we project ahead of him has a worse recent record at this track, and the only exception is Berry. Larson's last five starts here read 7th, 14th, 3rd, 4th, and 7th. That is a 7.00 average with nothing outside the top 14, and unlike Berry it is five races deep. The odd part is what he has never done here: 26 laps led in 15 career Cup starts. He gets the finishes here without ever leading the race.

His season has been two different seasons. From Michigan through Sonoma in June he finished 4th, 5th, 3rd, and 4th. From Chicagoland through Iowa he finished 34th, 34th, 15th, 39th, and 33rd. Richmond looked like more of the second kind when he rolled off 30th, and he came out of it 6th with a 16.74 average running position. That same night he flew to Iowa, arrived during the C-mains with a police escort waiting, started on the pole, led all 50 laps of the Knoxville Nationals, and collected $200,000. It was his fourth Nationals win. A driver arriving in that form at New Hampshire, where his last five finishes are all inside the top 14, is a problem for the field.

What moves between now and Sunday

This is Thursday's table, from a sim run before anyone has turned a lap. Practice and qualifying both run Saturday, and at a track where the last four winners all started inside the top five, that session will move these numbers more than it did at Richmond. One note for reading the table: Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano, and Ryan Blaney all show a median finish of 5th, because medians compress and nobody's median is 1st. The win chance column is where they separate.

The DFS read

Sunday is a dominator race. It runs 301 laps, which puts 75.25 DraftKings points in the laps-led pool alone. Our sim projects Hamlin for the most laps led in the field at 47.4, with Ryan Blaney at 39.4 and Bell at 34.2. Logano projects 27.5 laps led at a $10.5K salary. Hamlin's 6.2x value is the best figure among the top five on our table.

Saturday: the Truck Series finale

The Team EJP 175 closes the Truck Series regular season, and the Chase cutline is still unsettled going into it. Layne Riggs ranks 1st on our Trucks table with a 22.0% win chance. Kaden Honeycutt holds the second-best win chance at 16.2% and sits 3rd on that table. Chandler Smith carries the second-best projected finish, a median of 6th. Christopher Bell doubles up in the Halmar Friesen No. 62 and our sim has him 7th. One caution on that table: 41 trucks are entered for 36 spots, so five of the names on it will not make the race.

Two races left

Saturday settles the Truck Series regular season. Sunday is race 25 of 26 for Cup, and after it only Daytona stands between the field and a Chase that locks at 16 drivers and runs ten races with no eliminations. Joey Logano has improved his average finish over the final ten races in each of the last four seasons.