Richmond Raceway did not “fix” Hendrick Motorsports’ summer.
It did, however, give the organization something it had been missing for months: four cars pointing in the same direction.
No. 9 Chevrolet driver Chase Elliott finished fifth under the lights on Saturday night, his best result since winning at Texas Motor Speedway in May, ending a career-long nine-race streak outside the top 10. Reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Larson followed in sixth, snapping his own run of four consecutive races off the lead lap and scoring his first top 10 since Sonoma Raceway in June. A somehow winless William Byron came home ninth for his second straight top 10; his first consecutive pair since March, while Alex Bowman finished 10th for the first time since Chicagoland Speedway in July.
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Individually, none of those results qualify as a breakthrough.
Collectively, they might.
Richmond marked the first time all four Hendrick cars finished in the top 10 since Talladega Superspeedway in April 2025. More importantly, it came immediately after a four-race stretch in which 16 Hendrick starts produced zero top fives, one top 10, five top-15 finishes and just 27 laps led.
At Richmond, though? Four starts, four top 10s.
A modest spark, perhaps, but with only Sunday’s Dollar Tree 301 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and next weekend’s Daytona International Speedway cutoff remaining before The Chase, there is little time left to determine whether there is any actual heat behind the flame.
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That makes the “Magic Mile” an unusually useful test for a team that by now typically already has its sights set on paving a path to a championship in the fall rather than wondering if it’ll go a whole summer winless.
Daytona will settle the regular season a week later, but drafting tracks tend to introduce their own variables. Loudon offers Hendrick one final conventional look at itself before The Chase begins — 301 laps around a flat, technical 1.058-mile oval where speed, balance, track position and execution tend to have enough time to reveal themselves.
If Richmond was simply a pleasant one-night reprieve from an uneven summer, New Hampshire could expose it. If something is genuinely beginning to click again across the Hendrick campus, this is where the evidence can start stacking up.
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And there is plenty to prove.
Even with two early-season victories from Elliott, Hendrick’s 2026 numbers remain almost unrecognizable compared with the organization’s production through the same 24 races last season.
The championship team had six wins at this point in 2025, and its top-five total has fallen from 32 to 21, with top 10s dropping from 52 to 37. The most dramatic gap is up front: Hendrick led 2,328 laps through 24 races last year compared with 1,073 this season — a decline of 1,255 laps. Meanwhile, DNFs have climbed from eight to 13.
The unfortunate flip side for the team is that, in the process, its greatest competitors have moved in the opposite direction. Joe Gibbs Racing has led 2,067 laps this season and Team Penske 1,287 (split between just three drivers, as opposed to Hendrick and JGR’s four apiece), both ahead of Hendrick. JGR has seven wins (with another seven tacked on by Toyota affiliate 23XI Racing), while Penske has four itself, and three in the last four races alone.
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This is not to suggest Hendrick suddenly became an also-ran. Elliott is already locked into The Chase, Larson sits eighth in points and Byron is 12th. Bowman would likely be in the mix for a Chase spot as well, had he avoided injury earlier this season. Larson, to his credit, remains one of the sport’s most prolific lap leaders, even while riding a career-long Hendrick winless streak, and ranks just behind season stalwarts Denny Hamlin (880) and Ryan Blaney (708) for third best in the series.
By its own recent standards, though, the organization has spent much of 2026 producing isolated flashes rather than the sustained, four-car pressure we’ve grown accustomed to.
But Richmond looked different — and New Hampshire now gets to determine whether it actually was.
There is some irony in choosing Loudon as the proving ground, because Hendrick’s relationship with the track has been simultaneously productive and maddening for more than a decade. That’s also what makes it a perfect location for a late-summer barometer.
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The stat has been repeated ad nauseam at this point, but, in case you’re unaware, it was Kasey Kahne who delivered the organization’s ninth and most recent New Hampshire victory. The same Kasey Kahne who last drove in the Cup Series in 2018 and not for Hendrick since ’17.
The team has won 118 Cup races at 28 different tracks since the former No. 5 driver claimed a lobster in 2012 just weeks after the team’s current driver, then a spry 19-year-old, made his NASCAR debut with a top 10 in a Truck Series race at Kentucky Speedway.
It has won five championships since, two of them going to that 19-now-34-year-old.
At New Hampshire, Hendrick cars have finished in literally every position from second through 15th since Kahne’s victory — but never first. Clearly, not the profile of an organization incapable of competing at Loudon, but almost the opposite, as Hendrick has repeatedly gotten close enough to make the absence conspicuous and perhaps down to just peculiar circumstances.
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Last year was a prime example.
Byron finished third, Elliott fifth and Larson seventh, while Bowman came home 15th. Byron essentially spent the entire afternoon near the front, with a 4.7 average running position, while Larson’s was 6.0. Elliott charged from 27th to fifth and spent three laps out front.
The ingredients were there. The trophy went elsewhere. Again.
No current Hendrick driver illustrates that relationship better than Larson. Among drivers with multiple New Hampshire starts, Larson’s 10.93 average finish ranks behind only Josh Berry’s absurd two-race sample (2.5) and Denny Hamlin’s 9.94. Larson owns six top fives and nine top 10s in 15 starts and carries an active streak of three consecutive top-10 finishes at the track.
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He has also finished second three times — the most runner-up results in New Hampshire history by a driver who has never won there.
RELATED: Larson wins Knoxville Nationals title hours after Richmond race
The stranger number might be “26,” though.
That is how many laps Larson has led in those 15 starts, his fewest at any active oval where he has raced multiple times. For a driver who has led 11,001 Cup laps overall and routinely measures his best afternoons in chunks of triple-digit dominance, Loudon has produced a peculiar brand of Larson success: close to the front of the pack, but rarely leading the charge.
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It also arrives at a telling moment for the No. 5 team.
Larson’s current 48-race winless streak is his longest since joining Hendrick in 2021. Before the drought began with his most recent victory at Kansas in May 2025, he had won exactly one of every six races during his Hendrick tenure.
The laps led indicate that the speed has hardly disappeared completely; it’s just that the conversion rate, for whatever reason, has.
A strong Loudon afternoon would not erase 48 races, of course, but it could, however, provide another useful data point — along with a lobsterman’s boatload of mojo — after Richmond finally interrupted a rough recent stretch.
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The same applies elsewhere in the building, too.
chase elliott leads the field at loudon
Elliott’s fifth-place Richmond finish carried particular weight because of what preceded it. After opening 2026 with seven top 10s and two wins in the first 11 races, he went nine straight without another top 10 before Richmond.
New Hampshire has not traditionally been one of the “automatic” tracks for him — four top 10s in 12 starts are his fewest at any venue where he has raced more than 10 times — but he has shown winning-level pace there on occasion. Elliott finished second in 2022, led 41 laps from the pole in 2024 and rallied through the field last year at a track that’s notoriously hard to pass on.
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Byron’s recent progress is a bit quieter but no less relevant.
His ninth at Richmond gave him back-to-back top 10s for the first time since March, after a stretch in which he recorded only four top 10s across 11 races and a notable public radio spat with his longtime crew chief. His overall New Hampshire record is thin — one top 10 in eight starts — but that lone result came last year, when he finished third, scored points in both stages and posted the 4.7 average running position.
Bowman remains the biggest question mark. Richmond gave him his first top 10 in more than a month, but New Hampshire has produced only one top 10 in 14 career starts and no laps led. While he’s out of the running for a Chase bid, the No. 48 team is looking to string together strong weeks to carry momentum into 2027, which will be Bowman’s final year in the Cup Series before handing the reins to Connor Zilisch for 2028.
No one is demanding a Hendrick victory Sunday, and it’s nowhere near a ‘must-win’ for the team. This is more about examining the shape of the performance after showing cohesive vitality at Richmond. A win would obviously end a remarkable and baffling New Hampshire drought, but another afternoon with three or four cars consistently inside the top 10, collecting stage points, creating passing speed and inserting themselves into the late-race conversation could be just as informative for what comes next.
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Because Hendrick’s problem this summer has not simply been a lack of trophies, but an overall concerning scarcity of weekends when all four teams looked like meaningful factors at once.
Richmond finally supplied one. New Hampshire is uniquely set up for Hendrick drivers to prove it wasn’t a flat-track fluke.
Loudon has been good enough to Hendrick over the years to make contention realistic, yet difficult enough to keep Victory Lane locked away since 2012, conveniently positioned as the final non-drafting checkpoint before The Chase.
Short of an entirely dominant race weekend, we may not have firm, undeniable evidence that Hendrick is “back” by Sunday evening.
But if Richmond was the beginning of something rather than the exception, Loudon will highlight it.
Or perhaps the “Magic Mile” might expose the illusion altogether.
