Hendrick Motorsports saved a lot of money with its 2018 driver changes

The list of the highest paid NASCAR drivers in 2017 is interesting mostly for how much one or two teams were represented on it.

Among all the major pro sports, NASCAR is the one that offers the most challenges for how much its top stars get paid. Contracts aren’t made public like they are in, say, the NFL or NBA, so it falls on third parties to help us fill in the blanks.

Forbes is one of them, and it just published its list of the highest paid NASCAR drivers for 2017. Helpfully, the top 12 drivers have their total earnings given, including things like endorsements and merchandise sales, as well as the amount of money they made just in salary and winnings.

To no one’s surprise, Dale Earnhardt Jr. topped all Cup Series drivers with his overall earnings, supplementing his very healthy secondary income with $14 million in salary and winnings. His Hendrick Motorsports teammate, Jimmie Johnson, was second, which is what you get when you’re a seven-time champion.

But the really interesting part, at least where Hendrick Motorsports is concerned, comes halfway through the list. There you’ll find Kasey Kahne in the seventh position, with a salary and winnings total of $9.8 million last year. That’s right: Hendrick had three of the seven highest-paid drivers in the sport on one team in 2017.

Joe Gibbs Racing didn’t have it much easier. Kyle Busch was third on the list ($13.1 million in salary/winnings), Denny Hamlin fourth ($12.9 million) and Matt Kenseth 12th ($7.9 million). While the two powerhouse teams shouldering a heavy salary burden is no shock, the amount of that burden can’t help but raise an eyebrow or two.

What these numbers definitely do is give the offseason moves that Hendrick and Gibbs made into even greater context. Hendrick lost Dale Jr. to retirement and said goodbye to Kahne. They were replaced by William Byron and Alex Bowman, and not, as some guessed at the time, by the likes of Kenseth. When you consider that Chase Elliott is also in the mix, Hendrick now has Johnson and three drivers who are on the NASCAR equivalent of NFL rookie contracts. That’s got to be saving the team a boatload of bucks.

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The Gibbs situation isn’t quite as dramatic, but dropping high-earning Kenseth and replacing him with second-year Cup Series driver Erik Jones also makes a difference. And maybe that’s what we should expect so see going forward. Big teams might run four cars at the Cup Series level, but they probably won’t carry three huge salaries. Seeing the numbers laid out like this, you can start to see why.