Is the XFINITY Series failing to produce NASCAR Cup Series winners?

There’s an open question about whether NASCAR’s top driver development series is doing enough to have its champions ready to win at the top level.

When explaining the NASCAR XFINITY Series to people who aren’t stock car racing fans, it’s tempting to fall back on the obvious baseball analogy. In some ways, it really is similar to double or triple-A baseball, as it’s where the stars of tomorrow are honing their craft for when they are “called up” to the big leagues, a.k.a. the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. In other ways, such as the presence of Cup Series drivers in many races, the comparison falls apart a little bit, but it’s useful as a quick point of reference that most people instantly understand.

Not that long ago, it also made sense from the standpoint that if you were an XFINITY Series champion, it was more or less expected that you would find success in the Cup Series as well. The list of season winners between 1998 and the middle of the last decade includes Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex Jr.

However, even two of those gentlemen are among the “Big Three” dominating Cup Series racing right now, that trend has not proven to be one that’s carried over to more recent years. As ESPN’s Bob Pockrass points out in his excellent piece on why the Big Three is winning so often, the last six XFINITY Series champions are all Cup regulars now.

They just haven’t won many races. Here’s how they’ve fared:

2012 champion (and 2011, for that matter) Ricky Stenhouse Jr. – 2 Cup Series wins
2013 champion Austin Dillon – 2 wins
2014 champion Chase Elliott – 0 wins
2015 champion Chris Buescher – 1 win
2016 champion Daniel Suarez – 0 wins
2017 champion William Byron – 0 wins

That’s five wins total from every XFINITY Series champion, and if you want to discount restrictor plate races because of their inherent randomness, both of Stenhouse’s wins and Dillon’s Daytona 500 triumph to start the current season came at superspeedways.

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To be fair, there are extenuating circumstances, as Buescher has never been with a top Cup Series team, Suarez was promoted suddenly after Carl Edwards’ abrupt retirement, and Byron is still a rookie. Overall, though, this is a dismal record from what should be the best of the best coming up the ranks.

Pockrass’ article, even though it’s not specifically about this phenomenon, also has some good quotes in it that highlight potential causes. Harvick believes it’s partly due to NASCAR imposing ever stricter limits on how many starts Cup Series drivers can make on the lower circuit, preventing the younger talent from measuring themselves against the best.

"A lot of this is a product of a development system that is a little bit broken. We dumbed down the Xfinity Series by kicking everybody out. You’re seeing the repercussions of that with the Xfinity guys when they get here, coming here and they aren’t winning like they should be. There’s a lot of things [they need to learn], the details of that top-5 and winning races on this side is hard to find."

Steve Letarte offers another explanation, one that points to business decisions forcing the XFINITY Series champions to move up when they could use more time to develop — to make another comparison to other sports, not unlike college basketball players who declare too early for the draft.

"I believe the business model is pushing drivers to Cup faster than, in my opinion, they should go. When was the last time someone spent more than a year in the Xfinity level?"

That one is hard to tear down and might not matter anyway. Dollars and cents dictate more decisions in modern NASCAR than ever, so keeping drivers in the XFINITY Series longer isn’t feasible in many cases.

Harvick’s notion, though, could raise some eyebrows since it’s counterintuitive. If you let Kyle Busch compete in two-thirds of the XFINITY Series schedule, he’d probably win 10-plus races, and it would be a rare sight indeed to see any regular from the junior circuit in Victory Lane aside from the restrictor plate stops. However, when the XFINITY champion moved up and got to battle for the lead with the likes of Truex or Kyle Busch, there’d be a much better chance that they had done that before.

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That’s worth something. Whether it would translate to more Cup Series wins is hard to know for sure. What is certain at the moment is that the XFINITY Series is producing drivers who can run toward the front and record top-10 finishes, but not necessarily turn those good days into actual victories. Until NASCAR can figure out why and if anything can be done about it, file this discussion away in the back of your mind as you ponder the fate of whoever takes the XFINITY Series crown in 2018.

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