Will NASCAR’s young guns win any races this season?

Maybe the hopes were a little too high for the 25 and under crowd of the NASCAR Cup Series this season, but no one predicted they would be shut out completely.

Going back now and reading the preseason predictions for the so-called “Young Guns” of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series is like stepping into an alternate reality.

Defining exactly who is and who isn’t a member of the Young Guns is an inexact science, but for the sake of argument, we’ll count anyone who is a Cup Series regular and was 25 or under at the beginning of 2018 (which allows us to sneak in Daniel Suarez, who turned 26 in January). Many people feel Kyle Larson shouldn’t count since he is “established” after multiple wins in 2017, but we’ll include him too as it only makes the contrast between expectations and reality even more stark.

In any case, it’s clear that people took the Old Guard vs. Young Guns narrative seriously before Speedweeks, and it’s amazing to look back on the prognostications now. Writers participating in the NASCAR.com preseason staff round table predicted the following things:

• Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, William Byron, Erik Jones and Daniel Suarez would all win a race.
• Alex Bowman would win one of the season’s first 10 races.
• Chase Elliott would win at least five races.
• Bubba Wallace would clinch a playoff spot by winning a race.
• Jones and Suarez would win their way into the playoffs.

The Motor Racing Digest round table called for Elliott, Byron, Jones and Suarez to all break through and grab their first wins. Other outlets also felt Elliott would win multiple races, and far too many to name here thought that Larson, Elliott or both would make the Championship 4 and perhaps even hoist the trophy at season’s end.

This isn’t meant in a Freezing Cold Takes or gotcha-style dredging up of the past, but instead as a mere illustration of the fact that everyone thought the Young Guns were destined for big things in 2018. Put another way, if we stepped into the past from the end of June and asked if there was any way the young NASCAR Cup Series stars would combine for zero wins after 16 races in 2018, we’re betting that every single one of these journalists would think we were nuts.

Yet here we are, just 10 races from the end of the regular season and nearly halfway through the whole darn 2018 schedule, and if anything, the Young Guns have taken a step back, not forward. Larson and Ryan Blaney, who had combined for three trips to Victory Lane by this time last year, have zero this season — and Blaney doesn’t even have a runner-up finish to his name.

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Elliott has yet to grab that elusive first victory and has just four top-5 finishes. His Hendrick Motorsports teammates, Bowman and Byron have just one of those — combined. Suarez ran a promising third at Dover but hasn’t had a top-10 finish since, Jones has just two top-10s in his last nine starts, and Wallace has been mostly a non-factor save for his thrilling second place in the Daytona 500 and an eighth place at Texas. It’s fair to say that the numbers back up the idea that not only hasn’t anyone in the group won a race yet, they aren’t even particularly close most weeks. That’s not something anyone expected would happen.

So what gives? There are a couple things conspiring against the Young Guns right now.

The best drivers have been more dominant than ever

As it turns out, 2018 is turning into the worst possible time to be a rookie or talented but inexperienced young NASCAR Cup Series driver. Not only aren’t the Young Guns winning, hardly anyone else is either. The so-called Big 3 of Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. have combined to win 12 times already, and when you throw in Clint Bowyer’s two victories, that’s 14 of the 16 starts in the hands of just four men. Considering Austin Dillon won the “anyone still running can win” Daytona 500, Joey Logano must be thanking his lucky stars he managed to squeak one by the Big 3.

Considering how good Truex was the second half of his 2017 championship drive, it would have been foolish to expect less from him. Kyle Busch is a generational talent, and Kevin Harvick is experiencing a late career resurgence to go along with the strides Stewart-Haas Racing has made as an organization. All three drivers are paired with super sharp crew chiefs and have teams that, while they do make mistakes, don’t tend to make errors so large they cost them races.

If only one of these drivers was on top of their game, you could win when they had misfortune or simply missed the setup a bit. With three all performing at this level, it’s becoming a Herculean task to beat them all to the checkered flag.

Most of the Young Guns are driving Chevys

If you consider the Young Guns a group of eight — Larson, Blaney, Elliott, Jones, Suarez, Byron, Bowman and Wallace — you’ll notice that one thing most of them have in common is that they are driving for Chevrolet teams. Only Blaney (Ford) and JGR teammates Jones and Suarez (Toyota) are not. That’s turned out to be a significant handicap, because not only aren’t the young Chevy drivers winning, none of them are.

Dillon’s Daytona triumph came in the opening event of the season. Since then, Chevrolet has won exactly the same number of races as the Young Guns, meaning absolutely zilch. By this time last year, the manufacturer had already racked up seven non-restrictor plate wins, and both Larson and Jimmie Johnson were multi-time winners before the end of June.

The arrival of the Camaro ZL1 scared a lot of the teams and drivers in the other manufacturers’ camps, but it has turned out to be a puzzle too tricky to solve on the fly. Time is steadily ticking away for a solution that will come during the 2018 season, and that’s hampering five of the young hopefuls we’re discussing.

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Of course, saying that the whole group is going to go winless for 20 more races could make us look as silly as those preseason calls now appear to be. There is plenty of time for things to change, for certain teams to find a bit of extra speed they lack right now, and even as impossible as it seems right now, for one of the Big 3 to fade. Any NASCAR season tends to divide itself naturally into spring, summer and fall segments, with the status quo often upended from one to another.

But even discussing the idea that the Young Guns might go 0-for-2018 is amazing. if it somehow comes to pass, it’ll be interesting to see if we all exercise even more caution before peering into the crystal ball for 2019, or if a “now they’re really due!” feeling will take over.