The Super Bowl LVIII can potentially predict which driver will win the NASCAR Cup Series championship this year. After watching the recent Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, if a NASCAR fan comes across that statement, they are bound to be taken aback. But it could be true.
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The Chiefs faced the 49ers on February 11, a week before the upcoming Daytona 500. This game was a rematch from the 2020 Super Bowl that the Chiefs won. That year, Chase Elliott won the Cup Series championship. But that’s not all.
The Kansas City Chiefs have been a part of three of the last four Super Bowls. And in all of those years, the NASCAR Cup Series champion was less than 30 years old. In 2023, the Chiefs beat the Eagles, and Ryan Blaney won the Cup Series championship at 29. The year before that, the Chiefs locked horns against the Bucs, and Kyle Larson, who was 29 then, won the Cup title. As mentioned before, Elliott won the championship the same year when the Chiefs beat the 49ers in 2020.
On that note, the drivers who will be 29 this year at Phoenix on November 10 are Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe. Elliott, Tyler Reddick, and Erik Jones will be 28, while William Byron, Austin Cindric, and Noah Gragson will be 26.
Another way to see how the Super Bowl could predict the NASCAR Cup Series champion is that the three times the Kansas City Chiefs played the Super Bowls they were followed by three drivers winning their first-ever Cup Series championship. Indeed, good news for the Denny Hamlin fans.
Could 2024 be Denny Hamlin’s year?
The 23XI Racing co-owner has won 51 Cup races. He has made it to the coveted Championship race thrice in the last five years. Although Denny Hamlin doesn’t show any symptoms of slowing down, he indeed is 43, and not everybody is Bobby Labonte, who won the Cup Series championship at 45. But there is no reason to believe that Hamlin cannot replicate the feat at forty-plus age. After all, with an array of victories in the top-tier NASCAR series, we all know how competitive the #11 Toyota icon is.
After getting chucked out of the playoffs last year, Hamlin had said, “I know with the team I’ve got and the abilities that I’ve got on short tracks, intermediates, superspeedways, there’s nothing missing in the DNA to get it done. It’s just sometimes luck is not on your side, and with the format getting a smaller and smaller sample size, luck is a factor in it.”
But will luck favor Hamlin this year? His fans would argue that he started the season with a victory at The Clash. Although it wasn’t a point-paying race, a win is a win. That win came in a newly designed Toyota, which was a collaboration between Toyota, Joe Gibbs Racing, and 23XI Racing. Only time will tell if the Pied Piper of Pocono will be able to add the title of a Cup Series champion to his resume this year.
