With one-quarter of the NASCAR Cup season in the books, there’s still plenty of races to be won in the 27 remaining events (17 left in the regular season and 10 in the playoffs). But when it comes to just which drivers will win at least one of those races, NASCAR analyst Kyle Petty made two key predictions on this week’s edition of Performance Racing Network’s Fast Talk show.
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Prediction No. 1: Bubba Wallace will not win a race this year.
“I’m going to say no,” Petty said about Wallace reaching victory lane. “As we look at William Byron and Denny (Hamlin) and Christopher Bell, these are guys that can win week in and week out, every single week.”
“When you look at the season and there’s 36 races and say you can only win five of them, and you have to put all your eggs in the basket for those five, that’s tough, a tough thing to do, so I’m going to say no.”
It’s not totally surprising that Petty made such a prediction as Wallace is riding an 89-race winless streak, his last triumph coming in 2022 in the fall race at Kansas Speedway.
That being said, however, Wallace is off to one of his better starts to a NASCAR Cup season. He has back-to-back third-place finishes at Homestead and Martinsville and was ninth at Atlanta. But he’s also been inconsistent, with his other six starts ending up with finishes of 19th or worse.
Still, he is a strong eighth in the Cup standings, leaving Petty to emphatically note that even if Bubba doesn’t win a race, “He makes the playoffs, for sure. His pit crew is lights out.”
Now, As For Alex Bowman
Prediction No. 2: While Bubba will go winless, that won’t be the case with Alex Bowman, who Petty believes will win at least one race this season.
“Every year, I don’t know how Bowman finds his way to the playoffs, but he always finds his way (six times in the last seven seasons),” Petty said. “(Thus far this season) he sat on the pole (at Bristol), ran decent at Phoenix (7th), and some of these places.
“Because of the Hendrick organization, I’m going to say yes, at some point in time on a mile-and-a-half racetrack, he wins a race.”
Bowman was off to a great start in this season’s first six races, including finishing second (started from the pole) at Homestead. He also has four other top-10 finishes. But he has struggled in the last three races: 27th at Martinsville, 35th at Darlington, and 37th at Bristol, as his pole went for naught due to engine issues that ended his race just 343 laps into the 500-lap event.
Obviously, it’s too soon for Petty to predict how Wallace and Bowman will do in the 10-race postseason, but KP is definitely convinced that both drivers will make the playoffs. Where they go from there is anybody’s guess.
