First Win: Check. How Long Until the Second Win?

Ty Gibbs and Carson Hocevar earned their first career wins in the 2026 season. That got me wondering: Statistically, how long is it likely to take to earn a second win?

Some people talk about the first win the way one would talk about learning to ride a bike. Once you figure it out, it’s easier to do it again. Motorsports, like any sport, requires a degree of confidence. But also like other sports, confidence is what mathematicians call ‘necessary, but not sufficient.’

Wrangling the Data

AI and computer program make it easy for anyone to throw a graph or charts on a social media site. My question with many of these posts is… So?

It’s a pretty picture, but what does it mean? That goes beyond the fact that a lot of people don’t know how to read a graph — or even a chart. An AI or plotting program doesn’t understand your data, or take into account real-world constraints. To it, your data is just numbers.

My First Try

I started this exercise by charting race wins vs. number of that race for each driver. I chose number of races instead of time (i.e. months, days) because we’re really interested in wins vs. chances to win. Calendar time doesn’t make sense because we don’t race for three months. No one has a chance to win. This way also eliminates races missed for injury or bad behavior.

I had to cut the data down to the first five wins. I calculated the number of races between the first win and the second, as well as the delta between the first and third wins, and then the first and fifth wins.

And it was a mess. I actually had to print it out and stare at it for awhile. See where I highlighted squares looking for a pattern? Also, I made notes about the tracks at which the wins happened.

The chart didn’t get any prettier the longer I stared at it. If I had stopped here, I would have been able to note that:

• The number of races between first and second wins ranged from three to 223.
• The number of races between first and third wins ranged from eight to 289.
• Some Hall-of-Fame drivers were in the bottom half of the chart.

This was not very useful.

Refining the Second-Win Data

So what about those drivers in the lower portion of the chart? You might see in the photo that I folded the paper because the drivers with many races between their first and second wins didn’t make sense. We’re talking drivers like Chase Briscoe, Michael McDowell, Joey Logano, A.J. Allmendinger, Martin Truex Jr. and Chris Buescher. So what do those drivers have in common?

It’s not quality: They span the range from a few wins to a multi-time series champion.

It can’t be due to the era, either. Truex’s first Cup Series race was in 2004. Briscoe’s was 2021.

It’s not age, either.

The thing that separates these drivers is the teams they drove for. Emphasis on teams. Most (but not all) started out their careers with lower-tier teams and moved around a bit. Some, like Keselowski, got an early win and attention from larger teams.

Briscoe earned his first two wins with Stewart-Haas Racing. He had 94 races between his first win at Phoenix at the start of 2022 and his second win at Darlington with the same team, but at the end of 2024 — as the team prepared to shut down. That 94-race gap says more about the state of SHR than it does Briscoe’s capabilities.

Chris Buescher, a perennially under-ranked driver, first won with Bob Jenkins in 2016 at Pocono. He drove for JTG-Daugherty before landing with Jack Roush in 2020. Buescher’s second win didn’t come until 2022, in the 29th race of the season at Bristol. That gives him 223 races between win one and win two.

But again, that’s more about teams than it is the driver.

What We Can Say About Second Wins

To make the data more comparable to Hocevar and Gibbs, I’m focusing on drivers who stayed with the same team for at least their first three wins. I made an exception for Blaney, since the Wood Brothers’ No. 21 car is sort of a fourth Penske car. I left Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. in there, too because I was curious about drivers whose first wins were at superspeedways.

Time Between Wins by Driver

	Track of 1st Win	Win 1	Win 2	Win 3	Win 4	Win 5	Win 1-Win 2	Win 1-Win 3	Win 1-Win 5
Johnson	Fontana	13	16	31	51	58	3	18	45
Reddick	Road America	92	96	104	116	138	4	12	46
Chastain	COTA	121	125	168	187	217	4	47	96
Hamlin	Pocono	21	27	60	85	136	6	39	115
Stewart	Richmond	25	32	33	47	48	7	8	23
Stenhouse Jr	Talladega	158	165	365	431	nan	7	207	nan
Elliott	Watkins Glen	99	107	109	123	135	8	10	36
Gordon	Charlotte	42	50	64	66	68	8	22	26
Ky Busch	Fontana	31	41	61	83	118	10	30	87
Byron	Daytona	98	111	149	152	183	13	51	85
Harvick	Atlanta	3	17	52	91	147	14	49	144
Larson	Michigan	99	116	126	134	137	17	27	38
Bowman	Chicago	134	156	198	202	207	22	64	73
T. Dillon	Charlotte	133	158	247	326	395	25	114	262
Ku Busch	Bristol	48	74	75	78	84	26	27	36
Wallace	Talladega	143	176	277			33	134
Blaney	Pocono	68	119	157	175	204	51	89	136
Bell	Daytona RC	38	92	104	107	116	54	66	78
Cindric	Daytona	8	94	125	nan	nan	86	117	nan
Logano	Loudon	20	125	170	190	192	105	150	172

This starts to make a smidge more sense now that we’re considering drivers with career trajectories similar to Hocevar and Gibbs. With the exception of Logano and Cindric, all the drivers on this chart won their second race anywhere between three and 54 races after their first win.

Excluding Cindric and Logano, there are 18 drivers represented.

• Half of those drivers won their second race within 10 races of their first.
• Two-thirds of the drivers won their second race within 20 races of their first.

So that suggests there’s a decent chance for Gibbs and Hocevar to win second races this year. Of course, there are 34 other drivers who would like to have a say about that happening.

Contrary to what I expected, the quality of the team didn’t factor in much. Reddick was with RCR when he won his first three races, Chastain with Trackhouse. But Hamlin, Johnson and Stewart were all with tier-one teams.

Does Timing of the First Win Matter?

It doesn’t seem to, at least for those drivers who didn’t have team switches or other exceptional circumstances. The drivers with the most recent wins generally earned them from races 90 to 145. Bell is an exception, with his first win coming at race 38.

Does the Track Where the First Win was Earned Matter?

• Four drivers earned their first wins at road courses: Reddick, Chastain, Elliott and Bell. That’s a recent phenomenon because there used to only be two road courses on the schedule.
• Four drivers also earned their first wins at superspeedways: Stenhouse, Byron, Wallace and Cindric. Three of the four haven’t earned a fifth win yet.

A Second Win is Not Guaranteed

What do the following drivers have in common?

• Trevor Bayne
• Johnny Benson Jr.
• Harrison Burton
• Cole Custer
• Justin Haley
• Casey Mears
• Paul Menard
• Jerry Nadeau

These drivers have won exactly one race in their NASCAR careers. Mind you, that’s more than most NASCAR drivers ever win. But Haley ran 177 Cup Series races after his win without getting a second. Custer stands at 144 races and counting.

Even drivers with multiple wins may experience long gaps between them. Kyle Busch hasn’t won in 144 races, Alex Bowman in 59 , Kyle Larson in 35 and Ross Chastain in 34.

A Working Theory

I say it’s a ‘working theory’ because I haven’t yet dug into it. But I noticed something interesting in the data. If you look at the time it takes for a driver to get their first five wins — when they’re with the same team for those five wins — It’s 45 races or less. The drivers who satisfy that constraint are series champions.

Reddick switched teams between win 3 and win 4 but still got his first five wins in 46 races. And he’s already got five wins in the first 11 races this year. Of course, he’s not a series champion. Yet.

That’s not to say first-five wins in 45 races is a requirement for becoming a champion. Logano, Blaney and Kyle Busch prove that. But it’s an interesting metric.

So meet me back here in 2027 and let’s see if Gibbs and/or Hocevar will join that group of elite drivers.