In 78 years of modern-era NASCAR Cup Series racing, only twice has a driver won four of the first six races of a season.
Dale Earnhardt did it in 1987 and went on to win 11 races and the championship by nearly 500 points. Bill Elliott accomplished the feat in 1992 and lost the title by 10 points, beaten by the margin of a single lap led in the season finale.
The list has been closed for 34 years. On March 22 at Darlington Raceway, Tyler Reddick opened it again.
His fourth victory in six starts was perhaps the least likely of them all up to now. His alternator failed on the second lap. His crew chief spent the first stage instructing him to flip switches and turn dials while he raced, in an effort to identify which systems could be cut to preserve the remaining voltage. The cockpit fans were turned off first, then the cool suit’s water circulation.
Tyler Reddick Overcomes Adversity to Win at Darlington
At one pit stop, a crew member pumped out the standing water from the suit, as it had begun to warm against Reddick’s body in the South Carolina heat rather than keeping him cool. He ran without driver cooling through the final third of the race, trailing the leader by nearly 15 seconds at his lowest point, and won by nearly six seconds when it was over. It was his first win at Darlington after three runner-up finishes there, and the one that placed him alongside the two most decorated drivers in the sport’s modern history.
To understand what this season means, it helps to understand what last year cost him. Reddick spent 2025 winless, and not because he was slow. He completed more laps than any other driver in the series and had nothing to show for it. His newborn son was dealing with health complications that pulled at him through every race weekend.
Meanwhile, the team he drives for, 23XI Racing, was fighting for its existence in a federal courthouse. Co-owners Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin had filed an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR, alleging the sport’s charter system operated as an illegal monopoly. The team was trying to win races while simultaneously arguing in court that it had the right to keep trying.
The lawsuit was settled before 2026 began. NASCAR extended evergreen charters to all teams, giving 23XI the permanent organizational standing its rivals had long taken for granted. Reddick came to Daytona International Speedway in February with a stable team, a reset offseason and something to prove. Since then, he has spent six weeks accomplishing things the sport has not seen in a generation.
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The four victories have covered four different types of racing and required four different ways of winning. Reddick had never led a single lap in seven career starts at the Daytona 500, and he didn’t this year until the last one. Reddick, with a push from teammate Riley Herbst, drove past Chase Elliott on the backstretch in the final 500 yards and won by 0.308 seconds as cars went sideways across the finish line behind him. He was the 25th different leader of the race, a new Daytona 500 record, and the only lap he led was the final one.
At EchoPark Speedway a week later, a nine-car accident with 37 laps remaining tore the right-front fender off his car and appeared to end his chances. Temperatures had dropped to 39 degrees, making repairs nearly impossible at pit-road speed. The crew taped what it could. Reddick led the most laps of anyone in the race and won in double overtime, beating Chase Briscoe by 0.164 seconds. That made him the first driver in nearly two decades to win the opening two races of a Cup season.
Then Reddick quieted the skeptics at Circuit of The Americas on March 1. Many expected Shane van Gisbergen, who despite never having won at COTA was the odds-on favorite to walk away from the field. Reddick lost the lead before the first turn on lap one, ran 18th through the first stage, rebuilt on pit strategy through the second and held off van Gisbergen over a 16-lap sprint to the finish. He spent eight laps with the New Zealander on his bumper pressuring through every sector, before Reddick pulled away for good. It was the first time in Cup history that any driver had won the season’s opening three races.
Phoenix Raceway and Las Vegas Motor Speedwayu brought finishes outside the top 10, a reminder that even dominant early-season form has limits.
Finally, Darlington happened. The alternator died, Reddick won anyway and the list that had been closed since 1992 acquired a third name.
Earnhardt did not win the 1987 Daytona 500 either. Elliott did, taking the points lead that came with it. Earnhardt went to Rockingham Speedway two weeks later and led 320 of 492 laps. At Richmond Raceway the week after that, he wrecked his primary car in practice. His crew spent the night rebuilding it on a frame jig. He started from the back on Sunday, spun on lap nine trying to pass Alan Kulwicki and drove back through the field without the benefit of caution flags to win the race.
At Darlington, Elliott led the final 72 laps on a single tank of fuel in a gamble that was working brilliantly until the last lap, when the car ran dry coming out of turn 4. Earnhardt, who had pitted 11 laps earlier, swept past him on the outside. North Wilkesboro Speedway was the fourth win. Then Bristol Motor Speedway and Martinsville Speedway. Six wins in eight starts.
The season ended with 11 victories in 29 starts, a 5.9 average finish and a championship margin of 489 points over Elliott — the largest of the modern era at the time. It remains the standard against which every dominant Cup campaign since has been measured, and most have fallen well short of it.
Elliott’s 1992 season is harder to write about because it does not resolve the way dominant seasons are supposed to. It is the story of a driver who did everything right for the first third of a year, only to watch the machinery come apart in the last third in ways he had no control over and could not have predicted.
He crashed at Daytona and finished 27th while Davey Allison won and built an early points cushion that Elliott’s spring run could never quite erase. Then came the streak: four consecutive victories at Rockingham, Richmond, Atlanta and Darlington. Leading the standings afterward, the championship appeared to be his. The consensus in the sport was that if the equipment held together, the title was his to lose.
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The equipment did not hold together. An engine failed at Martinsville. A sway bar snapped at Charlotte Motor Speedway while Elliott was running in the top five with fewer than 40 laps remaining. A cracked cylinder head forced him out at Phoenix.
Each mechanical failure came on a day when a strong finish seemed available. Each one transferred ground to Kulwicki, who had no business being in the championship conversation in October, but was there anyway, driving a self-owned Ford he had built from almost nothing in Wisconsin and finishing where he needed to finish every week.
The Hooters 500 at Atlanta in November is remembered by many as the greatest NASCAR race of all time. Richard Petty made his final start after 35 years and 200 victories. Jeff Gordon showed up for his first Cup start. Six drivers had a mathematical shot at the title. Later on, Allison crashed out. That left Kulwicki and Elliott.
Elliott won the race and led 102 laps. Kulwicki finished second and led 103. Under that era’s points system, leading the most laps earned a five-point bonus. One lap was the difference. Kulwicki won the championship by 10 points. Elliott, who had won five races to Kulwicki’s two, finished second. The cruelty of it is still specific enough to sting when you say it out loud.
The championship Reddick is chasing operates differently from the ones Earnhardt and Elliott ran for. This season, NASCAR has returned to a 10-race Chase postseason format, replacing the elimination format that governed the sport since 2014. The top 16 drivers in the regular-season standings after 26 races qualify. Wins no longer guarantee automatic berths, but they are worth 55 points now, compared to 35 for a runner-up, making the premium for winning the highest it has been in years. The champion is whoever accumulates the most points across the 10 Chase races, from Darlington in September to Homestead-Miami Speedway in November.
Reddick leads the standings with 325 points after six races and holds a 95-point cushion on Ryan Blaney. The format rewards exactly what he has shown: the ability to win on tracks where he has no business winning, in cars that have no business finishing first. Whether he can sustain that over 30 more races is the question the season has yet to answer.
Martinsville is next, on March 29. Then Bristol, then Kansas Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway. Earnhardt won at Bristol and Martinsville in 1987 and turned a hot start into a blowout title. Elliott won none of them in 1992, and spent the summer watching his lead dissolve one mechanical failure at a time. Somewhere in that stretch is where both of those stories were decided. Somewhere in that stretch is where Reddick’s will be decided, too.
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The three seasons are not identical in their details. Earnhardt’s four wins were non-consecutive, spread across Rockingham, Richmond, Darlington and North Wilkesboro after a fifth at Daytona. Elliott’s were four straight after a crash at Daytona. Reddick’s are their own shape: three wins to open the year, the first time any driver had done that, plus two forgettable finishes and then a win at the hardest track on the schedule in the hardest possible circumstances. The arc does not map cleanly onto either predecessor.
What all three share is the rarity of the number itself. In 78 years of modern-era Cup racing, only these three drivers have won four of the first six races of a season. Earnhardt and Elliott are in the Hall of Fame. Reddick is 30 years old, racing for a team that spent the previous year in a courthouse fighting for its life, and he has 30 races left in his season.
Earnhardt’s story ended the way dominant seasons are supposed to. Elliott’s ended the way the cruel ones do. Reddick’s story is six races old. The tracks ahead do not care how good he was in February, and neither will the standings when September arrives.
What he has built is real. What it becomes is still being decided.
Reddick won three of the first four races, yes, but he has of yet to prove himself alongside Elliott and Earnhardt (and no, I am not one of the Earnhardt worshippers).Maybe he will someday, but he hasn’t earned it yet. Time will tell.