First and foremost, Sunday belonged to Denny Hamlin, who drove to Victory Lane at Martinsville Speedway for the first time in a decade to claim his first win of 2025 — and set his course toward capturing that elusive first career championship.
But it was a great day for Hamlin’s allies, too. While his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell finished second (albeit a distant 4.62 seconds back), Bubba Wallace, who drives for the 23XI Racing team Hamlin co-owns, came home third to complete a Toyota lock-out on the podium.
For Wallace, the Martinsville run was more than just a solid day at the track. It continued a stretch of early performances this season that have him looking as strong as he ever has in his Cup career. Though he is still looking for his first win since Kansas in 2022 — 86 races ago — there are plenty of signs Bubba’s drought could end soon … perhaps even this weekend.
If it feels like the No. 23 has been a fixture up front all season, it’s not your imagination. Despite leading zero laps Sunday, Wallace joined Hamlin, Bell and Kyle Larson as the only drivers to spend 100% of the race running in the top 15. This came on the heels of the previous week’s race at Homestead, where Bubba spent 94% of his laps running in the top 15. Overall, he’s run 72.2% of all possible laps this season in the top 15, which ranks fifth among regular drivers — trailing Tyler Reddick (88.1%), Kyle Larson (83.6%), William Byron (78.8%) and Ryan Blaney (73.2%):
This tracks with plenty of other numbers indicating a career year for Wallace in 2025, his fifth season at 23XI and ninth in the Cup Series. I wrote a few years ago that Wallace was already an above-average driver, according to metrics such as average finish, Adjusted Points+ index (where average is always set to 100) and Driver Rating (where average is around 70.0). But he’s only gotten better since then. Despite the ongoing winless streak, Wallace is currently on pace for career-best marks in:
- Average start (10.7; previous best was 12.4 in 2023)
- Average running position (11.1; previous best was 14.9 in 2024)
- Share of possible laps led (5.4%; previous best was 3.1% in 2023)
- Share of possible laps in top 15 (72.2%; previous best was 61.2% in 2023)
- Standings rank (8th; previous best was 10th in 2023)
- Adjusted Points+ index (127; previous best was 121 in 2024)
- Average Driver Rating (87.9; previous best was 79.6 in 2023)
Speaking of Driver Rating, it tells us something else important about Wallace’s evolution as a driver. If we dig deeper, we see that he hasn’t just improved his overall performance level this season, but he’s also improved within each category of track type relative to earlier phases of his career. Here are the Driver Rating splits by track type for Bubba in three different eras of his time in Cup — the Richard Petty Motorsports era (2017-20) when he first broke in, his early years at 23XI (2021-24) and his run in 2025:
Granted, we only have a sample size of one race on a short track this season — but as we already noted, it was a good one for Wallace this past weekend. Meanwhile, he’s also hit his usual solid marks at superspeedways (I’m counting Atlanta in that group), and a very strong run at Homestead — a season-high 118.7 Driver Rating while finishing third — offset a few tougher outings at Phoenix and Las Vegas among the ovals. Plus, Bubba even drove to a solidly mid-pack day (his average running position was 18th) at COTA, which isn’t bad by his standards at a road course, his weakest track type by far.
All of this speaks to Wallace becoming a more well-rounded and consistent contender week-to-week, across the wide variety of tracks drivers encounter in the schedule. That’s especially true early in the season – with the schedule landing on more non-ovals than ovals. Traditionally, Bubba has been a slow starter before finding more pace in the second half of the season, but he had a 136 Adjusted Points+ index in the first quarter of the schedule last year and he’s off to a comparable start this year.
The only thing missing is a return trip to Victory Lane for Wallace, who has the highest average Driver Rating of any active Cup driver without a win since the start of 2023. And that would seem to be just a matter of time, as metrics like average running position (where Bubba ranks third this season behind Byron and Reddick) and Driver Rating are highly predictive of future finishes. To try to estimate when his best chance may be, I ran each remaining race through my track-scouting projection system — which uses performance at a particular track, and all of its similar tracks, to predict Driver Rating in any given upcoming race. Here are Bubba’s week-by-week projections over the rest of the 2025 season:
By a stroke of coincidence, one of Wallace’s best projected tracks happens to be coming up immediately at Darlington. While he’s never won there, Bubba has finished 16th or better in each of his past five races at “The Track Too Tough To Tame,” including top 10s in four of them. Additionally, he has posted Driver Ratings in the 90s in each of his past four Darlington starts. And Homestead — one of Darlington’s other two somewhat similar tracks — has been Bubba’s best track by average Driver Rating (95.5) in the Next Gen era. (That’s less the case for Dover, Darlington’s other similar track, where Bubba’s rating is just 68.4, but Darlington is also a fairly unique track in general.)
All of this points to the potential for a Bubba breakthrough in Sunday’s Goodyear 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), which would validate all of those laps he’s put in at the front of the field this season. And if it doesn’t happen at Darlington, he’ll have plenty more chances soon — with a run of favorable ovals and superspeedways on the horizon before the next road course appears on the calendar. Either way, this season is shaping up to be a career year for Wallace.
