The 2026 Chase for championship was supposed to be a three-horse race: JGR, Penske, Hendrick Motorsports. But if you take a look at leaderboards, there’s a clear trend. Denny Hamlin from the Toyota camp is the number one seed, and Ryan Blaney is the only non-Toyota driver in top 6. So the question that everyone is asking going into the post-season is whether Chevrolet or Ford will be able to put a halt to Toyota domination? 

There’s optimism among the fans of HMS or Penske camp, but Steve Letarte had a more measured take. “Someone’s going to have to prove to me on track that Toyota still doesn’t have the advantage. That’s where I stand currently. Like I would be shocked if the top four isn’t some mixture of Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Chase Briscoe, and Christopher Bell,” Letarte said on the Dale Jr. Download podcast.

Letarte’s point was that the upcoming Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway is going to be the testing ground. Hamlin has five wins at Darlington. His teammate, Chase Briscoe, on the flip side, has won back-to-back Southern 500. Tyler Reddick from 23XI Racing won the spring race and has two top 5 finishes at the iconic oval. 

Jeff Gluck, who was also part of the panel, wasn’t entirely convinced over HMS Chevys consistency. “I really don’t know how to evaluate the Hendrick season. Because, they’re obviously not winning, they do show speed at times but also not like really convincing speeds. Chase how we knew it the old Chase, that’s not gonna work, and now we have stage points too.”

The manufacturer standings tell an even clearer story. Toyota leads with 1,176 points, well ahead of Chevrolet’s 995 and Ford’s 965. A major reason has been the level of cooperation within Toyota’s camp. Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing have effectively operated as two top-tier organizations rather than following a traditional primary and secondary team structure.

That creates an important advantage because teams can share technical information and strategic ideas. Data from one organization can help another find improvements faster. The same goes for decisions in the boardroom and wider competition strategy. Chevrolet, meanwhile, has spent much of the season trying to understand its new body design. The change has created a steep learning curve, especially with the cars’ low-downforce characteristics.

The cars have often been twitchy and hard to control on larger tracks and mile-and-a-halves. Drivers and analysts have repeatedly pointed to the difficulty of finding a consistent feel. Chevrolet’s last win in 2026 came way back in June, when Shane van Gisbergen won at Sonoma.

That problem has hit Chevrolet’s biggest organizations particularly hard. Hendrick Motorsports has shown flashes of speed, but it has not consistently produced the kind of performance expected from one of the sport’s most legendary organizations. Hendrick had their last win in the 2026 season in May at Texas, when Chase Elliott won the Wurth 400.

Limited wind tunnel time has also made the development process more difficult. Hendrick, Trackhouse Racing and Richard Childress Racing have had less opportunity to diagnose the balance problems and find solutions quickly.

Chevrolet drivers have won only six races this season (the same total as Ford). That leaves the manufacturer with plenty of ground to make up against Toyota. Ford, however, has shown that Toyota is not untouchable. The Blue Oval has won five of the last seven regular-season races, creating some momentum heading toward the Chase.

Ryan Blaney, who has won two of those recent races, believes Ford has improved its overall speed and performance on intermediate tracks. He has credited better communication and hard work across Team Penske and the wider Ford camp for the turnaround.

“I think we’re in a good spot,” Blaney said per The Tennessean. “Maybe we weren’t where we wanted to be early in the year, but we put a lot of work in, whether it was in our camp or just the Ford camp in general, on ‘How can we be better, and what areas can we be better in, and what do we need to work on to achieve that goal?'”

That could offer Chevrolet a blueprint. If Chevrolet wants to challenge Toyota and Ford during the Chase, it cannot simply hope its cars suddenly become faster. There are five Chevrolet drivers in the 2026 Chase — HMS’ Elliott, Kyle Larson and William Byron, along with Spire Motorsports’ Carson Hocevar and Daniel Suarez.

They need to close the gap quickly and consistently. Because as Letarte sees it, anything less could make the next 10 weeks a very long stretch for the Bowtie.