Josh Berry won at Las Vegas in 2025, made the playoffs, and was presumably a driver who had finally cracked the Cup Series. Twelve months later, he is 30th in the standings, averaging a 26.5 finishing position, and Wood Brothers Racing is not picking up his option for next year. As the news makes rounds around the NASCAR garage, Denny Hamlin went on his podcast this week and talked about exactly why this keeps happening to drivers in that car.
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“Let’s be factual, the performance is bad” via Denny Hamlin’s Action Detrimental podcast. “Listen, it’s Penske’s team. I think they put most of their development people on the 21 car because that’s their pathway to a house car.
“The Wood Brothers own the charter. Wood Brothers does their social accounts. But I don’t know how much the Wood Brothers do beyond that. I’m very uninformed. But Penske is struggling, and you have a development team on a struggling team. My next question would be: what do you expect?”
Here’s the thing: Wood Brothers Racing does not make its own cars. The chassis, the data, the engines, all of it comes from inside the Team Penske shop. While it is Penske-level equipment on paper, the team itself is struggling for speed, and the resource pecking order becomes very obvious very fast.
Simulation slots, wind tunnel data, top engineering talent, all of that goes to Blaney, Logano, and Cindric first. WBR gets the rest. While Ryan Blaney has maximized Penske’s best setups into a win, ten Top-10s, and third in points, teammates Joey Logano, who is 17th, and Austin Cindric, 16th, have combined for just three Top-5s despite having cars capable of leading laps.
On top of that, teams get 20 minutes of practice most weekends now. Everything depends on the simulation work done during the week. If you are getting secondary time slots with less-refined data, you are already behind before you unload the car. And when Ford is broadly off the pace, which it has been for most of 2026, that gap compounds.
The precedent in this matter makes the point better than anything else. Matt DiBenedetto came in off a playoff run, and his Cup career effectively ended in that car. Harrison Burton was a touted Xfinity winner, but when he finished three seasons with three finishes of 27th, 31st, and 28th, he was released.
Berry won a race in that same car in 2025. His average finish went from 16.2 to 26.5 in one year. That is not a driver who forgot how to race overnight. And so, as simply put by Denny Hamlin to conclude the matter:
“The performance is bad. You’re with an organization, that is apparent, is struggling with speed, and you have what I would think is the fourth-best team of that struggling team. I just think the bar is going to be pretty low.”
