2018 Team Reviews: Leavine Family Racing, Germain Racing, Richard Petty Motorsports and GoFas Racing

With the 2018 season getting further and further in the rearview, it’s time to take a look back and the highs and lows of each Cup Series team in 2018. Our first entry will start with the single-car teams at the back of the Cup Series field and move on to the multi-car teams in the top 25 of the owner points standings. Let’s get rolling.

GoFas Racing

Driver: Matt DiBenedetto (29th in points)

Top 10s: 1

Season highlight: DiBenedetto’s best finish of the season came at Daytona in July when he was seventh. He was also 17th at Sonoma in June and 13th at the Charlotte Roval.

Season lowlight: DiBenedetto was never far from being the worst full-time driver in the points standings. He was 28th in the standings for one week and spent the other 35 weeks somewhere between 29th and 31st in the points. DiBenedetto said he wanted the opportunity to win races going forward, so he parted ways with GoFas at the end of the season. He signed with Leavine Family Racing. LFR drivers have seven top 10s in 184 races.

Richard Petty Motorsports

Driver: Bubba Wallace (28th)

Top 10s: 3

Season highlight: Wallace finished second in the Daytona 500 to Austin Dillon. It’s great to have your best finish of the season in the first and biggest race of the year. But it also makes the season a bit of a letdown, especially when that finish is so far ahead of everything else you do the rest of the season.

Season lowlight: Wallace’s lack of brakes at Pocono and Indianapolis led to some scary crashes. Thankfully Wallace emerged unscathed from both of them. They came in a late summer swoon that showed just how far off the pace RPM had gotten. Wallace finished no better than 23rd in a 12-race stretch from July through the first weekend of October.

Germain Racing

Driver: Ty Dillon (27th)

Top 10s: 1

Season highlight: Dillon’s only top-10 finish came at Daytona in July when he finished sixth.

Season lowlight: This may not be a lowlight, but it’s kind of remarkable. Dillon finished from 20th to 23rd in 13 of the 36 Cup Series races on the schedule. If you needed a guy who would finish on the cusp of the top 20, Dillon was your man. He was solidly consistent in making it to the end of races for a driver outside of the top 25 in the standings. He had just four DNFs.

Leavine Family Racing

Drivers: Kasey Kahne (25 races), Regan Smith (11 races)

Top 10s: 2

Season highlight: Smith was 10th at Talladega in the fall while Kahne was 4th at Daytona in July. Yeah, you can see the theme here.

Season lowlight: Smith didn’t even start the final race of the season with the rest of the field because of a fluid leak.

Kahne fell to 31st in the points standings after the spring Richmond race. That was the sign that his final season in the Cup Series was not going to go well. Kahne struggled putting together consistent finishes inside the top 20 before he started to struggle with hydration issues that ultimately forced him out of the car with 11 races to go. Kahne had a very solid Cup Series career and that will be the memory of him, not a pitiful final season with a low-budget team.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter

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