Who should replace Martin Truex Jr. at Joe Gibbs Racing?

Whenever a team must replace a driver with 34 career wins and a Cup Series championship on his resume, it‘s a big decision to make.

That‘s exactly the situation Joe Gibbs Racing is facing after last week‘s news that Martin Truex Jr. is retiring from full-time racing after the 2024 season. Truex has been a staple of the team since the dissolution of Furniture Row Racing following the 2018 season, winning 15 races and scoring 106 top-10 finishes over that span. Before that, Truex had already established himself as a champion by outdueling future teammate Kyle Busch with the title on the line at Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2017.

Anybody tabbed to follow one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history in the seat of the No. 19 will face big expectations. But Gibbs has had to replace legends before, from when Bobby Labonte succeeded Dale Jarrett as the driver of the No. 18 in 1995 to Gibbs handing the keys of Tony Stewart‘s No. 20 ride to young Joey Logano in 2009, or even when Kyle Busch left the No. 18 after the 2022 season.

So let‘s rank the top candidates to replace Truex, by both their current series and their performance so far this season. We‘ll be measuring the latter according to my Adjusted Points+ Index metric — which gives points to drivers for their finishes in each race and then compares their per-race performance to the average driver in their series (scaling everything such that average is 100, while a rating of 120 is 20% better than average, etc).

Cup Series

1. Noah Gragson
Age: 25
Career Cup starts: 56
Current team: Stewart-Haas Racing
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 99.1
Index relative to teammates: +19.9

Despite difficult circumstances, with the news of SHR shutting down operations after the season, Gragson has bounced back from 2023 with Legacy Motor Club to be one of the Cup Series‘ most improved drivers this year. He has five top 10s in 17 starts, scoring one of SHR‘s lone podium finishes of the season with a third-place run at Talladega in April. Gragson is also just 25, and a vastly more professional showing this season (both on and off the track) has helped him reclaim the potential that made him one of the sport‘s most promising up-and-coming drivers when he narrowly lost the 2019 Xfinity Series championship. (The winner there, Ty Gibbs, would be a new teammate/rival at JGR if Gragson is Truex‘s successor.) Finally, Gragson has past experience with Toyota in the Gibbs pipeline, having driven three Xfinity Series races for them in 2018.

2. Chase Briscoe
Age: 29
Career Cup starts: 125
Current team: Stewart-Haas Racing
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 95.6
Index relative to teammates: +15.3

Speaking of bounce-back seasons, Briscoe has also been much better in 2024. He was one of the Cup Series‘ more disappointing drivers last year — with an average finish outside the top 20 — while failing to build on a 2022 campaign that saw him record his first career Cup victory at Phoenix Raceway (to go with nine other top-10 finishes). But Briscoe has matched Gragson with five top 10s already by midseason, and the pair have practically identical performance stats on the season. The big question on Briscoe might be that he isn‘t a Toyota guy; he‘s a Ford lifer, having run every race of his NASCAR national series career in a Blue Oval.

3. Josh Berry
Age: 33
Career Cup starts: 29
Current team: Stewart-Haas Racing
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 81.1
Index relative to teammates: -4.1

Naturally, all of the SHR drivers are going to figure heavily into this year‘s Silly Season, with the team disbanding and its charters being scattered to the four winds. Berry is part of that mix, though his performance hasn‘t been on the same level as teammates Gragson and Briscoe so far. While he secured the other SHR podium of the year when he finished third at Darlington Raceway, he has mostly been uncompetitive — on Sunday at Iowa Speedway, his seventh-place finish was one of just three top 10s in 17 starts — and he‘s tied with Michael McDowell for the lowest rate of finishing races (76.5%) among any Cup regular. One of the pros of adding Berry is that he would likely take crew chief Rodney Childers with him, bringing one of the best in the business to the JGR garage. However, Berry didn‘t even produce an average Pts+ index — he was at 98.7 — while filling in with Chase Elliott‘s Hendrick equipment (and another champion crew chief, Alan Gustafson) last season, so he may not fit in with the expectations for a Gibbs team that has had exactly two below-average Pts+ seasons from its regular drivers since dropping J.J. Yeley in 2007: Daniel Suárez in 2018 and 20-year-old Ty Gibbs in 2023.

4. Erik Jones
Age: 28
Career Cup starts: 270
Current team: Legacy Motor Club
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 62.7
Index relative to teammates: +14.1

Jones has long been a tough driver to assess. He was at Gibbs for parts of four seasons from 2015-20, and while he outdrove the Cup Series average during those years — with a 139 Pts+ index — he could never outdrive his talented teammates. More recently, he‘s been in the opposite situation: Jones has easily beaten his teammates at Legacy Motor Club, but it hasn‘t been worth much in terms of absolute success. (He has just eight top 10s in 51 starts over the past two seasons.) Would he be a better bet than the other names on this list if he returned to JGR? On the one hand, it‘s hard to see a Gibbs reunion in the cards for Jones after he said JGR “blindsided” him when they moved on in 2020. But Jones knows the Gibbs program and has been in Toyotas nearly his entire career. Given that we‘ve seen him be solid — if not great — with JGR before, Jones may have the highest floor of any driver they might pick to replace Truex.

5. Ryan Preece
Age: 33
Career Cup starts: 168
Current team: Stewart-Haas Racing
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 60.9
Index relative to teammates: -31.1

Preece is the last of the SHR drivers on our list, and it‘s difficult to imagine Gibbs would tap a guy who has struggled to keep up with Gragson, Briscoe and Berry this season in comparable equipment. Preece‘s 2024 stats (an average finish of 21.6 and a 61 Pts+ index) are almost exactly in line with his career averages (23.2 and 59, respectively) across multiple different teams, so this isn‘t a down season — a mid-pack performance is just what you can expect from Preece, something that doesn‘t fit in with what JGR‘s profile as a perennial contender.

6. John Hunter Nemechek
Age: 27
Career Cup starts: 58
Current team: Legacy Motor Club
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 56.8
Index relative to teammates: +4.9

Nemechek technically ranks lowest among our regular Cup Series candidates in Pts+ index, but he would potentially be a more attractive choice than Preece or even some of the others on the list. Nemechek is relatively young; he‘s just a year removed from a fourth-place finish in the Xfinity standings (done while driving for Gibbs); he‘s been outdriving his teammates at Legacy Motor Club this year, and he has more than a decade of NASCAR national series experience in Toyotas. In some ways, that history makes him a natural choice to at least get a look for the Truex seat, even though he‘s been a near-total non-factor (two top 10s in 17 races) in Cup this season.

The Wild Card: Kyle Busch
Age: 39
Career Cup starts: 695
Current team: Richard Childress Racing
Adjusted Pts+ Index: 100.3
Index relative to teammates: +53.7

This would be the biggest bombshell of the 2024-25 Silly Season, if it happens. And according to Pts+ index, Busch is currently having the best Cup Series season of anybody on our list of candidates — driving circles around RCR teammate Austin Dillon — despite this otherwise being the worst full season of Busch‘s storied career. But a Gibbs reunion seems unlikely for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Busch is still under contract with Childress next season. Busch can still drive, and Gibbs would upgrade his chances to compete for a championship again, but there may be too many obstacles in the way of making this work.

Xfinity and Trucks

1. Chandler Smith
Age: 21
Career Cup starts: 3
Current team: Joe Gibbs Racing (Xfinity Series)
Xfinity Series adjusted Pts+ Index: 202.0
Index relative to teammates: +48.8

Smith — who ranks second in the Xfinity Series standings — might have the inside track for Truex‘s seat if JGR bypasses the Cup drivers and dips into the lower-tier series. He‘s just 21 years old, which puts him in the same young hotshot mold as Ty Gibbs when he ascended to a Cup ride, and he has spent most of his career in Toyotas, including driving for Gibbs this season. There‘s precedent for Gibbs plucking a promising driver from the Xfinity Series and handing them a competitive ride — see Ty Gibbs, Tony Stewart, Daniel Suárez and Jason Leffler — though some of those stints were vastly more successful than others.

2. Austin Hill
Age: 30
Career Cup starts: 8
Current team: Richard Childress Racing (Xfinity Series)
Xfinity Series adjusted Pts+ Index: 201.8
Index relative to teammates: +54.8

Currently third in the Xfinity standings, Hill finished fifth last year and has become one of the most reliable contenders in the Xfinity Series. He also has Cup experience with Penske, Beard Motorsports and RCR over the past three seasons, finishing a career-best 14th last August in the Daytona night race. While he and Smith have almost identical performance metrics this year, Hill is the older, more experienced driver (with nearly twice as many career Xfinity starts under his belt).

3. Corey Heim
Age: 21
Career Cup starts: 2
Current team: Tricon Garage (Truck Series)
Truck Series adjusted Pts+ Index: 246.5
Index relative to teammates: +137.9

After ranking fourth in the 2023 Truck Series — a finish marred by a payback incident with Carson Hocevar in the championship race — Heim has unfinished business in 2024, and he‘s been flat-out dominating this year. (While he still trails Christian Eckes in the standings, he has twice as many wins and a far superior Pts+ index.) Heim is Toyota‘s top prospect as well, which will automatically land you in a prominent place on JGR‘s radar. But the only precedent for a driver primarily in the Truck Series making the leap to a full-time Cup ride at Gibbs the following season might be Denny Hamlin, who ran more truck races than Xfinity ones in 2004, then made his Cup debut to replace Leffler in 2005. (And even there, Hamlin was running a full-time Xfinity schedule at the time, while Heim has started only seven of 15 possible Xfinity races this year.) The rest was history for Denny, and Heim might have that level of potential, but he probably needs more experience at a higher level before making the full-time leap to the Cup Series.