Many NASCAR Cup Series fans, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., were certain that Josh Berry’s journey to victory lane in the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford was inevitable. However, few would have anticipated that he would be the season’s third different winner or that it would occur just five races into the 2025 season. Or that he would run a 1.5-mile oval in a “regular” race. Berry won the Pennzoil 400 on Sunday afternoon at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, marking his first career victory and the 101st for the Wood Brothers. However, his journey to the victory lane was by no means the only “upset” aspect of the 267-lap race across the 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) four-turn course Las Vegas, Nevada oval.
Daniel Suarez of Trackhouse Racing was beaten by Berry, and Ryan Preece of RFK Racing finished third. Even in the Next Gen era, it would be extremely difficult to find a more surprising top three in a race that isn’t on a superspeedway or road circuit. Suarez was the only driver with any playoff experience and the only previous race winner among the three, with two victories in nine seasons. Ironically, he is also a driver who many think will lose his job at the end of the 2025 season, as Connor Zilisch is expected to take over as driver of the No. 99 Chevrolet.
Preece’s third-place result, which matched his career high from a superspeedway race at Talladega six years ago while he was still with the team that was formerly known as JTG Daugherty Racing, may have been even more indicative of the circumstances. Two of last year’s Stewart-Haas Racing drivers placed in the top three of a “regular” oval race, while another former Stewart-Haas Racing driver placed second. Preece finished 26th in points last year, with Berry coming in 27th. Preece was in his second season with Stewart-Haas Racing, while Berry was in his first. In just a few years, Stewart-Haas Racing moved from being the Cup Series leader to an underdog, and their 2024 season-ending shutdown was not even much of a surprise, given that rapid decline.
Their 12 victories in 2018 and their 10 in 2020 put them at the top of the series. They advanced to the Championship 4 with Kevin Harvick for the third consecutive year and the fifth time in six years, despite having just four victories in 2019. However, they only managed four more wins in 2021 and 2022, and in 2023 they lost for the first time since switching to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2009. Then, if Chase Briscoe hadn’t held off Kyle Busch at Darlington Raceway in the regular season finale last year, they would have missed the playoffs completely with all four drivers. However, Briscoe’s 14th-place ranking was the poorest team-leading result for a Stewart-Haas Racing driver in team history, just one year after Harvick’s 13th became the worst.
The team’s DNF total of 26 matched their highest finish total, while their top five finish total of seven and top ten finish total of twenty-five were also their lowest. However, as Stewart-Haas Racing’s twilight years came to pass, the performances of Berry, Preece, and even Suarez—who only had a one-year stint with the team in 2019—show that the drivers weren’t the issue. The once-proud squad took a serious tumble from grace. Preece, a driver who many believed shouldn’t have been given another opportunity at the Cup level after his previous problems, and Berry, one of the oldest second-year Cup drivers in recent history at the age of 34, are both experiencing immediate success with new organizations—new Ford organizations, that is.
