Why Chevrolet's long NASCAR Michigan winless drought won't end this week

It's been nearly a decade since Chevrolet last won a NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway. 

In the 11 races at the two-mile track in Brooklyn, Michigan, since Kyle Larson won with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2017, Chevy has been shut out in victory lane. Just to show how long it's been since a Bowtie won at MIS, that win was just the fourth of Larson's entire career — he now has 32 — and future champion Chase Elliott was yet to win a single Cup race. 

That streak is frustrating enough as-is for Chevrolet, especially given that Michigan is less than an hour-and-a-half away from GM's Detroit headquarters, which just saw a Honda driver in Alex Palou win IndyCar's Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix on the streets of Motor City. 

The bad news for Chevrolet is that a victory this weekend seems unlikely, given the manufacturer's struggles on high-speed ovals through the first 14 Cup races of the season. 

Chevrolet lacking speed on fast ovals

Just as it did in 2018, Chevy came into the 2026 season with a new body, essentially forcing teams to put together a notebook on the fly while in the heat of battle. It took Chevrolet until Race No. 7 to score a win, with Chase Elliott taking the victory at Martinsville. 

Things have been slightly better for Chevrolet since the beginning of April. Carson Hocevar won at Talladega, Shane van Gisbergen won at Watkins Glen, Elliott won at Texas and Daniel Suarez, via a savvy strategy call and well-timed precipitation, won the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte. 

That is notably a much better record than Chevrolet had when it introduced its new Camaro body in 2018. Through the first 21 races of the 2018 Cup season, Chevy's only win was Austin Dillon's Daytona 500 triumph. It didn't win on a non-drafting oval until Elliott won at Dover, and Chevrolet scored a paltry four wins on the year in 36 races, three of which were Elliott's. 

But while the wins are coming slightly easier for the Bowtie Brigade than they were eight years ago, there's still a noticeable lack of speed in the Chevrolet camp on non-drafting ovals, where Toyota has dominated. 

Not only have Toyotas won nine of the first 14 Cup races overall, but also five of nine on non-drafting ovals. On non-drafting tracks over a mile in length, Toyota's been victorious four times in six races. 

It was three Toyota drivers in Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell and Chase Briscoe battling for the win at Nashville. Hamlin and Bell had the two fastest cars at Charlotte the week prior, Hamlin won the All-Star Race at Dover and it was Hamlin and Reddick who tussled for the win in the closing laps at Kansas. 

Michigan, being a fast, sweeping two-mile behemoth, is not a 1:1 comparison to any other track on the schedule. But if current trends are to be believed, it will be Toyota that leads the pack in Sunday's FireKeepers Casino 400 as Chevrolet lags behind. 

Hamlin and Reddick are the last two Michigan winners, while Chris Buescher is the other active Cup driver to win a Next-Gen era race at MIS.