Five NASCAR Cup drivers with something to prove in 2025 season

Let's be honest, every driver has something to prove in some form or fashion.

Here are five who stand out entering the 2025 NASCAR Cup season and what they could achieve this year.

Alex Bowman

He reached the final eight in the Cup playoffs in 2020 and followed that by winning a career-high four races in 2021.

But Bowman hasn't been able to duplicate those successes since.

He missed five playoff races due to a concussion after a crash at Texas in 2022.

Bowman led the points early in the 2023 season but suffered a fractured vertebra in a sprint car crash that April and missed three Cup points races. He had only four top 10s in 23 Cup races after he returned.

Bowman briefly advanced to the final eight last year — until his car failed post-race inspection at the Charlotte Roval and was disqualified. That allowed Joey Logano to secure the final playoff spot on his way to winning the title.

The 31-year-old Bowman often has been viewed as the "other driver" at Hendrick Motorsports to teammates Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson and William Byron. Elliott and Larson each have won a Cup championship. Byron won last year's Daytona 500.

This season is Bowman's chance to put the disappointments of the past three seasons behind him and begin a new chapter in his Cup career.

Chris Buescher

It was a decade ago that Buescher won the Xfinity championship.

He's run full-time in Cup since, but he's not had a playoff-caliber ride until recently. He's scored five wins in the last three seasons, including two victories in playoff races.

As RFK Racing grows, the focus is on making the playoffs and competing for wins. Buescher made the playoffs in 2023 but did not last year.

Since 2022, Buescher has scored nearly two-thirds of his 42 top 10s at either road courses or tracks that are 1 mile or less in length.

The key for Buescher and RFK Racing will be 1.5-mile tracks. Excluding Atlanta, which is categorized as a drafting track, five of the first 13 races of the regular season are at 1.5-mile speedways: Las Vegas, Homestead, Texas, Kansas and Charlotte.

Buescher has no wins and three top 10s in 21 combined starts at those tracks since the 2022 season. Teammate Brad Keselowski has had seven top 10s at such tracks in the same time.

Buescher nearly won at Kansas last May, finishing second to Kyle Larson by .001 seconds in the closest finish in series history.

Greater success at 1.5-mile tracks, along with his strength at short tracks, road courses and Darlington Raceway (three top 10s in the last four starts there), should return Buescher to the playoffs this season.

Daniel Suarez

Coming off a season where Suarez made the playoffs and Trackhouse Racing teammate Ross Chastain didn't, it might not make sense that Suarez has more to prove than Chastain.

While Suarez did make the playoffs via his dramatic Atlanta win last year, he has seen his number of top-10 finishes decline each of the past two seasons. Suarez had a career-best 13 top 10s in 2022. That total dropped to 10 in 2023 and nine last year.

A key area last season was average starting position. Suarez's average starting spot last year was 20.7 — four positions worse than the 2023 season.

So what?

Last year, he scored 29 points in the first stage — half of what he had scored in the opening stage of races in 2023.

Bottom line, if one doesn't qualify well, they're not typically running close to the front because of all the traffic. And if they get to the front, it can be the result of brazen strategy that happens to work that particular time vs. all the other times it doesn't.

There will be plenty of focus on Suarez — who has made the playoffs in two of the past three years — when the series goes to his native Mexico to race in June. The question will be if he has secured a spot in the playoffs by then and can be seen as someone who can contend or will be trying to race his way into the postseason.

Bubba Wallace

While Wallace has shown progression over the past few years, he has only one playoff appearance and no wins in the regular season (both of his Cup victories came in the playoffs in years he did not make the postseason).

23XI Racing teammate Tyler Reddick made the championship race last year, the first time the organization had done so.

Wallace starts this season with Charles Denike as his new crew chief and a focus on getting off to a good start, something that has hampered Wallace in past seasons.

Wallace has averaged 4.6 fewer points per event in the first 12 races of the season compared to the remaining 14 races in the regular season over the past three years.

If he had matched his productivity in the final 14 races of the regular season during the first 12 races, he would have scored 55 additional points. He would have made the playoffs last year with those extra points.

Wallace had eight top 10s in the final 16 races of last season, including four top 10s in the playoffs. He averaged 28.3 points during those races — the equivalent of a ninth-place finish.

If he can build upon that this season, he should be on the way to making the playoffs again.

Todd Gilliland

He's the most experienced Cup driver at Front Row Motorsports but also the youngest on the three-car team that includes Noah Gragson and Zane Smith.

Gilliland, who is 24 years old, has made 108 career Cup starts. He begins his fourth full-time season in the series. Gragson has 75 Cup starts; Smith has 45.

Nearly 60% of the races Gilliland had better results in year over year (2024 compared to 2023) were at short tracks and 1.5-mile tracks. It's a sign of the progress Front Row Motorsports and Gilliland have made.

Each year is an opportunity to move forward and such is the case for Gilliland.

This will be his third season with crew chief Ryan Bergenty. They had a rough start to last season, recording three top-20 finishes in the first 11 races of the year. They followed by scoring nine consecutive top 20s, including three top 10s.

Building upon that consistency will be key for this team. Do that and the No. 38 team could be in position to give Front Row Motorsports its third playoff appearance in the past five seasons.