The Same Driver Gave Toyota Its 500th and 700th NASCAR Wins

Brandon Jones won the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Saturday night in the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota GR Supra, and the victory was Toyota’s 700th in NASCAR’s three national series.

The milestone came one night after Kaden Honeycutt’s Truck Series title race, which Toyota counted as win number 699, and it came from a driver who has been here before. Jones also delivered Toyota’s 500th NASCAR win, at Phoenix Raceway in March 2020, so the same driver has now put two of the manufacturer’s round-number milestones on the board, more than six years apart. Saturday’s win was his second of the 2026 season after Chicago and the ninth of his career in the series.

Toyota’s release on the milestone breaks the 700 down as 221 wins in the Cup Series, 222 in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and 257 in the Truck Series since the company entered NASCAR’s national ranks in 2004. Travis Kvapil scored the first of them in a Truck Series race at Michigan in July 2004, Jason Leffler took the first second-tier win at Indianapolis Raceway Park in July 2007, and Kyle Busch won Toyota’s first Cup race at Atlanta in March 2008. Busch is still the leading Toyota winner with 203 victories, ahead of Denny Hamlin with 76 and Christopher Bell with 41, and 89 drivers in all have won a national-series race in a Toyota. Joe Gibbs Racing accounts for 395 of the 700 on its own, 179 in Cup and 216 in the second series, since it switched to Toyota in 2008.

The race itself was not a Toyota procession. The official results show Jones started eighth and finished ninth and seventh in the two stages, while Sheldon Creed’s Chevrolet led 99 of the 200 laps from the pole. Jones led 25 laps in three stints, the last of them from Lap 187 to the checkered flag, and he beat Carson Kvapil’s Chevrolet to the line by 3.937 seconds in a race that ran two hours and 28 minutes with four cautions. His Gibbs teammate Brent Crews finished third in the No. 19 GR Supra, which Toyota’s post-race report says sealed the series’ Rookie of the Year award for him after 29 starts. William Sawalich was 10th in the No. 18, Taylor Gray 14th, Harrison Burton 23rd and Dean Thompson 33rd.

"There were so many cool positives out of today," Jones said afterward. "First off, knocking Toyota’s 700th win out of the park. I’ve gotten a couple milestones for this group a few times. It’s so cool to be a part of these big moments for this company. The truck guys did it yesterday and did a phenomenal job so I’m really hoping the Cup guys pull through, and we can sweep this weekend up." He added that the No. 20 "weren’t the best car to begin this race" and that the team "consistently made better gains on the car all night long," with long-run pace as its strength.

The championship went elsewhere. The NASCAR Wire Service reports that Justin Allgaier finished seventh in the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet and that was enough for his second series title in three years, 14 points clear of Jesse Love, with Kvapil third and Creed fourth in the final standings. Chevrolet took the manufacturers’ championship as well. Jones, who was also in the Chase field, ended the year eighth in points.

Tyler Gibbs, the president of Toyota Racing Development, said in the release that "the success we have seen in our over two decades in the sport is all about the people," and that "we are proud of this achievement, but the work is not done." The next chance to add to the total is Sunday’s Cup Series championship race at Homestead, where Toyota drivers start first, second and third and Bell and Hamlin are two of the three drivers still eligible for the title. Honeycutt’s Truck Series championship on Friday night was the weekend’s first Toyota trophy.

The Toyota Report Take

Seven hundred wins in 22 seasons is a remarkable run for a manufacturer that was a newcomer in 2004, and the breakdown says something about how Toyota got there. The Truck Series has supplied more wins than either of the car series, and Joe Gibbs Racing has supplied more than half the total by itself. That concentration has been Toyota’s strength and its exposure at the same time, which is why the Cup Series drivers’ title has stayed out of reach for so long even as the win count climbed.

Jones winning both the 500th and the 700th is the kind of coincidence a sport runs on, and it lands in a season where he has been a steady second-tier hand rather than a title contender. The number that matters more for Toyota is 221, the Cup total, because the only one it wants to add on Sunday is the one that comes with a championship.

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