Toyota Clinched a NASCAR Title With Three Races to Spare

Toyota clinched the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Manufacturers’ Championship on October 18, its fourth in the series and its first since 2019, and it locked the title up with three races still left on the schedule.

The clinching win came at Phoenix Raceway on October 18, when Tyler Reddick drove the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota to victory in the Freeway Insurance 500. It was Toyota’s 18th win of the season through 33 races, a total that only its 19-win 2019 campaign has beaten. The brand’s earlier manufacturers’ titles came in 2016 and 2017, with 16 wins each, and in 2019.

Toyota announced the title in a release from Avondale, Arizona, and the wins were spread across its roster rather than coming from one car. Reddick accounted for six of them, including the Daytona 500, which was Toyota’s first win in that race since 2020, and a record three straight victories to open the year. Denny Hamlin won four times and carried the most points of any Toyota driver into the playoffs as the No. 1 seed, the first time he has held that spot. Chase Briscoe won three races on intermediate tracks, including back-to-back playoff races at Las Vegas and Charlotte, and Christopher Bell took the Southern 500 at Darlington.

Two of the wins came from drivers who had never won a Cup race before this year. Ty Gibbs broke through at Bristol and added Iowa, and Corey Heim, a Toyota development driver on a part-time schedule, won the inaugural street race in San Diego in June and then the Brickyard 400 in July. Toyota supports three Cup teams, Joe Gibbs Racing, 23XI Racing and Legacy Motor Club, which Yahoo Sports noted field nine full-time entries between them.

"This is a very important title for Toyota and TRD," Tyler Gibbs, president of TRD, U.S.A., said in the release, adding that the championship "represents the teamwork, effort and passion of countless people across our organization." He said the work behind it began at the end of 2024, and that "we couldn’t be more pleased to have that work pay off with our fourth manufacturers’ title."

The title ends a run of five straight manufacturers’ championships for Chevrolet, which won every year from 2021 through 2025 and holds the all-time record with 44. Ford has 17. Toyota’s fourth moves it out of a tie with Hudson on the all-time list. Since its first Cup season in 2007, Toyota has recorded 221 wins and 189 poles in 716 starts.

The drivers’ title is still open, though the odds have moved against Toyota. Kyle Larson’s Chevrolet won at Talladega on October 25, and ESPN reported that he leads Hamlin by 73 points and Bell by 74 with two races remaining, after Bell crashed on pit entry and finished 35th and Reddick was swept up in a 12-car wreck. Toyota has not won a Cup drivers’ championship since Kyle Busch in 2019. The next race is at Martinsville on November 1.

The Toyota Report Take

Manufacturers’ titles rarely make the front page because fans follow drivers, not badges, but this one says something about where Toyota’s NASCAR program stands. Chevrolet had owned the award for five years, and Toyota did not take it back with one dominant car. It took it back with six different winners, two of them first-timers and one of them a part-time development driver, which is the kind of depth that lasts longer than a single hot season.

The drivers’ championship would be the fuller prize, and a 73-point deficit with two races left makes that a long shot for Hamlin and Bell. Even so, 18 wins in 33 races is a season Toyota will be happy to defend in 2027, and the fact that it came from three teams and six drivers suggests the program’s strength is not tied to any one of them.