Stenhouse heading into the new NASCAR Cup Series season looking to build on the lessons of 2025

Ricky Stenhouse and the No. 47 Hyak Motorsports Chevrolet placed 30th overall in the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series. Along the way, Stenhouse strung together three top 10 finishes and was consistently a top 15 finisher.

The 2023 Daytona 500 winner is now about to enter his 14th NASCAR Cup season, and is looking for an improved campaign in 2026.

“I will be on track at Bowman Gray on Saturday (for the pre-season Clash race),” he said. “It’s not really a make or break thing. It’s not super-serious. We want to do well for our partners and run well and make the race, but at the same time, we don’t have a ton of new Chevrolet body parts. So trying to make sure you get out of there with maybe some body panels that you can reuse would be beneficial for a team like us, because we are a single-car team.

“It will be interesting to just see how that race plays out. It’ll be really, really cold. I think it’s supposed to be a temperature high of 30 degrees. It’s going to be a chilly one.”

Immediately after the Bowman Gray race, Stenhouse will look to the 2026 Daytona 500.

“We’re ready,” he said. “We’re ready for it. We’ve been watching some tape and some film and we know that over the last five years we’ve put ourselves in the right positions to win the race. Obviously we’ve only won it once, but we continue to put ourselves in the right spots and we’ll be able to win us another one.

“You know, it’s a long week down there. I’m running the Truck race. It’ll be my first Truck race. So that will fill up the weekend even more with racing that on Friday night. Man, it’s going to be really cool to race the Truck and to try and get us a win there, as well.”

Immediately after Daytona will come the mixed bag of Atlanta, Circuit of the Americas, Phoenix and Las Vegas Cup Series races.

“It is a mixed bag,” he said. “We finished top five and top six at both of the Atlanta races last year. That felt good. I like COTA. I think we run well on the long run there. Hopefully we can find a little bit more raw speed. If we could, I think that would help us. And then we go out to Phoenix and Las Vegas.

“At Phoenix, I thought we ended the 2025 season strong for what we normally run like there. I’m pumped to get there this year and see if we can make some headway on that. We had a test this off-season, so we got to work on our short track package. I felt like that did good things for us. I think we learned a lot. Las Vegas will kind of be that real and true mile-and-a-half where we’ve raced well at in the past. It’s a good stretch of races to start the season.

“We’ll give it everything we’ve got. I feel like we show up to the racetrack and we don’t feel like we’re an underdog. We don’t have that mentality. We’ve got the mentality of, we’ve got really good quality people. We’ve got good quality cars. Our ownership group doesn’t hesitate to get us stuff that we need.

“Yeah, we’re definitely an underdog when it comes to resources and things like that that other teams have that we don’t. We just try and focus on what we do have. We want to do the best we can with it all. I’m just pumped to get the season going. The guys have been working really hard this off season, just getting things more organized. We had that test in January. We normally dot get many tests, so I think that was a big benefit. Hopefully it will help us throughout the year, because I think we learned a lot there.”

Stenhouse comes off something of an underwhelming 2025 season and is keen to improve upon it this ’26 Cup tour.

“2025 definitely wasn’t anything to write home about, but at the same time I felt like it was useful,” he said. “Again, I think we learned a lot of what not to do. Through the summer months we were working on our car and were just headed in the wrong direction on things that we were working on. That kind of led us down a path for a couple months where we just couldn’t get out of our way. I think the bright minds we have at the shop put their heads together and kind of found what we needed, and we were able to right the ship and end the season strong.

“I’m happy with the way we ended. I feel like or execution was something we looked at and said, ‘Man, if we can match or execution this year with a little bit more raw speed and handling out of or race car, than we’re going to have a good 2026.’ I think that’s where our focus is. We want to be continuing to prepare and execute the way we did. We just want to bring a little bit more raw speed to the racetrack.” 

On his 2026 goals?

“Early on last year up to around race 12, we were in the NASCAR Playoffs,” he said. “We had what we needed points-wise to be in the playoffs. We want to capture that again. If you do the season in thirds, in that first third we just want to make sure we are still in contention for top 16 in points. With the new Chase format, you’re going to have be top 16 in points.

“We’ll take that third and then we’ll do the next third and make sure we are still in that same position. I feel ready to go I feel like I’m well rested. I feel like I’ve done a really good job of kind of resetting everything this off-season. I feel like my team has done the same thing. Again, I think one race at a time, but I’ve got this gut feeling that I feel more confident going into 2026 than I did last year. I’m ready to hit the track running.”