High in the Custerdome
Cole Custer will be back in the Cup Series with the new Haas Factory Team. What can we expect?
Cole Custer will return to Cup in 2025 in the No. 41 for Haas Factory Team. Team will remain Ford and have a tech alliance with RFK Racing.
— Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) July 20, 2024
Custer hasn't had a successful Cup Series career thus far, with just one career win and an average finish outside playoff territory. The advanced metrics don't look much better. His rookie year was not bad: a slightly positive PFAE (positions finished above expected) and a nice success rate at 61%. Since then, it's been all underwater.
His Xfinity career is another story. In the year prior to his promotion to Cup, he had seven wins in the Xfinity Series as a 21-year-old. His underlying metrics were fairly strong. He had a 2.173 PFAE, which is good: solidly in the playoffs, if not championship tier. But his success rates were great, sitting around 80% in both of his final two years in the second tier. He's picked up where he left off since returning to Xfinity in 2023, with his PFAE surging to an excellent 4.682 in 2024.
Justin Barber
Custer is a curious case: the success rates are great, the PFAEs are only series-good. The PFAEs are not at the level one would want prior to promotion to the top level of NASCAR. However, if anything, the split indicates he's consistent.
Consistency and volatility are interesting concepts to consider in NASCAR. Take two drivers with an average finish of 15. Driver A finishes either first or 29th in every race—perfectly volatile. He's either winning or irrelevant. Driver B finishes 15th every race—perfectly consistent. Who would you rather have? If your goal is winning championships or even just winning races, you must go with driver A.
What happens when those drivers move from Xfinity to Cup? Driver B likely starts finishing 20th every race. Driver A is still picking up top fives with a lot of DNFs. Custer is a Driver B-type. His stats show someone who consistently delivers better-than-expected results in Xfinity, just not spectacularly so.
So what is he going to do when he returns to the Cup Series? We've seen some improvement in the Xfinity Series for him. Plus, he'll have the full dedication of a team instead of being the fourth car in a team spread too thin. HFT will have an alliance with a team that's performing well in RFK. I'm still skeptical that we'll see meaningful improvements in his results. I think he's going to continue to run effectively where he was running in his first Cup stint: just outside the playoffs. The results should be similar to that of Wood Brothers with Matt DiBenedetto: a team that looked like they could compete for a playoff spot, but unable to get over the hump in a series where there are too many good teams that win too many races. Teams in that tier can't point their way in, and Custer's not shown an ability to drag his teams to wins.
Statistically speaking, even with the RFK alliance, I don't think Custer will be able to do any damage in the Cup Series. Whereas Brad Keselowski and Chris Buescher are very good drivers, with Keselowski being the weaker of the two and yet riding a 4.145 PFAE this season, and Buescher having the second-best success rate in the NextGen era amongst active drivers, Custer is a just-good driver in a second tier series.