Noah Gragson is getting another crack at the No. 4 Ford.
Front Row Motorsports announced Friday that Gragson will return to the car for the 2027 NASCAR Cup Series season, with options to keep the marriage going beyond next year. Because apparently neither side is ready to admit this relationship needs counseling.
Gragson is in his third full Cup season and second with Front Row. The 28-year-old Las Vegas native currently sits 31st in the championship standings, which is roughly the automotive equivalent of finding out your GPS has been recalculating for 200 miles.
Still, there are reasons Front Row is willing to keep the faith.
Gragson has plenty of experience, including 13 victories in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series during his four seasons with JR Motorsports from 2019 through 2022. Eight of those wins came in 2022, when he finished second in the championship. So nobody has forgotten that there is a rather useful race car driver buried in there somewhere.
The problem is that 2026 has been a struggle.
Gragson and first-year Cup crew chief Grant Hutchens have managed just one top-10 finish through the first 23 races, a ninth-place run at Talladega Superspeedway in April. There have been flashes of something better, including an 11th-place finish in the Daytona 500 and a 16th at Nashville Superspeedway.
But flashes don’t put trophies on the shelf.
Gragson’s average finish this season is 24.65, which is hardly the sort of number that makes champagne nervous. Yet it would still be his best average finish since 2024 if he can maintain it through the end of the season.
That 2024 season was Gragson’s first with Stewart-Haas Racing, and it produced a career-best seven top-10 finishes along with a 24th-place finish in the standings and a 19.6 average finish. Considering where things have gone since, 19.6 suddenly looks less like a mediocre number and more like something you’d frame and hang over the fireplace.
Gragson’s path to the Cup Series has been anything but straightforward.
He made his Cup debut in 2022 on a part-time schedule, bouncing between Beard Motorsports, Kaulig Racing and Hendrick Motorsports. His final start that year came in the No. 48 Hendrick Chevrolet after Alex Bowman was injured.
Then came his first full season in 2023 with Legacy Motor Club, driving the No. 42 Chevrolet. A year later, he moved to Stewart-Haas Racing before joining Front Row Motorsports in 2025.
Now he has something he hasn’t had much of during his Cup career: a little stability.
Whether that stability produces a breakthrough is another matter entirely.
Front Row clearly sees enough in Gragson to give him another year, and the options beyond 2027 suggest this isn’t merely a one-year experiment. But NASCAR is a wonderfully unforgiving place. Eventually, the excuses run out, the stopwatch gets the final word and the car has to go faster.
Gragson has another season to prove it can.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
- Noah Gragson’s NASCAR career gets another lease on life - August 14, 2026
- Ty Gibbs won, but JGR’s real story was behind him - August 9, 2026
- Ty Gibbs has graduated from promising to dangerous - August 9, 2026