Everything You Need to Know About the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Season

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

In less than a week, the Daytona 500 will be in the rearview mirror and 2015 Sprint Cup points will be on the board. That's right—after a long winter, racing is back.

At long last, after an offseason filled with big changes and endless speculation, we get to see who, if anyone, can dethrone Kevin Harvick, who Brad Keselowski will tick off next and who is ready to win his or her first Sprint Cup race this season.

Already, the 2015 season is off to a dramatic and thrilling start. 

On Sunday at Daytona 500 qualifying, Jeff Gordon started out his final year with a bang by winning the pole. His teammate, Jimmie Johnson, will join him on the front row, while the rest of the lineup will be decided in the Budweiser Duels later this week.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here's what you need to know to be fully ready for this NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.

Check the Rulebook

There are tweaks to the NASCAR rulebook every year, and 2015 is no exception. While there’s nothing as drastic as a completely new Chase format—the one from last year is still in place, thank goodness—the new rules this year are already causing quite a stir.

This year, the biggest qualifying change came at the Daytona 500, where group qualifying was introduced in order to make the process more entertaining and TV-friendly.

Of course, group qualifying has been problematic at the restrictor-plate tracks—you might recall the mayhem in Talladega last fall—and it wasn’t any different at Daytona this year. 

Clint Bowyer was the one affected the most by the chaos. He was caught in a wreck in the first qualifying round when journeyman racer Reed Sorenson tried to block him, and his car was destroyed.

Understandably, Bowyer had some select words for NASCAR about the new rules.

Daytona qualifying wasn’t the only rule change this season, though. Drivers can now adjust the track bar from inside the car, horsepower has been reduced, the minimum weight of the cars has decreased and skirt manipulation has been banned.

According to NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief racing development officer, Steve O’Donnell, the goal is to improve the racing, as reported by The Associated Press (via Fox Sports):

The combination of a lower horsepower package, and a new aero package, which takes about 300 counts of downforce off of the car, we believe will make for an even better racing product. I think where you will really see it is in the turns, where drivers need to come off the throttle more, and we believe that will be where we see more passing, in turns.

Additionally, there was a ban on private testing, and there will be an increase in automated pit road officiating.

Every season, there are a few teams who have trouble adjusting to the new rules, so it’s worth keeping an eye on to see who that will be in 2015.

Will a Change Make a Difference?

Rules aren’t the only things that are different in NASCAR this season—a few teams will also look a little different.

Of the many crew chief changes in the offseason, none will be under more scrutiny than that of Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Greg Ives. At the end of last year, Junior’s longtime crew, chief Steve Letarte, left to go work for NBC, and now Ives will try to seamlessly transition to the No. 88 team and carry over the momentum from last year’s four-win season.

Earnhardt has spoken very highly of Ives, who has an engineering background and is incredibly detail-oriented.

"There may be a little time for us to learn how to communicate and get the jargon down to handle how he talks and how I explain the car,” Earnhardt said, as reported by Jordan Bianchi of SB Nation. “But once we get that done, I think the cars will have the speed. I'm excited."

However, a crew chief change is relatively minor compared to what Carl Edwards went through.

The veteran left Roush Fenway Racing, where he had spent 11 years, for Joe Gibbs Racing after the 2014 season ended. Edwards wasn’t shy about the reasoning, either—he hopes the move will produce a spark similar to the one that Kevin Harvick’s move from Richard Childress Racing to Stewart-Haas Racing after the 2013 season provided.

In other words, Edwards wants a championship sooner rather than later.

The Candidates to Dethrone Kevin Harvick

Harvick finally won his long-awaited Sprint Cup championship last year, and now he gets to feel what it’s like to have a bull's-eye on his back. That's right—being the defending champion is not a walk in the park.

Luckily for Harvick, he has a lot of good support from his team. Even his son, Keelan Harvick, has his back.

But even the sagest advice won’t be able to save Harvick this season if some of the former champions on the circuit find another gear.

While last season, all four contenders in the final race at Homestead—Denny Hamlin, Ryan Newman, Joey Logano and Harvick—had never won a championship before, I don’t see that being the case this year. In 2015, I expect for former champions to litter the later rounds of the Chase and be the biggest threats to Harvick.

Johnson should be as dangerous as ever this year. The six-time Sprint Cup champion had a down year in 2014, winning four races but only finishing 11th in the standings. However, as he proved at Daytona qualifying Sunday, he should be back to his best in 2015 with Team Hendrick and longtime crew chief Chad Knaus in his corner.

Kurt Busch—if his legal troubles don’t get in the way—will be an outside contender for the title this year, as will Matt Kenseth. Tony Stewart, Keselowski and Gordon are always threats, but we’ll get to them in a bit.

If we are to have another first-time champion this year, Logano, Edwards, Earnhardt Jr., Hamlin, Newman, Kyle Larson and Kyle Busch will be the guys to look out for.

In other words, there's no shortage of contenders as the season gets underway.

Will There Be a First-Time Race Winner?

This year’s rookie class is a particularly sparse one. According to Jayski’s NASCAR site, the only current candidate for Rookie of the Year is Jeb Burton. So instead of focusing on that, we'll focus in on the drivers who haven’t won a Sprint Cup race yet. 

Kyle Larson, last season’s Rookie of the Year, is the most likely candidate to get his maiden win. After all, last year, the 22-year-old had eight top-fives and 17 top-10s. Most importantly, he got noticeably better as the season went on, scoring two runner-up finishes and six top-10s in the 10 Chase races.

Not only does the Chip Ganassi Racing driver expect to win a Sprint Cup race and make the Chase this season, he’s looking to contend for the title, as reported by Jared Turner of Fox Sports:

Larson expects to be in Victory Lane this season after sniffing a win on multiple occasions as a rookie. And that's not the only target for the driver of the Target-sponsored No. 42 car.

"The next step would be to win some races and definitely make the Chase," Larson said. "We were close to winning a few races last year, so I think we could go out there and win a couple or a few races this year, and then go for the championship, as well. Had we made the Chase last year, we would have been a contender up until the second-to-last round. That was good, so I think we can go out there and do even better this year."

Larson isn’t the only high-profile driver going for his first win, though.

Danica Patrick will also be under the microscope this year, as her contracts with Stewart-Haas Racing and her sponsor, GoDaddy, are slated to be up at the end of the season. Patrick certainly doesn’t have to win for a shot to renew either contract, but she needs to show significant improvement over last year, when she had only three top-10s and no top-fives. However, a trip to Victory Lane would be a much-needed boost.

Patrick’s boyfriend, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., is also seeking his first Sprint Cup victory in 2015, as are Austin Dillon, Justin Allgaier and Ryan Blaney.

But the driver outside of Larson who has the best shot at winning his first Sprint Cup race this season is Sam Hornish Jr., a 35-year-old veteran who is back in the big leagues after being relegated to NASCAR’s lower levels in 2010 following a failed stint with Penske. Hornish is taking over the No. 9 car, formerly driven by Marcos Ambrose, for Richard Petty Motorsports.

The Tony Stewart Mystery

One of the biggest question marks in 2015 is Stewart, who failed to win a Sprint Cup race last year for the first time in his career.

Stewart is still dealing with physical problems after badly breaking his leg in 2013. He has already had four surgeries, and a fifth is planned for after this season. Perhaps even more worrisome, though, are the concerns about Stewart's mental state following the accident last August when he infamously struck and killed Kevin Ward Jr. in a dirt track race.

From purely a performance standpoint, it’s easy to forget that Stewart won his last championship as recently as 2011. The 43-year-old finished 25th in the standings last year, only a bit better than his 29th-place finish in 2013. In the last two years, he only has one win, eight top-fives and 15 top-10s in 54 races.

It remains to be seen if a new season will bring about a rejuvenated Stewart who challenges on a week-in, week-out basis like he used to or whether his racing career will continue to decline.

“I don’t know if he can get that fire back,” three-time champion Darrell Waltrip told Viv Bernstein of The New York Times. “I think for him, just being content and happy would be a big accomplishment in this year coming up. A content and happy Tony Stewart can win a few races.”

Bad Brad

It’s rare that NASCAR drivers agree about anything, but last season in particular, everyone seemed to agree that Keselowski was bad news.

Keselowski, who won the championship back in 2012, was at the center of two post-race fights during the Chase, brought on by what many considered his reckless driving and even more reckless refusal to apologize.

The truth is, Keselowski is just not a guy who goes around placating his peers. He races hard, he goes for the win at all costs and he doesn't apologize if he doesn’t feel like he did anything wrong. And, as you might guess, it’s rare that Keselowski feels like he did anything wrong.

The 31-year-old has made enemies out of guys such as Kenseth, Gordon, Harvick and Hamlin, and some are starting to wonder if his lack of popularity will make winning a second championship difficult.

"It's tough to win a championship if nobody likes you," Hamlin said about Keselowski last year during the Chase, as reported by Jordan Bianchi of SB Nation. "That is going to be a very, very tough task. You always have to just watch your mirror, and that's a tough way to race. It really is a tough way to race.”

Popular or not, there’s no doubt that Keselowski is one of the best drivers out there. Last year, he won a series-high six races and finished fifth in the standings. It’s worth watching whether he will clean up his act at all this year. 

Of course, if it's not Keselowski causing the drama, it will be someone else. Already this season, his teammate, Logano, has gotten into a squabble with Harvick. High stakes will always lead to high drama.

The Long Goodbye

There's no way around it. While all of the topics mentioned previously in this article are important, nothing this season will overshadow Gordon's retirement. 

Gordon has been racing in the Sprint Cup Series since 1992. He has 92 wins, 320 top-fives, 19 years in the top 10 in the standings and four championships to his name. He is a living legend, and every week at every track will give us a chance to remember more classic Gordon moments.

Last year, he came extremely close to making it to the final race at Homestead and contending for his fifth championship, and he'll be trying to do that this year so that he can finish his career in style. He's clearly off to a great start with the Daytona 500 pole.

Hendrick Motorsports was the strongest team in racing last year, despite its disappointing Chase showing, and the team will give Gordon the best chance possible to end his NASCAR run on a high note.

But no matter what happens with No. 24 this year, let's just remember to appreciate getting to watch him race while we can.

It's shaping up to be a fantastic season from top to bottom. Buckle up, NASCAR fans. We're in for a wild ride.