Todd Gilliland 2025 season in review

Driver: Todd Gilliland, No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford

Crew chief: Chris Lawson

Final 2025 ranking: 27th

Key stats: 0 wins, 1 top five, 5 top 10s, 23 laps led

How 2025 ended: Gilliland had the most top 10s (five) in a single season of his four-year Cup career. While he still has not won a Cup race or qualified for the playoffs, he had a runner-up finish in the fall playoff race at Talladega Superspeedway and followed that up with a ninth-place run at Martinsville Speedway.

Best race: Gilliland's best finish was his runner-up showing in the Talladega fall race, finishing a close 0.145 seconds behind race winner Chase Briscoe. Gilliland led 11 laps, just under half the number of laps he led for the entire season (23).

Other season highlights: Switched from his old No. 38 Ford to the No. 34 Ford, previously the car number of veteran driver Michael McDowell, who left after the 2024 season to race in 2025 for Spire Motorsports. Not known as the most prolific qualifier, Gilliland still had two strong starting positions this season: fifth (EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta, spring) and seventh (Mexico City).

Stat to know: Gilliland finished all but two races in the 36-race schedule, the fewest DNFs he's had in a season in his Cup career. With 144 starts, Gilliland is the "elder statesman" in Cup for Front Row Motorsports teammates, followed by Noah Gragson (111 starts) and Zane Smith (81 starts).

Quotable: "The beginning of the year, we fired off really strong. We had good runs at Daytona, COTA, Atlanta, all those places, and we were doing OK. But it seemed like once we got to May, June, we just kind of hit a slump. We got damage at Pocono, got in an early wreck at Chicago, and it was like six weeks in a row where we just could not put anything together and had a lot of really bad finishes, which really buried us, and it was just really hard to get momentum going back again." -- Todd Gilliland on the ups and downs this season.

Looking ahead: Gilliland should be able to finally crack the top 20 in the final season standings in 2026. He could also come close again to earning his first career Cup win.