Josh Berry will not be back in the No. 21 Ford next season. The 35-year-old confirmed during a teleconference Wednesday morning that Wood Brothers Racing is moving on without him for 2027, and the team followed with an afternoon statement confirming it had declined its option on the driver. His replacement, the team said, will be announced “in the near future.”
“Just to go ahead and put it out there, I will not be back in the 21 car next year,” Berry told reporters. “They’ve been amazing to work with, amazing people, and it’s been such a great opportunity. What I didn’t want to do was sit here and feed a line to you guys and then have it get announced later, so I feel like that makes me pretty ignorant, so I wasn’t going to do that.”
A Decision That Did Not Blindside Him
Berry said he first learned of the decision less than 24 hours before facing the media, but the writing had been on the wall for a while. He sits 30th in the NASCAR Cup Series standings through 15 races in 2026, and the rumor mill around the No. 21 seat had been churning for weeks.
“You hear the rumor mills start going, so I’m not going to say that I was completely caught off guard,” Berry said. “I didn’t exactly feel great about it. I probably would have said myself I was probably 50-50 in what was going on. Obviously, hit the ground running here, working hard to try and find out what’s out there, and certainly open and optimistic about any opportunities that come my way, but first and foremost, we’re going to do our best to finish this season strong and leave in a good place.”
The numbers tell the story of a season that never got going. After opening the year with a ninth-place run in the Daytona 500, Berry has finished 26th or worse in 11 of 15 races, with four DNFs. His only other top 10 came at Martinsville Speedway. He was candid about the connection between those results and Wednesday’s news.
“It’s been a tough year, and when you have some of the things we’ve had happen and the results we’ve had happen, regardless of the details of it, you start to question returning, and that’s fair,” Berry said. “If we had ran better, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation, but we didn’t. Now, we got X number of races throughout the rest of the year to turn that back around and change the narrative and get back closer to the front.”
Two Seasons With NASCAR’s Most Historic Team
Berry joined Wood Brothers Racing ahead of the 2025 season, taking over the No. 21 from Harrison Burton after a rookie Cup campaign with the now-defunct Stewart-Haas Racing operation. The partnership started about as well as it possibly could have. That March, Berry won at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, his first career Cup Series victory, and locked the sport’s oldest active team into the playoffs.
The postseason told a different story. Berry crashed in all three Round of 16 races, including on the opening lap at Darlington Raceway, and exited the playoffs at the first hurdle on his way to a 16th-place finish in the final standings. The 2026 season has compounded that slide, with Ford teams broadly struggling for speed and the No. 21 group rarely sniffing the top 15.
“It’s been a struggle really for a lot of the Fords and a lot of the guys this year, and we just got to turn that around and go to the next race,” Berry said. “At the end of the day, whether you win or you wreck, whatever, you go to work Monday and go to the next race, and that’s what we’re going to do from here on out and see how it all shakes out.”
Wood Brothers Racing, which fields cars in partnership with Team Penske, was gracious in its statement. “We thank Josh Berry for all he’s done for Wood Brothers Racing and our partners over the last two seasons. Josh has been a great teammate and we look forward to a strong finish to this season. We wish Josh all the best moving forward. We will announce who will be driving the No. 21 Ford Mustang Dark Horse in 2027 soon and we are excited for what lies ahead for Wood Brothers Racing.”
The Long Road That Got Him Here
Berry’s path to the Cup Series was one of the more unusual in the modern garage. The Hendersonville, Tennessee, native spent more than a decade with JR Motorsports, the organization owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Earnhardt Miller, joining in 2010 and grinding through late model racing up and down the East Coast. At times, he has said, he believed he would be a late model racer for life.
When the opportunity finally came, he made it count. Handed a part-time ride in NASCAR’s second-tier series in 2021, Berry won in his sixth start at Martinsville after leading 95 laps. When an injury sidelined Michael Annett later that year, Berry stepped into the No. 1 Chevrolet and won again at Las Vegas in the fall. A full-time promotion followed in 2022, and he delivered three more wins, 20 top 10s and a Championship 4 appearance. In 2023 he stacked up 18 top 10s and finished 11th in points despite going winless, which was enough to earn the call to Cup with Stewart-Haas for 2024.
A Seat With a Habit of Launching Careers
Whoever lands the ride inherits one of the most storied pieces of equipment in American motorsports. The Wood Brothers operation dates to 1950, when Glen Wood founded the team in Stuart, Virginia, and its alumni list reads like a wing of the Hall of Fame. David Pearson delivered the team’s most famous era in the 1970s, including the 1976 Daytona 500 won in a crawl to the line after his last-lap crash with Richard Petty, and Trevor Bayne stunned the sport by winning the 2011 Daytona 500 in the No. 21 at age 20.
More recently the car has served as a proving ground for young drivers on their way up. Ryan Blaney drove the No. 21 from 2015 through 2017, scoring his first career win at Pocono in 2017 before graduating to Team Penske, where he became a Cup Series champion. Harrison Burton’s tenure produced a memorable superspeedway win that extended the team’s victory streak across seven different decades. The question now is whether the Wood Brothers reach for another developing prospect from the Ford pipeline or a veteran who can maximize the equipment immediately.
The team’s alliance with Team Penske gives it access to championship-caliber engineering, which makes the seat more attractive than the 2026 results suggest. Berry’s Las Vegas win in 2025 proved the car can reach victory lane when circumstances align, and a driver market that includes several displaced veterans means the phone in Stuart is unlikely to stay quiet for long.
What Happens to Berry and the No. 21 Now
Berry’s free agency lands in the middle of an active silly season. Several seats remain unsettled for 2027, and a proven race winner with superspeedway and short track credentials will draw interest, even off a down year. Berry made it clear he believes his results this season do not define his ceiling.
“I’m still the guy that won Las Vegas. I’m still the same guy that nearly won New Hampshire in the playoffs,” he said. “It’s been a tough year, but we’ll work through it and try to find what’s out there. The sun came up this morning, and it’s a new day. You land on your feet and you go to work, that’s all you can do.”
For Wood Brothers Racing, the timing of the announcement suggests a replacement is already lined up, and the team’s “near future” language points to a reveal sooner rather than later. The No. 21 has been a launching pad for young talent in recent years, and whoever inherits the ride will join a team with 101 Cup Series victories and a history stretching back to 1950.
Berry and the team now face 21 more races together, starting with Sunday’s Great American Getaway 400 at Pocono Raceway. For a full look at the weekend, including Christopher Bell’s return from a fractured wrist, see our Pocono race preview. An awkward farewell tour it may be, but Berry has spent his whole career proving people wrong, and he has half a season left to remind the garage exactly what he can do.
