NASCAR News: Josh Berry admits losing Cup Series drive didn't shock him

NASCAR star Josh Berry has revealed he wasn't shocked to learn he would not be staying at Wood Brothers Racing in 2027.

Berry joined the team ahead of the 2025 Cup Series campaign and took his first Cup victory last season at Las Vegas, putting the No. 21 into the playoffs. However, results so far this year have been harder to come by.

Heading to Pocono this weekend, Berry sits 30th in the Cup Series standings and 136 points adrift of The Chase spots, making a post-season appearance extremely unlikely.

Perhaps due to the poor start to the year, Wood Brothers Racing confirmed on Wednesday that they had decided not to exercise their option to extend Berry's contract into 2027, with the 35-year-old set to depart the team at the end of this season.

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Josh Berry on Wood Brothers Racing exit

Naturally, this would have been disappointing news for Berry, but he says it isn't something that necessarily surprised him.

"No, not necessarily," Berry said when asked if the move caught him off guard in a media call on Wednesday. "You hear the rumor mill start going, so I’m not gonna say I was completely off guard. I don’t really want to expand on it much further than that.

"From my side of things, I didn’t exactly feel great about it. I probably would have said myself I was probably 50-50 on what was going on. It’s like I said, it’s been a tough year. That’s the reality of it.

"Obviously, I don’t want it to work this way, but it’s been a tough year and when you have some of the things we’ve had happen and the results that we’ve had happen, regardless of the details of it, you start to question that and that’s fair at the end of the day."

Berry accepts results played a part

"If we had run better, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation," he continued. "But we didn’t, so now we’ve got an 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.

"It’s been a struggle for a lot of the Fords and a lot of the guys this year and we’ve just got to turn that around and go to the next race.

"At the end of the day, whether you win or you wreck or whatever you go to work on Monday and go to the next race and that’s what we’re gonna do from here on out and see how it all shakes out.”