Thomas Annunziata did not win the 2026 ARCA Menards Series championship on Friday night at Kansas Speedway. He won it on a tiebreaker, which made it better.
The 21-year-old New Jersey native finished fifth in the season finale, enough to end the 20-race campaign deadlocked with Nitro Motorsports teammate Jake Bollman on points. The tiebreaker gave Annunziata the title, marking the first time in ARCA history that a championship has been resolved that way. He arrived at Kansas carrying a 16-point deficit to Bollman. He left as champion.
It is the first ARCA title for Nitro Motorsports and the second in four years for Toyota, which has now claimed three championships in the last six seasons. Jesse Love won in 2023, Ty Gibbs in 2021. Annunziata becomes the ninth Toyota-partner driver to take the ARCA crown, a list that stretches back to Justin Lofton in 2009 and includes Frank Kimmel (2013), Sheldon Creed (2018), and Christian Eckes (2019).
The season itself was quietly dominant. Across 20 races, Annunziata posted one win, 11 top-five finishes, and 18 top-10s in the No. 70 Toyota Camry, averaging a seventh-place finish across the full schedule. The win came at Lime Rock Park in June, part of a four-race Toyota winning streak that ran from Michigan International Speedway through Elko Speedway. Toyota teams combined to win 11 of the season’s 20 races.
For a driver making his first full-time ARCA season, that’s an unusually complete statistical line. One win is enough to define a campaign, but 18 top-10 finishes in 20 starts reflects something more systematic: the ability to stay in contention on circuits where ARCA racing has a way of sorting out even the best-resourced entries before the checkered flag.
Annunziata also made his NASCAR Truck Series debut this season, starting fourth at Lime Rock Park in the No. 1 Toyota Tundra TRD Pro for TRICON Garage. The dual-series appearance on a short track in a single weekend is the kind of development calendar that suggests Toyota and its partners have larger plans for him.
Toyota’s depth in the ARCA development pipeline has been evident for several seasons. The structure that produced Ty Gibbs and Jesse Love is the same one Annunziata is coming through, and both of those drivers moved into higher NASCAR series competition. Whether Annunziata follows that path at the same pace remains to be seen, but the 2026 season gave him the kind of credentials to make the conversation credible.
Nine drivers. Three championships in six years. Toyota’s ARCA pipeline is not an accident, and Annunziata is its newest graduate.
Source: Toyota. Images courtesy of Toyota.
