All posts by David Morgan

By David Morgan, Associate Editor TALLADEGA, Ala. – Denny Hamlin will have the best seat in the house when the green flag waves on Sunday’s Geico 500 at Talladega after scoring the pole. The two-time winner at the 2.66-mile superspeedway propelled his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota to the top of the scoring pylon with a lap of 52.979 seconds, 180.751 mph to capture the first superspeedway pole of his NASCAR Cup Series career. “This was the first one for sure. I was well aware this was my first speedwayRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor TALLADEGA, Ala. — From the smallest track on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule to the largest. Following last weekend’s race on the flat half-mile of Martinsville, it’s on to the biggest and baddest track on the circuit – the 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway and Sunday’s running of the GEICO 500. Since opening its doors in 1969, the track just off Interstate 20 in Eastern Alabama has been a wild card on the schedule with the unpredictable nature of superspeedway racing on full display over the past half-century,Read More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor NTT IndyCar Series street races always seem to end with hurt feelings and Sunday’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach was no different. This time around, it was six-time series champion Scott Dixon and Pato O’Ward that weren’t seeing eye to eye at the end of the day. The problems between the two stemmed from an incident on lap 20 in Turn 8 when O’Ward dove to the inside of Dixon heading into the right-hander, which led to wheel-to-wheel contact that sent Dixon head on intoRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor When it’s your day, it’s your day. The start of the 2023 NTT IndyCar Series season didn’t start the way Kyle Kirkwood and Andretti Autosport would have liked following two tumultuous races at St. Petersburg and Texas, but they can put all that behind them now as Kirkwood was victorious in Sunday’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach – his first career IndyCar win. Kirkwood streaked to his first career IndyCar pole on Saturday ahead of Marcus Ericsson and his Andretti teammate Romain Grosjean and thatRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor After playing in the dirt last weekend, it’s back to the asphalt this weekend as the NASCAR Cup Series gets set for Sunday’s running of the NOCO 400 at Martinsville A mainstay on the schedule since 1949, the historic half-mile in southern Virginia, which is also the smallest on the circuit, will test both man and machine over the course of the afternoon and is a place where bent sheet metal and hurt feelings are all but inevitable. Given that Martinsville serves as the final raceRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor After missing the past six weeks following a leg injury, Chase Elliott will make his return to the cockpit starting with Sunday’s NOCO 400 at Martinsville. The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion was snowboarding in Colorado during the week prior to the March 5 race at Las Vegas when he suffered an injury to his left leg in which he broke his tibia and forced him to the sidelines. Elliott explained that he “didn’t have a cool story” to go with the incident that caused hisRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor Penalties, penalties, and more penalties. Over the course of the last week, the NASCAR airwaves have been ablaze with penalty talk, with a stem of appeals being heard and the results that came afterwards only fanning the flames. Hendrick Motorsports was the first to have their appeal heard for a penalty dating back to Phoenix in which the team was alleged to have modified the hood louvers on their four team cars, which went against the rule the sanctioning body put in place for messing withRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor FORT WORTH, Tex. – Thrice as nice. For the third time in his career, Josef Newgarden found himself in Victory Lane at Texas Motor Speedway, holding off a hard-charging Pato O’Ward down the stretch in Sunday’s PPG 375 to earn himself another cowboy hat. In what was one of the most hotly contested races at the 1.5-mile oval in recent years, deciding which driver would come away victorious was up in the air from the time the green flag dropped all the way to the checkered.Read More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor FORT WORTH, Tex. — A busy Saturday at Texas Motor Speedway ended with six-time NTT IndyCar Series champion Scott Dixon topping the board in final practice for Sunday’s running of the PPG 375. The Chip Ganassi Racing ace, who has won five times previously at the 1.5-mile track, put down his fast lap of 223.378 mph with less than 10 minutes left in the session to give him a boost of momentum heading into Sunday. Josef Newgarden, the defending winner at Texas, led the way forRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor Following a marathon Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas last weekend, the NASCAR Cup Series heads back to the short tracks starting with Sunday’s Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway. Often described as the perfectly designed race track by drivers, the 0.75-mile track lends itself to not only short track characteristics of beating and banging, but also the characteristics of a larger track with the side-by-side racing that will take place throughout the event. Though the track has lost some of its luster in recentRead More