Breaking News Category

By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor With Brad Keselowski’s dominant win at Daytona in Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 and his Team Penske teammate, Joey Logano, coming home fourth, team owner Roger Penske had nothing but good things to say about the duo that has combined for four wins on the season. Keselowski proved he would be a threat for the win at Daytona early on, taking the lead for the first time on lap nine and staying in the lead for 115 of the 161 laps in the race. TheRead More
By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Brad Keselowski had an excellent solution for the massive wrecks that scrambled the finishing order of Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. He stayed ahead of all of them. Leading 115 of 161 laps in the No. 2 Team Penske Ford, Keselowski sped away from his pursuers after a restart in overtime and posted his third victory of the 2016 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season in thoroughly convincing fashion. The victory was Keselowski’s first at Daytona andRead More
By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor When the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series visits the restrictor plate tracks of Daytona and Talladega, there is always a chance that a driver might get caught up in a crash that ends their night prematurely and for the 2016 Sprint Cup Series rookie class, that is exactly what happened in Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona. Throughout the first 89 laps of the race, three of the four rookies (Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott, and Chris Buescher) had made their way through the field intoRead More

Posted On July 2, 2016By Motorsports TribuneIn Breaking News, Cup

Fan Mail: A Spirited Defense of Restrictor Plate Racing

By David Westergreen, Fan Column The first NASCAR race I ever watched was the 2001 Daytona 500. While it is a race well remembered for its last lap, what is often forgotten is the 49 lead changes among 14 drivers and underdog winner. Performances by Ward Burton and Sterling Marlin bringing Dodge back to the forefront for the first time since 1979 at Daytona are lost to the memories of Dale Earnhardt. This was my first experience as a fan. I did not see any one of Dale’s 76 winsRead More
Lewis Hamilton took his fifth pole position of 2016 and the 54th of his career in a topsy turvy wet final qualifying session that saw Nico Rosberg finish second ahead of Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg. Rain began to fall at the end of Q2 and increased in intensity in the run-up to the final 12-minute session, leading to the 10 drivers who made it through to the top-10 shootout taking to the track on intermediate tyres. The rain quickly abated, however, and the times began to drop rapidly. Vettel wasRead More
By Joey Barnes, Editor-in-Chief Nico Rosberg has received a five-place grid penalty after a crash in FP3 forced the Mercedes team to change his gearbox. Rosberg enjoyed a banner Friday after dominating both the first and second practice sessions, but halfway through Saturday’s final practice he suffered suspension failure that sent him into the wall off the Turn 2 exit. The team confirmed that the mechanical failure happened at full throttle under “an unusually high load” on the exit of the curb. The German currently leads defending Formula 1 championRead More
Sebastian Vettel postest the quickest lap of final practice for the Austrian Grand Prix as Nico Rosberg crashed out of the session with a rear-suspension failure. Vettel’s best lap came in the final 10 minutes of the session, the German reclaiming P1 from team-mate Kimi Raikkonen with a time of 1:07.098 at the end of a session dominated by Mercedes. Early in the session championship leader Nico Rosberg had focused on longer runs on the ultrasoft tyre, posting 14 laps on the purple-banded Pirelli in the opening half of theRead More
By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Aric Almirola won his second NASCAR XFINITY Series race by much less than a nose. But to the driver of the No. 98 Fred Biagi-owned Ford, that was a vast improvement over his first victory in the series—when he wasn’t even in the car when the race ended. In Friday night’s Subway Firecracker 400 at Daytona International Speedway, Almirola was inches ahead of Justin Allgaier off the final corner in overtime when NASCAR called the eighth caution of the raceRead More
By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor When the NASCAR Xfinity Series heads to the two restrictor plate tracks on the schedule, Daytona and Talladega, those tracks serve as the great equalizer and allow some of the smaller, lower budget teams to have the same chance at a win or top-five finish as the powerhouse teams in the series. That very thing held true once more in Friday night’s Subway Firecracker 250 at Daytona. Ryan Sieg, who drives for his own team, Ryan Sieg Racing, is most definitely an underdog among theRead More
By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor For the second time in as many races at restrictor plate tracks, the finish to Friday night’s Subway Firecracker 250 at Daytona came down to NASCAR analyzing the video replay due to a last lap caution and by the time all was said and done, Aric Almirola was scored as the race winner for his second win in his home state of Florida. Almirola first visited victory lane at Daytona back in 2014 with a win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in the rainRead More