Cup

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor What a difference a week makes. Literally seven days ago, Hendrick Motorsports was still reeling from the biggest single day penalty to any organization in NASCAR Cup Series history and it was Tyler Reddick of 23XI Racing who fended off William Byron to provide a glimmer of hope for the rest of the garage. Due to the 100 championship and 10 playoff point penalty and the injury to Chase Elliott, all four Hendrick Motorsports drivers faced long odds to reach the Championship Race in November. AndRead More

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor Jeff Gordon believes Hendrick Motorsports has reaped the benefits of a Cup Series caliber backup in Josh Berry over the past month. Sure, it’s easy to say that now given that Berry finished second to teammate Kyle Larson in the Cup Series race at Richmond on Sunday but it would have been easy to pump the brakes on that narrative in the middle of the race when he got spun in traffic due to contact from Ryan Blaney. Berry, the current Xfinity Series championship contender andRead More

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor For all the accolades and success Kyle Larson has enjoyed over the past several seasons, even someone considered to be a generational racing talent occasionally watches himself on YouTube just to remember happier times. “I was watching just flipping through old YouTube videos this week of my 2021 season so I could remind myself that I used to be good,” Larson said in a familiar self-deprecating way in the media center following his victory on Sunday in the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway. … butRead More

By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service With the benefit of a fast final pit stop, Kyle Larson was able to put his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet out front at Richmond (Va.) Raceway and then hold off the field in the last 25 laps of Sunday’s Toyota Owners 400 to earn his first NASCAR Cup Series victory of the 2023 season. The 30-year old Californian had to out-duel his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Josh Berry on a pair of re-starts in the closing laps to secure the win at the firstRead 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

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor The NASCAR industry is an especially reactive one. For ways both good and bad, it knee jerks to everything from safety matters (generally good) to the (mixed results) endless competition related conversations across the ether on a weekly basis. This season alone has seen the last-minute knee-jerk to a lower downforce configuration for short tracks and road courses, following a winter banning the ‘Hail Melon’ and incorporating a universal choose rule. No motorsports sanctioning body in the world is as reactive to its competitors and audienceRead More

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor The official box score will show that Tyler Reddick earned one victory on Sunday in the EchoPark Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, but the case can be made that he earned three victories and a runner-up by the end of the day. First, the obvious reference. In surviving three overtime finishes, Reddick was made to have defended a race he had already effectively won, having outdueled William Byron in a spirited old-school classic by the end of regulation. Then came 45 minutes of repeatedRead More

By Matt Weaver, Special Contributor The EchoPark Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas was billed as something akin to a showcase for just how far NASCAR has come from a global standpoint. And for three hours, it largely delivered on that expectation until it suddenly couldn’t. And for nearly 45 minutes, spanning three different overtimes, arguably the greatest international motorsports starting lineup ever assembled for a single Cup Series race just could not stop crashing each other. Involved in one of the overtime crashes, Ryan Preece referred to the fieldRead More

By David Morgan, Associate Editor AUSTIN, Texas – Welcome to NASCAR, gentlemen. Needless to say Sunday’s marathon EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas was an eye-opening experience for the road course ringers that came to play in the NASCAR Cup Series this weekend in Austin. Jenson Button and Jordan Taylor, champions in Formula 1 and IMSA, respectively, were making their first start in the Cup Series and were joined by another former F1 world champion in Kimi Raikkonen making just his second Cup start. By the time theRead More