Category: NASCAR Blogs

Martinsville Speedway currently holds the distinction of being the first track to host a race in the ‘Round of 8’ portion of the NASCAR Playoffs. That means that at the end of the day on Sunday followers of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series could potentially know who one of the four drivers with a chance to be crowned as the 2019 champion will be. The winner of the First Data 500, provided that driver is one of the eight still remaining in the title hunt, will be issued an invitation as one of the Championship 4 contestants in the…

Continue reading

Matt Kenseth drove to such an impressively consistent season in 2003 that he wrapped the NASCAR Cup Series title even before the green flag was waved over the field at the season finale race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. Despite the fact that he only scored one victory that year, the 25 top-10 finishes Kenseth compiled were enough to allow him to be crowned as the series champion following the season’s penultimate race in Rockingham, NC. Even though he had won more than twice as many races as any other driver on the series that season, Ryan Newman could only muster…

Continue reading

The biggest and fastest tracks on the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series schedule have always required drivers to work together by using the draft in order keep pace with the competition and pass other cars. This has been true since the 1950’s when the first of what we have come to call the ‘plate tracks’ was first built. But lately it seems as if the teams, and perhaps more importantly the manufacturers, have decided that working together to achieve the goal of placing one of their own in the winner’s circle supersedes all else at Talladega Super Speedway and Daytona…

Continue reading

Virtually every driver and team still involved in the NASCAR Playoffs came into this current stretch of three races that make up the ‘Round of 12’ pointing out that they wanted to jump start their efforts in this segment by scoring a good finish at Dover International Speedway in the Drydene 400. The emphasis on Dover was born out of the fact that the next event for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series will take place in the wildcard race at the ever treacherous Talladega Super Speedway coming up this weekend. However, one of NASCAR’s power teams now finds itself…

Continue reading

During the winter leading up to the 2019 NASCAR season the sanctioning body announced that it would begin taking wins and finishing positions away from cars that failed post-race technical inspections. It had been decades since the last time a car and driver had been hit with such a penalty under NASCAR’s watch but this season promised to bring about changes in the way rule violations would be handled. In more recent times, it had been common practice to issue fines, points reductions, and even suspensions to crew members when violations were found even though the winner’s trophy did not…

Continue reading

Every race has its share of mistakes made by drivers and crews and even the officials who govern the event. Sometimes those mistakes can be overcome and sometimes they result in a team scoring a finish that may seem like an underachievement. But over the course of a long season, those mistakes are often times forgotten by the time the next racing weekend rolls around. However, that cannot be the case at this point in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season. The first round of the NASCAR Playoffs are set to begin on Sunday in the South Point 400…

Continue reading

*Turn 2 Blog is a regular feature on InsideCircleTrack.com. Here, site operators Michael Moats and Richard Allen take turns offering their thoughts on the NASCAR and pavement short track racing topics of the day. Richard: After much build up, the 16 driver field for the NASCAR Playoffs is now set. Those competitors for the 2019 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series championship as well as the remainder of the drivers and teams are about to embark on the final ten-race run that will bring the season to a close with the final stretch broken into segments designed to reduce the contenders…

Continue reading

Perhaps like no other the race on the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series schedule, the Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard typically boils down to which team and driver make the best strategy play at the end. Kasey Kahne’s win in 2017 and Paul Menard’s triumph in 2011 serve as shinning examples of how making the right late race calls in terms of when to pit or not to pit as well as what to do in the pits can decide who will take the checkered flag. The areo-sensitive Indianapolis Motor Speedway can make passing quite difficult. As a…

Continue reading

Every year the debate seems to surface regarding whether or not the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series should or should not be racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The arguments against auto racing’s top division competing on the 2.5-mile track are many. The racing isn’t particularly good, the grandstands look empty, it’s a track meant for IndyCar, and there are other facilities better suited for stock cars are among the complaints against the Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard. And all of these arguments have some degree of merit. However, there is one thing that cannot be disputed when…

Continue reading

Joe Gibbs Racing has won 13 of the 25 races contested so far in 2019 on the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. But until Sunday night/Monday morning at Darlington Raceway all of the team’s wins had been delivered for the Toyota organization by Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex, Jr. However, it was the turn of Erik Jones in the Bojangles Southern 500 to contribute to the company’s dominance of victory lane as he held off Busch and Kyle Larson to win one of the sport’s crown jewel events. That was the second MENCS win for Jones in as…

Continue reading