Who… should you be talking about after the race?
Between having no fewer than 80 family members and friends at the track to watch him race and not having a win yet in 2024, Ryan Blaney was motivated on Sunday at Iowa Speedway. Blaney led a career-high 201 laps on the way to winning the Iowa Corn 350 over William Byron. It was the 11th win of the 2023 champion’s Cup career.
By winning the inaugural Cup race at Iowa, Blaney became the first driver to win in all three national series at the track. Blaney also got the first NASCAR national series win of his career at Iowa, finding victory lane in the Craftsman Truck Series at just 18 in 2012.
After Saturday’s Xfinity Series race, tires were at the forefront of the conversation going into Sunday’s Cup race, but while they played a supporting role, they weren’t the focus. Blaney won with just two fresh Goodyears on his final stop and Byron still couldn’t run him down. Some divers did struggle with cut tires, but they didn’t dictate the race — Blaney did that on his own.
And don’t forget Josh Berry. Berry led a career-high 32 laps on Sunday and had the fastest car in the field mid-race. While Berry didn’t have enough speed to challenge Blaney for the win, he’s far from alone in that regard. It’s easy to forget that Berry is still a rookie in the Cup Series. He had a couple of Xfinity starts under his belt at Iowa with one top 10.
Berry and his team have come out swinging since Stewart-Haas Racing announced its closure after the 2024 season. They’re racing for jobs but look far from defeated.
What… is the big question leaving this race in the rearview?
With Martin Truex Jr. announcing his retirement at season’s end and the closure of Stewart-Haas Racing on the horizon, Silly Season is underway in a big way. But while the question of the moment is who will fill Truex’s seat in the No. 19, the real question is just how crazy will Silly Season get in 2024?
NASCAR and team owners remain at an impasse on a future charter agreement, and those four SHR charters still hang in the balance. While at least three of them look to be spoken for if an agreement is reached between teams and NASCAR, that means three teams expanding to what could be a new limit of three cars. There will be four seats open from the SHR closure, but that doesn’t mean its four current drivers slot into them.
The five open seats also don’t account for other moves from teams or drivers before the end of the year. There’s a lot of wheeling and dealing left to be done.
Where… did the other key players wind up?
Pole winner Kyle Larson looked like typical Larson through the first two stages, leading laps and scoring a total of 19 stage points, but in the final segment, his luck ran dry. Contact from Daniel Suarez sent Larson into the wall, and suspension damage and a cut oil line relegated Larson to 34th place, 36 laps down to Blaney.
Chase Briscoe was the last driver to win an Xfinity Series race at Iowa in 2019 before the series returned to the track this year. But he didn’t find the same magic in the Cup Series’ Iowa debut, finishing two laps down in 28th.
Speaking of Xfinity races at Iowa, Brad Keselowski and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. lead all drivers in that series with three wins apiece. Keselowski started fifth but fell back quickly with handling woes almost as soon as the green flag dropped. Pit strategy helped him climb back to the front, but those handling woes didn’t go away. Keselowski held on for a respectable 10th-place finish.
Stenhouse also played the pit gamble game, and he played it well enough to remain in the top five in the final stage as the laps ticked down. Stenhouse finished fifth, his third top-five finish of 2024.
When… was the moment of truth?
It was just a month ago that Kyle Busch seemed to be turning his 2024 season around. With three top 10s in four races from Texas Motor Speedway to Kansas Speedway in May, Busch was sitting a solid 12th in points and looked like he was on the verge of a win.
But five weeks later, it’s all come unraveled. Busch finished 27th at Darlington last month but rebounded a bit in the Coca-Cola 600, finishing 15th. Since then, however, it’s been one stroke of bad luck after another.
Busch has had cars capable of top fives for the last three races and finishes of 35th, 12th and 35th to show for it. His 12th place at Sonoma wasn’t bad, but he was in the top five in the final laps only to get moved out of position and passed. The week before at Gateway, he crashed after just 139 laps despite leading 15 of them.
This week, Busch was running solidly inside the top 10 with fewer than 100 laps to go when a mechanical issue sent him to the garage after lap 272, leaving him frustrated in 34th place and outside the playoff picture. It’s not quite a must-win situation for Busch, as a solid summer could see him work his way back into the points picture, but it will be in a couple of weeks if the freefall continues.
The next couple of tracks are good ones for Busch. He has multiple wins at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in all three national series, along with Xfinity and Truck wins at Nashville Superspeedway, so righting the ship is still a possibility.
But Busch and the No. 8 team will have to bail fast to make it happen.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
It’s going to be another scorcher of a weekend for the Cup Series, which heads to New Hampshire just in time for a heatwave to hit the Granite State. With high temperatures and thunderstorms in the forecast, it could turn into a strategy game.
The Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas have come out on top the last two years, with Truex the track’s most recent winner.
Noticeably absent from the recent winners’ list is Chevrolet. The last driver to take a Bowtie to Loudon’s victory lane is Kevin Harvick in 2016. Before Harvick’s win, you have to go all the way back to 2012, when Kasey Kahne drove to the win. The only active Chevrolet driver with a prior Loudon win is Busch, whose most recent win came in a Toyota in 2017. Can the manufacturer see one of its drivers take home the huge lobster on June 23?
How… will Truex’s career be remembered?
Truex was talented from the start but spent much of his early Cup career in cars that simply weren’t good enough to showcase it. Once he moved over to Furniture Row Racing, though, things changed after the team partnered with Joe Gibbs Racing. Truex won four times in 2016, his first multi-win season, and won the title next year. Gibbs reconsidered his support of FRR after they swiped the title, but took on Truex in the No. 19, where he has flourished.
He’s not flashy but he’s consistent, and that has led him to plenty of wins. He’s certainly done enough for Hall of Fame inclusion down the line. Not bad for a kid that Dale Earnhardt Jr. saw enough in to pluck from the anonymity of the then-Busch North Series and give him a shot in an Xfinity car, and one who toiled for years in Cup with little to show for it.
Not bad at all.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.
Oh boy New Hampshire in the heat. Been there done that. Plus limited passing at this track. I’ll watch it on tv thanks and skip being miserable for hours