1. Strategy is Back, Baby!
To be clear, there have always been and will always be strategy calls to make in motorsports. Giving the fastest possible cars to the best drivers is, of course, the point of the entire exercise, but deciding what to do in the middle of lengthy races is an integral part of NASCAR.
The problem is that once you set aside the standard race day decisions like when to pit and how many tires to put on, the biggest strategic element of the past few seasons has been how slow to take it on drafting tracks to save fuel. That, dear reader, isn’t much fun at all.
Without belaboring the points made by several members of the Frontstretch team about the red option tires (or soft tires, if you prefer), they turned out to be a godsend for the race at Phoenix Raceway. Putting on a set of option tires when no one else did turned mid-pack cars into frontrunners, which is why Ryan Preece looked for a bit like he was playing a NASCAR video game on too low a difficulty setting while he flew through the field.
Smart use of the option tires even had Ty Dillon in position to contend for a win until a brutal, error-filled pit stop put the kibosh on that. Yet even though anyone could make a charge to the front, the option tires didn’t turn the race over to a completely random set of contenders, as evidenced by the fact that the driver who won the previous two NASCAR Cup Series races (barely) managed to make it three in a row.
We’ll come back to that gentleman in a second, but the point here is that the option tires added just the right amount of risk-reward to the equation at Phoenix. It’s possible they won’t work as spectacularly on all short tracks, but they look promising in the afterglow of what we just witnessed.
It sure beats the heck out of driving slow on purpose when it comes to strategic wrinkles.
2. So is Dominance!
When the Next Gen car was introduced to the Cup Series in 2022, the consensus was that it would level the playing field for a bit until one of the larger organizations found a way to bring its economy of scale and economic advantages to bear. The first three years of competition more or less bore that out, with no driver winning more than six races in a single campaign.
Yet here we are four weeks into the 2025 season, and there are signs that might be changing before our eyes. By winning a tight battle back to the line at Phoenix, Christopher Bell became the first driver to win three consecutive Cup races in the Next Gen era, as well as the first to win three of the first four races in a season since Kevin Harvick did it in 2018.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Bell is going to go wild and run off like 12 wins, or that he’ll be the guy everyone is trying to catch all season. Harvick ended up with eight victories seven years ago, and Kyle Busch managed that many himself that year.
Still, there’s a real chance that Joe Gibbs Racing, and Bell’s team in particular, have made the breakthrough that most assumed someone would make in due time. His wins came on three distinct types of tracks, and Bell also led laps in the Daytona 500. He’s been fast everywhere.
Parity is what sports fans always claim to want. Ratings and other indicators suggest dominance makes them pay more attention. We might be on our way there for 2025.
3. Yet It’s Not All Rainbows at JGR
Perhaps the crew members for Ty Gibbs will want to hang out more than ever with Bell’s this week. While Bell has flexed his muscle in ways that we’ve not yet seen in a Next Gen car, Gibbs has literally had results as bad as a JGR driver has ever turned in — and they date back to the end of last season.
This development is, in a word, baffling. Gibbs is only a year removed from a blistering hot stretch to his 2024 Cup campaign, where he ripped through four straight top-nine finishes between Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Circuit of the Americas. He was a very popular pick to get his first series victory before racing got underway in 2025.
He’s also just 22 years old, so any “Ty Gibbs is washed” chatter is just internet nonsense. There is some danger that he’ll be upstaged by the next wave of even younger talent rising the ranks behind him, especially with William Sawalich under the same Toyota umbrella. But that might just allow Gibbs to work himself out of his funk without so many eyes on him. Instead of being a young phenom, it could be that Gibbs is, as my son would say, a regular bloomer.
It’s just a stark contrast to the wild success Bell is having, and yet another example of how fortunes can vary wildly even within the same garage.
4. Is No News Good News for Fontana? Or Just No News?
When the plan to close Auto Club Speedway in California and replace it with a short track was first announced, it felt a little bit like when your favorite musical artist decides to tinker with their style for their next album to cash in on whatever genre is trending at the time. The sport was just coming off the #MoreShortTracks frenzy after all, still blissfully unaware that racing was about to pick up at intermediates while falling off at tracks a mile or less in length.
Since then, a lot of things have changed besides the racing, and the future of a replacement track in Fontana remains very much up in the air. An article in the Los Angeles Times this week shed little new light on that subject.
It sounds like something might still be built there. Will it be a half-mile oval? That’s apparently just one option. I’d find it humorous if a two-mile, D-shaped oval was another.
I also feel for the fans in that part of the country who just want to see something happen. I just wouldn’t feel real confident hearing the most ambiguous possible quote from NASCAR West Region president Dave Allen: “We’re going to do something. I just don’t know what and when yet.”
Going to steal that to tell my boss sometime soon.
5. The Oldest School Part of NASCAR Right Now is The CW
Sounds crazy, right? But the history of network TV affiliates switching away from sporting events in progress is a long one, dating back to the Heidi Game in 1968. You might need to ask your grandparents or even great-grandparents about that one.
In any case, the frustration felt by fans who had their CW affiliates switch away before the end of the Phoenix NASCAR Xfinity Series race is real. It’s not new, except to racing fans in 2025, and is part of a long tradition of affiliates having to learn about viewer outrage the long way.
The CW says its affiliates will be better at this as they go. In the meantime, consider this the next time you complain about the changing landscape of race broadcasts: We wouldn’t have had that problem if the race was on a streaming service.
