Is the Coronado Naval Base a better fit for NASCAR than Chicago?
With the Chicago street course experiment nixed for 2026, NASCAR announced its replacement earlier this week: an Independence Day weekend race at Coronado Naval Base in San Diego, celebrating the 250th anniversary of not just the United States Navy but America as well.
All of that fanfare will surely put out a great product from a patriotism standpoint. For those who love a good flyover, this might be the closest thing to riding along with the Blue Angels as you can get (and who knows, maybe they show up too).
But what about the actual racing? There are no oval tracks sitting around empty on the base; this is another street race. However, being on a naval air base lends itself to a bit of a broader spectrum than winding down the narrow streets of Chicago. One of the primary benefits is empty air strips. Some of the actual course, like the start/finish line and first few turns, are already finalized, as they go through the actual base.
However, the rest of the track is a blank canvas, so to speak. NASCAR is reportedly working with iRacing on making the course everything it needs to be with multiple passing zones and different elements of other tracks, which might be the smartest thing that I’ve heard in quite some time.
With all of this in mind, I’m going to jump straight to it: This is going to be tenfold better than the Chicago street course. The idea of a race in an urban environment is a good one, but Chicago simply wasn’t the city that was ever going to make that happen. Good on NASCAR for lining this up, and good on the drivers for promoting it correctly.
Sincerely, someone who has the original Top Gun soundtrack framed above my desk.
Will Denny Hamlin catch Kevin Harvick’s 60 wins this season?
Like it or not, Denny Hamlin is still the king of concrete after his win at Dover Motor Speedway last weekend. That same win was his 58th in the NASCAR Cup Series, placing him just two away from tying Kevin Harvick for 10th on the all-time wins list.
The question at this point isn’t whether Hamlin is going to catch Harvick or not. It’s more of a matter of when.
Hamlin has stated multiple times that he’s got some more driving left in him at Joe Gibbs Racing, and he’s already at four wins in 2025 alone, with several tracks he’s seen success at coming up on the schedule.
However, that assumes that Hamlin wins just about all of the races he’ll be a heavy favorite in the rest of the season, and I don’t quite buy that. At the absolute most, he’ll tie Harvick before the season’s end, but he’ll surpass him early on next season and potentially catch or surpass Kyle Busch if he and Richard Childress Racing don’t pull some speed out of thin air.
While the hunt for more wins certainly continues for Hamlin, the real chase is after the championship that he’s still without. If he retired tomorrow, he’d have the most wins of any driver without a Cup championship. If Hamlin can’t finish the deal at some point in the near future, he and Mark Martin will both be written off into the pages of history as the absolute best of the rest, and that’s not how Hamlin wants to go out by any means.
Is Connor Zilisch even human?
At this point, it’s a question that’s worth asking.
Since returning from the injury he suffered at Talladega Superspeedway in a crash in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, Connor Zilisch has been absolutely on fire behind the wheel, which has earned him three wins since missing Texas Motor Speedway.
The wins are impressive, no doubt, but what’s more wowing is the fact that he hasn’t finished outside the top five in the Xfinity Series a single time since returning from injury. It’s been an otherworldly run for Zilisch that’s seen him jump to the series lead in win total and second in points.
Is there a chance that he could make a run at the regular-season championship? Justin Allgaier currently leads that category by a 56-point margin over his young teammate. It might take Allgaier falling off a bit or having a few bad races in a row late in the season, which he typically doesn’t do, but Zilisch can most definitely catch him from a mathematical perspective.
The odds, though, are that Allgaier still takes the regular-season title. However, if Zilisch keeps this level of driving up, both on road courses and ovals alike, he could be the preeminent favorite to win the overall championship. Currently, he sits at +210 to win, while Allgaier’s line to repeat as champion sits at +175, according to DraftKings.
We’ve seen plenty of young stars come through the Xfinity ranks, but Zilisch is burning brighter sooner than just about any in recent memory.
Will Spire Motorsports’ Truck team go full time in Xfinity in 2026?
Spire Motorsports is offloading a significant amount of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series equipment it got from Kyle Busch Motorsports. This revelation came from an X post linked to racingjunk.com, where several large teams can sell their equipment for a price they deem reasonable.
The money isn’t necessarily in question for Spire, as it’s one of the few Truck Series teams that can afford to field four entries week in and out.
However, if you were, say, going to cut down on Truck teams next year to go Xfinity racing, as is one of the current rumors around the garage, it makes sense to liquify some assets.
Additionally, there are cars out there. For instance, the now-defunct Our Motorsports’ rides are floating around after its final run at Dover. It seems like quite the coincidence, doesn’t it?
But this is also equipment that is, in some cases, a few years old. It may simply be time for Spire to clean house on some of this old stock, and there’s no better way to do it than selling to other teams.
There’s also the issue of driver placement. Rajah Caruth is an exciting young driver in the sport, and his fellow full-timer Andres Perez is still in his rookie season. Would Spire simply downsize the Truck operation and keep Perez there, or would he be left to fend for himself after just one season in the big leagues?
Keep an eye on this one; for now, Spire hasn’t addressed the equipment sale or any of its plans outside of the Cup Series for 2026.
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.