Who… should you be talking about after the race?
William Byron was the class of the field when it mattered on Sunday (Aug. 3) at Iowa Speedway, winning the Iowa Corn 350 by 1.192 seconds over polesitter Chase Briscoe, who won his sixth pole of 2025 on Saturday (Aug. 2).
Byron took the lead on the first lap, leading the first 67 trips around Iowa before Brad Keselowski worked him over and passed him in time to win the first stage, bringing Austin Cindric along with him. Keselowski had the best car for the middle stages of the race, also winning stage two.
Byron wouldn’t see the lead again until lap 277, with Briscoe, Ryan Blaney, Cindric and Chase Elliott taking turns at the head of the class through the middle portion of the race as multiple pit strategies came into play.
A cluster of cautions in the first half of the final stage meant some teams, like Byron’s, playing the mileage game. Byron stretched his final tank of gas for over 140 laps, far exceeding the pre-race prediction of 110-115 laps. It’s Byron’s second win of 2025 and 15th of his career.
On the other hand…
Kyle Larson looked stout early on, starting third and scoring a sixth-place finish in the opening stage. He was frustrated with traffic as the day wore on, and he did get roughed up a couple of times, including by teammate Elliott. He voiced his frustration to his team, but as the day went on, it was also apparent that he didn’t have the car to contend. He finished 28th.
Larson has been in a bit of a summer slump. In the last eight weeks, he has just three top-15 finishes, though two of those are top fives. It could be that he and his team are willing to sacrifice a few finishes to find a playoff edge, but Larson’s vocal frustration on Sunday does beg the question of whether that’s legit, or whether Larson needs to find a little momentum before the playoffs if he hopes to win a second title this year.
What… does this mean for the points standings?
Byron retook the points lead from Elliott after Elliott finished 14th. Byron holds a gap of 18 over the No. 9. Larson and Denny Hamlin maintained third and fourth spots, but fell from inside 20 points of the top spot to 45 and 51 back, respectively. Christopher Bell held onto fifth by 11 points over Tyler Reddick.
Blaney, Briscoe and Alex Bowman remained unchanged in sixth through ninth, while Bubba Wallace moved past Chris Buescher to round out the top 10.
The big gain of the week was for Keselowski, who improved by five positions from 24th to 19th, up from 30th six weeks ago. He’ll still need a win to make the playoffs, but his team has obviously made some major strides.
The playoff picture did not change, though Buescher’s hold on the bubble loosened a bit thanks to teammate Ryan Preece’s top-five day. Buescher still maintains a 23-point cushion with three races left in the regular season.
Where… did he come from?
We need to talk about Preece.
He and his RFK Racing No. 60 team put together a stellar day on Sunday after starting 33rd. By the final restart, Preece didn’t quite have the long-run speed to contend for the win, but he was in solid position to capitalize on fuel miscalculations or mistakes and captured his third top five of what has been, if not a complete breakout (and there’s time for it to become that), easily a career year.
He’s got more top 10s than Joey Logano, Wallace or Reddick. His average finish of 16.0 is better than Logano, Wallace or Blaney. 13th in points, he’d be solidly in the playoffs in a lot of years; this one is an anomaly with three winners outside of the top 16.
Enough of Preece’s bad days have been bad enough to keep him lower in points. He’s got seven results of 20th or worse in 23 races, not quite consistent enough yet to be a weekly threat — but enough to make it clear that if he can clean that up just a bit, he’ll be one.
When… was the moment of truth?
There was some decent racing early and on restarts, but overall, clean air mattered way too much for the race to be particularly compelling. Yes, strategy was important, but for it to make the race interesting, it has to actually play out. A driver should not be able to run half throttle for laps on end to save fuel while the cars behind him, with the drivers pushing as hard as they can, cannot make up any ground.
Sure, part of that was also due to tire wear (and tires should absolutely wear out during a fuel run), but Iowa Speedway is a track that has produced good racing in both the Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series over the years, and yet the Cup cars couldn’t deliver much more than any of the one-mile tracks on the schedule.
This one wanted to be a good race. There were multiple pit strategies in play. Tires did matter, although not quite enough. The battle between Byron and Keselowski in the first stage was fun to watch. Restarts had a satisfactory amount of chaos.
It wasn’t that the short-track package didn’t work, because it’s hard to say that the intermediate package would have made it any better. It’s just that it’s not enough. More horsepower might have made a difference, though likely not as marked as it might on a short track.
This one had enough moments to keep it from being a total flop, but it was still glaringly lacking something.
Why… should you be paying attention this week?
With the Cup Series making its last visit to a road course before the playoffs at Watkins Glen International, Shane van Gisbergen will be a favorite to win his fourth race of 2025 and lock up a solid playoff seeding. But a van Gisbergen win should not be a foregone conclusion.
Who else is on the favorites list? How about Elliott, who has been the model of consistency this year and has two wins and a 10.6 average finish at the Glen. His last two starts there haven’t been stellar, but he’s still in the conversation. Others with two wins at the Glen include Larson and Kyle Busch.
Another driver who can’t be overlooked is AJ Allmendinger, who has a Cup win at the upstate New York track and finished third in his last Xfinity start there, two spots ahead of SVG. He had a transmission failure in last year’s Cup event, but he scored top-four finishes in each of the previous races there.
And don’t forget the defending race winner Buescher. A win would take him off the playoff bubble and take the pressure off for the final two regular-season races.
How… did this race stack up?
In terms of 2025, this one was mediocre. The racing wasn’t particularly exciting, and the broadcast didn’t help matters.
While its true that television can’t cover action that isn’t happening, it also can’t afford not to cover any action that is going on. The cameras caught some mid-pack battles, but it seemed like a lot was overlooked at times.
The booth did the best they could with what they had, but production seemed indifferent. There was a lot of emphasis on drivers like Larson, who really didn’t perform all that well. That same energy would have been better spent on drivers like Preece, Wallace and Austin Dillon, who exceeded expectations on the day.
The broadcast shouldn’t manufacture what’s not there, but this one made what was there fall flatter than it should have.
The clean air issues weren’t the production team’s problem, but how they worked with them was.
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.