Should reports of growing tension with local government worry NASCAR fans about the track’s future?
On Wednesday, reports surfaced from the Concord Monitor detailing a story about New Hampshire Motor Speedway and a recent event hosted in partnership with Harley Davidson and Indian Motorcycles highlighting a growing conflict between NHMS ownership and the local government.
To provide the cliff notes, the track had an order to allow members of law enforcement to patrol a 9-mile course that gets set up each year during Bike Week in which the track partners with motorcycle manufacturers to give demo rides to potential customers. The track ignored that order, citing that doing so would jeopardize the event even taking place, according to track ownership.
The track told the city that greater enforcement of traffic laws during this Bike Week event was needed, and the city did just that, issuing a plethora of fines, tickets and traffic stops.
Did it work? Well, not really. According to the report, this is a microcosm of what the relationship currently is between local government and the track itself.
How familiar does that sound? Similar developments led to the closing of tracks like Riverside Speedway (although that was more due to suburban development than anything else), and if you’ve ever known someone who lives by a racetrack, you probably also know someone who hates living by said racetrack. We’ve seen this movie before.
The local government has said that more communication is needed between the officials and the track, and that it hopes the relationship can be bettered. However, once a relationship like this turns sour, it’s often at the detriment of the track in the long run.
So should fans be worried about NHMS? To put it bluntly, yes.
Geography will play a factor here as much as anything else. This is not a large superspeedway-sized racing facility tucked into rolling hills of the Deep South, surrounded by faithful NASCAR fans. Instead, it lies in New England and offers a haven of speed for those around it who are fans of the sport. That group is a minority in New Hampshire, as sad as it may be.
There’s a very real chance in this encounter that the relationship could take a turn for the worse at some point, and in fact, I’d say it’s likely given the stories we’ve seen like this before. All it takes is one local official with enough power who’s hellbent on winning some votes at the expense of a few others, and the track will be put under so much pressure that it doesn’t make any sense to continue operations as normal.
That will be a sad day for all involved, but it’s the unfortunate end that many a track has met. I just hope that this gets turned around before the track and city officials reach that point.
Does Hyak Motorsports having no sponsor this weekend raise red flags?
One of the best stories in the sport this season has been that of Hyak Motorsports, formerly known as JTG Daugherty Racing, and its impressive run at piecing together a full season of sponsorship.
Now an entire 29 races in, this weekend at New Hampshire will serve as the first time this year that Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Hyak will have to run a Hyak Motorsports-branded car, as no primary sponsor was secured for this particular race.
Stenhouse and Hyak have put together an impressive run thus far in 2025 of scrounging enough sponsorship dollars to field a car each weekend, and that deserves mention. However, could this be a red flag for both the team and driver going forward? The replies on X sure seem to think so, but I don’t believe that’s the case.
It most certainly could be the beginning of the end, but I think the team will make it out of this on the other side just fine, assuming it doesn’t want to just throw its hands up and offload the charter. Hyak has done an impressive job acquiring sponsorship under short notice this year, and given an entire offseason, the sales team is going to be hard at work.
Additionally, Stenhouse is signed through next season, meaning that the team more than likely has a plan for 2026 and beyond.
Would it have been cool to see a completely blank car in the NASCAR Cup Series again? Well, duh, it always is. But at this time next year, I expect this to be a blip on the “hey, remember when” radar.
After a career race at Bristol Motor Speedway, what’s the limit for Zane Smith?
On a team with veteran talent and real speed at times this season, Zane Smith has emerged as one of the more intriguing young drivers in the garage, especially after coming home in third at Bristol last weekend.
Even going back to last year, when Smith has boomed, he’s done it in a big way. In 2024, his most impressive finish was a second-place day at Nashville Superspeedway, but he also managed a pair of top 10s on the year. Now in year two behind the wheel of the Cup car, Smith has looked more poised, and he’s become a more consistent driver as a result. He’s already got three top-10 finishes and one top five, all while narrowly missing out on three more top 10s with 11th-place finishes at Homestead-Miami Speedway, EchoPark Speedway and Richmond Raceway.
All of that goes to show that he is, in fact, improving, and so is the car. But what does that mean for his longevity? That’s hard to ascertain just now, but it might not be for reasons you might think.
Smith is still very young in his career, and the 2022 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion has a lot more races in front of him than behind him. However, if you look to the NASCAR Xfinity Series and Truck scene right now, you’ll see one of the most talented groups of young drivers the sport has ever seen winning races week in and week out.
It isn’t fair to hedge bets on who might be better in the long run before those drivers make their arrival, as they could either take seats or positions away from Smith. He’ll be a Kurt Busch-esque figure in the future, one who is always good for one or two wins a season, which can keep the money flowing into the right pockets nowadays, especially in this current playoff format.
Is the (Jesse) Love boat losing steam?
Remember when we all thought this Xfinity season was going to be a neck-and-neck race to the end between the likes of Jesse Love, Austin Hill, maybe Connor Zilisch and Justin Allgaier? Those were good times, right? Right?
Well, that was before Zilisch decided to forget how to lose a race for about a four-week period during which he got injured, which only ever seems to increase his power capacity.
Lost amid that storyline, though, is the fact that Love has completed a bit of a disappearing act as the season has gone on.
For instance, Love has seen little to no success outside of superspeedway tracks, at which he has to race head to head against not only Zilisch but also his own teammate Hill, who also only performs very well on superspeedways. In fact, Love’s only win this season comes from the very first race of the season at Daytona International Speedway, another superspeedway.
Even in his Cup starts, Love has not impressed when stacked up against the rest of the field. His highest finish thus far has been 24th in the Brickyard 400.
It suffices to say that the Love boat is losing a bit of its moxie, and if it doesn’t get it back soon, he could mimic his teammate Hill and be stuck in Xfinity purgatory.
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.