1. Can Alex Bowman Still Make The Chase?
Talladega Superspeedway marked the start of what Alex Bowman hopes will be a very late Chase comeback to salvage his 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Bowman’s finish of third was his first top 15 of the season, let alone his first top five. He was so far behind in points that he actually didn’t make up a single position in the standings, still winding up 36th after missing several races due to vertigo.
The Arizonian now has a 146-point gap separating him and 16th in points, Austin Cindric. That sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t have to be.
Looking at just the last eight races, Denny Hamlin has only won one race, but he’s scored 366 points. His consistent, weekly showing has allowed him to score 150 or more points than all but 11 other drivers in Cup in that timeframe.
Bowman has twice that amount of races to make up his 146-point gap. He just needs to build on this momentum with more consistent finishes in the late spring into summer. Add in Hendrick Motorsports equipment, you can never count any type of comeback out.
2. Spire’s Speed Shows It Might Not Need a Big Name
Carson Hocevar’s breakthrough win this past weekend was the cherry on top of a great start to the season for Spire Motorsports.
As it stands now, Spire would have two drivers in the Chase if the regular season were to end today. The decision to give Hocevar a long-term contract extension prior to the season has paid off tremendously, with no chance of him moving on to a more established team anytime soon.
Newcomer to Spire Daniel Suarez has talked quite a bit about how far off Trackhouse Racing is and has backed it up by being 14th in points, well above his former employer. His nearest former teammate is Shane van Gisbergen in 19th.
Kyle Busch’s contract with Richard Childress Racing is up at the end of this year, and a lot of people have linked him to Spire over the past couple of years. It’s a move that makes sense for Busch, but it might not make sense for Spire anymore.
Spire isn’t going to get rid of Hocevar. Suarez has earned himself another season at Spire if he can retain a playoff spot.
Michael McDowell is probably the most vulnerable driver at the team right now, sitting 23rd in points. But that’s still better than Busch, despite Busch being in a much more established seat.
Another driver better than Busch this season has been Austin Dillon. It’s not by as much as you might think, but Busch being unable to definitively defeat Dillon as he could just a few years ago is a major red flag.
3. Kyle Busch’s New Crew Chief
Also speaking of Busch, news broke on Monday morning that the former Cup champion will have a new crew chief.
Jim Pohlman has been taken off the road and put into an unnamed position in the RCR competition department. Pohlman steps off the pit box one day after his first top-10 finish of the season, a 10th at Talladega.
The new chief up top the No. 8 pit box is RCR Performance Director Andy Street. Street has won 11 NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series races over the years with Myatt Snider and Austin Hill and served as crew chief for the team’s part-time No. 33 car at select Cup events this year.
Street took over as interim crew chief last year for Busch after Randall Burnett moved over to Trackhouse. He and Busch managed a top five and two top-10 finishes in five starts.
When crew chiefs are being rotated around multiple years in a row, that’s usually not a great sign for a driver. With how Busch has run this year, it’s starting to become harder to justify RCR retaining Busch’s salary considering Jesse Love and Austin Hill are right there in NOAPS as much cheaper long-term options.
4. Jamie McMurray’s Return to NASCAR
After a number of very ho-hum choices for the No. 25 RAM, Kaulig Racing finally announced a couple of big names for the All-Star seat in the coming months: McMurray and Clint Bowyer.
Bowyer returning for that ride is very unsurprising. With how much money RAM has spent on Fox Sports advertising this season, Bowyer or potentially even Kevin Harvick showing up for a race was only a matter of time.
Jamie McMurray, though, is a big surprise. Let alone him racing at San Diego.
The event will be McMurray’s first NASCAR race since the 2021 Daytona 500. A return to NASCAR on a road course? Really?
Then I did some digging, and discovered a surprise, at least to me: McMurray is actually not half bad on road courses.
Obviously, he was overshadowed during most of his days at Chip Ganassi Racing by Juan Pablo Montoya. But McMurray was also fairly solid, scoring a few top five and top-10 finishes at Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen International.
Highlights include a second place at Sonoma in 2004 and a third place at Watkins Glen in 2006. In 2018, during his final full-time season in Cup, McMurray finished second at the inaugural Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL race.
5. The Newest Cup Driver
Daniel Dye has returned to NASCAR following his suspension.
Instead of staying in the lower series, he has moved up to Cup. Dye’s Cup debut proved to be incredibly uneventful, in which he finished two laps down in 24th running the No. 78 for Live Fast Motorsports.
And to be clear, nothing much has changed with his situation. Dye got reinstated by NASCAR pretty quickly and then found his way into a Cup car. Doesn’t matter that he negatively insinuated another driver was homosexual. Barely an inconvenience, actually.
It’s not on NASCAR for letting him come back so quickly. It’s on Dye for not even pretending to treat the experience as anything more than a minor roadblock.
Even Noah Gragson was aware enough not to come back to NASCAR for the rest of the season after his suspension a few years ago. Dye was out of NASCAR about as long as Bowman was with vertigo. Even less so, if we include his ARCA Menards Series starts in races he couldn’t win.
We’re getting to the point that NASCAR drivers can say or do whatever they want, and as long as dad has enough money or connections, they can find their way back to the sport. Meanwhile, drivers with actual talent like Parker Retzlaff or Timmy Hill have to scrape and claw just to stay in it.
It says more about the state of NASCAR past the top 30 drivers in Cup than it does about how good Dye actually is. Or isn’t.
Michael has watched NASCAR for over 25 years and has covered it on-and-off for 14.
In addition to Frontstretch he also writes sporadically for his own websites GrandPrixFocus.com and StockCarFocus.com.
Worrying about making the playoff should be the last thing on Bowmans, or anyone else’s mind. He just needs to get consistent decent runs again. That should be the only goal for the rest of this year.