5 Points to Ponder: How Late Is Too Late to End a Cup Series Race?

1. I Could Have Raced All Night

(With a h/t to Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner and an apology for twisting around the title to one of the top 20 showtunes of all time.)

When inclement weather rears its ugly head on a NASCAR weekend, there are only a limited number of solutions for how to handle it. That’s even more true when the effects are felt during a race, and while there are times when there are no easy fixes, the most common complaints from fans come when a race is cut short (as happened to all three national series races at Charlotte Motor Speedway this spring) or the conclusion is bumped to the next day.

Neither of those things happened on May 31 for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway, even though the Cracker Barrel 400 didn’t start on time due to rain. NASCAR waited it out, started the race later than planned and ran it to its conclusion.

People were still upset. Why? Probably because when Denny Hamlin took the checkered flag, it was after midnight ET. It wasn’t quite as late locally since Nashville is in the Central time zone, but that’s still pretty late for a non-holiday weekend Sunday night race.

As a night owl by nature, it didn’t bother me, but it’s easy to understand why some fans were irritated. You get one NASCAR race a year at your local track, and then you end up going into work, school, or whatever tired the next day.

Still, on the “no good choices” continuum of NASCAR options for dealing with bad weather, there seems to be a broad consensus that racing to a pre-determined time limit is at the bottom end (look at the Charlotte NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race reactions for all the proof you need). Waiting and racing late is at the other end, at least in my mind, so with all due respect to the Nashville area fans who were affected, it could definitely have been worse.

2. Nashville Superspeedway Should Stay on the Cup Series Schedule

It’s just part of the stock car racing life, circa 2026, that we start discussing the fate of tracks almost as soon as they are finished hosting races regularly. Nashville is no different, even though its history of putting on Cup Series events now stretches back a whole six years.

That sarcasm is followed quickly by an acknowledgement that there are extenuating circumstances in the Music City. Hope still springs eternal that NASCAR will return to the short track Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway, and since the sport is only reducing the number of cities it visits twice a year, the assumption has been that the return of the Fairgrounds means a farewell to Nashville Superspeedway.

Maybe we should pump the brakes on that idea for just a bit. While this track hasn’t produced consistent thrills throughout the decade, this year’s race was the best to date, complete with a breathtaking three-car battle between teammates for the win. Running the 750-horsepower package may have had something (OK, a lot) to do with that, but the numbers back up the eye test: The voting on Jeff Gluck’s “Was it a good race poll?” is trending toward this being the favorite Cup race at the track so far.

It’s hard to imagine Nashville bucking the trend and getting two race weekends a year when so many other places now only have one, and deserving venues like Dover Motor Speedway are fighting to hold on at all. It would be a shame, though, if we found something good and then let it slip away over something as arbitrary as seeing Nashville’s two tracks as part of a zero-sum game.

3. The Most Surprising Part of Shane van Gisbergen’s New Oval Game

Let’s get this on the record right off the top: It’s no shock that Shane van Gisbergen is getting better on oval tracks. Part of that is because he’s too talented to flounder forever, and yes, the other part is that he really had nowhere to go but up.

After just missing out on the top 10 at Charlotte, van Gisbergen collected his first ever top-five result on a Cup Series oval at Nashville. He moved up two spots in the points standings as a result, and is comfortably in the Chase field at the moment with the San Diego and Sonoma Raceway races where he figures to be a favorite just a few weeks away.

This kind of improvement might have been expected if Trackhouse Racing was on an overall tear in 2026, but that hasn’t been the case. In fact, with Ross Chastain on pace to have his worst season ever for the team — he’s currently 26th in points despite never finishing lower than 19th between 2022 and 2025 — and Connor Zilisch fighting through a rookie campaign that can best be described as nightmarish, the New Zealand native is really the only light in an otherwise dismal Trackhouse campaign.

So not only is van Gisbergen leveling up, he’s doing it despite running for an organization that appears to have lost the plot overall. That, and not just his newfound oval prowess, is the most impressive part of his 2026 so far.

4. Ryan Preece’s Upheld Penalty Could End Up Very Costly

It was almost a non-news story when the National Motorsports Appeals Panel decided to uphold NASCAR’s penalty against Ryan Preece for wrecking Ty Gibbs at Texas Motor Speedway earlier this season. Drivers rarely win on appeal, so Preece and his crew probably assumed those 25 driver points were gone as soon as they heard the initial ruling.

The problem is that they might really rue not having them. Preece finished 36th at Nashville after coming home 34th at Charlotte, racking up what were his worst results of the season back to back. As a result, he slid from 16th to 17th in the standings, meaning he’d be on the outside looking in if The Chase started today.

He’s only two points behind Austin Cindric, and there are 12 regular season races left, so all is far from lost. But Preece is now just seven points clear of Joey Logano, who figures to find his form at some point, even if it’s just barely enough to get himself into the field of 16.

Prior to Charlotte, Preece was on a remarkably consistent run where he finished somewhere between eighth and 18th for 11 straight races. That’s not title contender stuff, but it would probably be enough to stay in the Chase hunt.

The bad results may just be a blip, but the 25-point penalty now looks like it could be hanging over the No. 60 team’s heads for the next few months. When points matter more than ever before, the moral of this story is that settling perceived wrongs yourself just isn’t worth the risk.

5. It’s Almost Heim Time, But What Will That Look Like?

When racing historians look back decades from now, they’re going to be perplexed by how Corey Heim ended up without a full-time ride in any national series in 2026 after turning in a performance for the ages en route to the 2025 Truck Series championship. Or maybe they’ll just breeze over this season since we now know Heim will compete in the Cup Series regularly next season.

It’s tough to say how quickly he’ll adapt. Heim got an early taste of Cup life over the past two years, making spot starts for Legacy Motor Club and 23XI Racing. He did manage to grab a sixth at the Bristol Motor Speedway Night Race last September, but he’s mostly been mediocre at best in the others. While Heim will have seven more chances in a Cup car before this year is out, the cautionary tale of Zilisch is probably reason enough to keep Heim’s rookie expectations low until proven otherwise.

With 23XI announcing that Heim would drive its No. 35 Toyota in 2027, that also raises the question of what will happen to that car’s current driver, Riley Herbst. While he hasn’t set the world on fire by any means, the 27-year-old has shown improvement since 2025. The Athletic‘s Jordan Bianchi believes Herbst will end up with a fellow Toyota team as the driver of Legacy’s incoming third car.

Considering what Zilisch is going through as a rookie, there’s no guarantee Heim will immediately improve on Herbst’s results. But the upside is tantalizing, and that by itself might be enough to start dreaming about Heim Time starting next February.