It’s not just Carson Kvapil getting hot at the right time in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
His teammate, Rajah Caruth, has had to weather bouncing between his No. 88 JR Motorsports ride and a weaker No. 32 Jordan Anderson Racing Chevy throughout the season. But with the pressure of the Chase cutoff approaching, he’s found a rhythm. Caruth was ninth at EchoPark Speedway, won a stage at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and topped it off with a runner-up finish at Iowa Speedway this past Saturday.
Entering the final race of the regular season, Caruth is just 15 points behind the cutline, joining a frenzy of Sam Mayer, William Sawalich, Brent Crews and Taylor Gray separated by just 20 points. And now, Caruth is going to where he feels most comfortable: a drafting track in Daytona.
“Excited to go plate racing in a couple of weeks,” Caruth said on The CW after his run at Iowa.
Hang on. A couple of weeks?
That’s right, the payoff to months of racing to decide who will compete for the championship comes a full 20 days after the penultimate race at Iowa. The O’Reilly Series is off for Richmond and New Hampshire, making Aug. 28 the return of the series for what is essentially the most critical race of the season for most teams.
Could you imagine if before the final week of the NFL regular season, with plenty of playoff implications, the entire league got a bye week? Imagine if the NBA or MLB told teams to take a week off before the final stretch of games to decide who plays in the postseason.
NASCAR is doing that twice over. A full pay period for most will elapse between the final two races that will determine the field for a championship.
It’s the reality of any national series below the Cup Series that there’s not going to be as much racing as there is at the top level. With 39 weeks to fit 33 races, off weeks are a given on the O’Reilly schedule. It’s also been pretty commonplace to go two weeks without a race, with only one season since 2008 not having back-to-back weekends off.
The two-week break most commonly came early in the season, in either March or May, setting up a steadier schedule into the summer. Some years, October sees a break of two weeks that worked with full-season points. Of course, with college football taking hold in the fall, the TV networks wouldn’t complain much about not having to worry about where to slot an O’Reilly race.
But this year’s schedule has been wildly different. The series went 16 weeks nonstop to start the season. Though tough on teams, fans couldn’t complain about having something to fill their Saturdays, plus an Easter weekend race at Rockingham Speedway.
After an off week to start June, the series was back for five more weeks in a row of racing. Then, after the Focused Health 250 in Atlanta? Three races in seven weeks. To put that into perspective, Formula 1, which literally forces teams to shut down operations for two weeks in the summer, will host as many races in that span when its teams return for the Dutch Grand Prix next week.
O’Reilly isn’t the only national series with this issue. The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series will run back-to-back weekends to set the field of 10 for their Chase while O’Reilly is off, culminating at New Hampshire on Aug. 22. When is the first race of its playoff? Four weeks later, at Bristol Motor Speedway. For fans of O’Reilly and Trucks, this much time off with the playoffs approaching is frustrating for those trying to get their fix of the lower series.
So far, 20 of the O’Reilly Series’ 2027 dates are confirmed, with a few more — like Memorial Day weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway or the season-finale coming after the November Martinsville date — that are safe to assume will be confirmed soon. There’s some good news with the moving of Bristol Motor Speedway’s summer date back to Aug. 13, meaning fans won’t have to wait almost a month for Daytona on Aug. 27 if it remains the regular-season finale.
But early indications, if the series stays at 33 races in a season, seem to point toward changes that’ll leave fans disappointed. For one, it’s all but a done deal that the Rockingham Easter date is gone. And with it, likely the lone shot the O’Reilly Series had of a “standalone” event, something that used to be a staple of the series at places like Nashville, Milwaukee, Kentucky and others. It was the standalone events, often with support of Trucks or the ARCA Menard Series, that helped the series stand out by shaking up the calendar and going to underserved markets.
Additionally, the series will once again race on All-Star Weekend, this time at North Wilkesboro Speedway. It’ll eliminate another week for the series to be off and get back in the summer, where it’s currently lacking. Speaking of summer, it is currently a barren wasteland when it comes to confirmed races for 2027 in the series. The aforementioned Bristol and Daytona dates join July 3 at Iowa and Sept. 4 at Darlington Raceway as the only four races confirmed for the 17 weeks from June through September.
Where does NASCAR put that two-week break? The best bet for the sake of building up momentum toward the Chase would be early summer. Then again, maybe the series becomes more sporadic altogether and we start seeing more weeks off between races.
The Cup Series is always going to get priority from NASCAR when it comes to scheduling, but it’s important that the other national series get consideration. If the stage break changes of this past week have proven anything, it’s that NASCAR knows its fans want to see more racing. Whether the answer is more dates as a series or more standalones, it’s best not to leave O’Reilly fans twiddling their thumbs like they will for the rest of August.
James Krause joined Frontstretch in March 2024 as a contributor. Krause was born and raised in Illinois and graduated from Northern Illinois University. He currently works in Fort Wayne, Indiana covering minor league, college and high school sports. Outside of racing, Krause loves to keep up with football, music, anime and video games.