With winners vaulting themselves into the Chase and the points system conducive to drivers falling into and out of favor within a handful of races, a few good — or bad — races can make all the difference in the Sprint Cup Series. Just tell that to Denny Hamlin and Kasey Kahne. Each are on …
The NASCAR Sprint Cup series will make its way to Kentucky for the fourth time Saturday night. When it comes to making picks, there is not a whole lot of history to go on here for the Cup drivers. But with three races, there are at least some trends we can look at. The one …
ONE: Wine Country After the Irish Hills of Michigan, next up on the Sprint Cup Series slate is a trip out west to beautiful Sonoma and wine country. One of the two road courses on the schedule — the other being Watkins Glen — the chance to turn left as well as right brings up …
Move over Talladega — Michigan International Speedway deserves some of the spotlight now. NASCAR’s fastest non-restrictor plate track took a step up with the assistance of Sprint Cup’s new rules package, and Who’s Hot and Who’s Not shows that other than the faster speeds, nothing really changed. Long green flag runs were prevalent, and smart …
Key Moment – On lap 150, caution period pit stops took place for the last time. Jimmie Johnson, Paul Menard, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jamie McMurray stayed out. They would pit with 35 or so laps to go and run the remainder of the laps to the finish. That strategy paid off in top …
Do you like speed? Do you like it when race car drivers pilot their beastly machines on the very limit of traction? If you answered yes to the above questions, this weekend’s Quicken Loans 400 from Michigan International Speedway will likely be of interest to you. Record speeds have been the big story of the …
Remember when Dale Earnhardt, Jr. finished 25th in the Sprint Cup standings in 2009? It’s hard to believe considering the success he’s had lately, but it’s true. The next season didn’t go much better, with little progress, and the son of a legend ended up 21st. If his name wasn’t Earnhardt, he probably would’ve wound …
In many ways, the Sprint Cup Series’ venture to the Pocono Mountains was a microcosm of the season to date. There was a singular figure who led many a lap, multi-time champions finding ways to struggle, and frontrunners succumbing because of the not-so-alive half the alliance between man and machine. The end result was very …
Last weekend marked a jam-packed few days of racing across multiple tracks, with Pocono Raceway and Texas Motor Speedway sharing the brunt of the attention. However, Pocono may have been the winner in terms of intrigue — it featured the return of TNT to NASCAR for its six-race summer series, currently the final time the …
What a mess. That’s what several teams were left thinking after the wreckfest that was the Hollywood Casino 400. A track-record and season-high 14 cautions marred the racing over the course of the 400-mile event, caused by everything from a rash of blown tires, a couple of driver errors at the wrong time, a move made in anger, and a very slick repaved racetrack. “If people are wondering where all the cautions went, they moved to Kansas,” Brad Keselowski said at one point during the day, referencing complaints about a lack of yellow flags during several events this season.
Although qualifying doesn’t matter much at Talladega, you might think that winning the pole would make for a less stressful day. Not so for Kasey Kahne, who ran out of gas under green-flag conditions and got shuffled all over the place during the event. Then, things only went from bad to worse; he got a windshield full of Stewart’s undercarriage in the last-lap mayhem as Stewart landed on top of his car. Just like that, Kahne was relegated to a 13th-place finish.
Brad Keselowski took the lead after the final round of green flag pit stops and had a car that was simply better than everyone else for the final run to the checkered flag.
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