WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The old adage that you never know what you might see at “The Madhouse” now holds truer than ever.
If you’re looking for bloopers, tomfoolery and roughhouse antics from the bizarro side of the stock-car racing world, Bowman Gray Stadium is your ground zero. Wednesday night, the stadium’s voluminous book of oddities added a new chapter, a passage produced by one of the wildest weather stretches in recent memory.
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Ryan Preece emerged as the victor and one of the last drivers standing in Wednesday’s snow-delayed Cook Out Clash that unofficially kicked off the NASCAR Cup Series season. The exhibition showcase at one of NASCAR’s oldest facilities was a story of perseverance, not just by Preece, but by the industry that saw it through and the hardy fans who braved the elements.
That’s not to say it was necessarily pretty. The 200-lap, 50-mile race took roughly three and a half hours to complete, slowed by delays, 17 caution flags and dicey wet-weather competition. But the mailman’s creed of “neither snow nor rain …” easily applied, with more frozen precipitation mixed into the saying.
“I mean, just a wacky day,” said Ryan Blaney, third in his Team Penske No. 12 Ford. “A wacky race, really, from the first 100 laps going dry, and then a sleeting wintry mix right in the middle there, and then firing off, having really no clue what to expect.”
An all-timer winter storm was Round 1 of the unexpected. On the eve of Sunday’s scheduled start, nearly a foot of snow dropped on North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad area, pushing the non-points event to the middle of the week. A herculean effort to clear stacks of snow from the track, bleachers and surrounding grounds finally made the place race-ready.
“I mean, I give NASCAR a lot of credit for getting us in this week, you know?” said Cliff Daniels, crew chief for Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “I mean, look, we’re looking at inches of snow on the ground here still, and they were able to get the track clean. Big credit to the track crew and everybody they had on hand to be able to get the facility and everything that we had here ready to go.”
Come race day, Old Man Winter’s next counterpunch presented a new set of Clash challenges. Rain that occasionally mixed with sleet fell at the race’s halfway break, causing a series of delays and forcing teams to switch to wet-weather Goodyear tires to keep going. Frigid temperatures were a constant, and the multiple thrills and spills posed another disruption with caution laps not counting toward the race’s total. They most certainly did count toward teams’ fuel consumption, though, and as a series of cars’ tanks ran dry, race officials mandated another break to fill up.
Drivers adjusted, too. The tried-and-true preferred lower lane that’s worked for decades at the quaint quarter-mile oval gave way to a higher and eventually drier groove. The spray and the glare from the lights and the slick track surface created another obstacle.
Year 1 of The Clash at Bowman Gray was also cold, hosted on the same January-into-February weekend in 2025. But it was nothing this extreme, prompting some post-race speculation about whether it should return to the historic venue.
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“The weather is the weather. It is what it is,” Blaney said, noting he didn’t have a definitive opinion on the event’s fate in Winston-Salem. “You can’t predict that stuff. I don’t think you can judge a race or a track off of that weird weather circumstance. I think this place honestly, judging off the first half, put on a good show. Just the way calamity is, it would be with any place.”
Bowman Gray typically runs a spring-to-midsummer schedule for its weekly shows, but it’s been no stranger to cold-weather racing, either. Before NASCAR’s modern era, the track hosted the Tobacco Bowl for modified and sportsman cars around the turn of the new year, and the race was a sought-after event for drivers and spectators.
Preece’s opinion might understandably be biased, given his deep-rooted foundation in the Modifieds that form Bowman Gray’s featured division, and that he was left holding the hefty trophy at race’s end. His vote, he said, would be a Clash at New Smyrna Speedway in Florida, where he was headed directly post-race to get cracking on a week’s worth of events in the 60th annual World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing before Daytona. But his heart, he said, was also with the track that means so much to the sport and the diehard community that supports it — wacky weather races or not.
“Bowman Gray is special,” Preece said. “Here is what I’m going to tell you guys: The fact that this city still came out — like we had a great crowd for 34 degrees with potential for rain. I’m sure a lot of people had to miss work on Monday and Tuesday and couldn’t come out here early enough. They came out for the feature. For me, I can appreciate that. They love racing. I think I want to go to places that want us and love racing.”