While most current drivers are too young to remember Rockingham, the track’s past may provide some clues about who will excel.
With the Cup Series taking a week off after Kyle Larson’s dominating win at Bristol, the NASCAR world will turn its attention to a special homecoming this weekend: the Xfinity Series’ return to Rockingham Speedway for the first time since February 2004.
Up to then, “The Rock” had been a regular fixture on the NASCAR calendar for nearly four decades, playing host to 28 combined Cup wins by legends Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, David Pearson and Rusty Wallace, among other big names who drove to Victory Lane here. (It was also the site of debut wins by Mark Martin and Ward Burton, and final career wins for Bobby Isaac, Neil Bonnett and Bill Elliott.) Rockingham had not one, but two dates on the Cup Series schedule for most of that time, often serving as the second race of the season — immediately following the Daytona 500 — and one of the last races as well, playing host to Dale Earnhardt clinching his seventh and final Cup championship in 1994.
But NASCAR moved away from the venue after Matt Kenseth’s win at the 2004 early-season race, only briefly returning with the Truck Series in 2012 and 2013. As a result, most of the field in Saturday’s North Carolina Education Lottery 250 will have little to no memory of watching Cup cars zip around the 1-mile circuit with steep corners that measure as much as 25 degrees of banking in Turns 3 and 4. While the elder statesman of the 2025 field, Kasey Kahne, was 23 years old when he finished second in the final Cup race at The Rock, 36 drivers on the entry list were under age 20 back in February 2004; 32 were younger than 15, 25 were younger than 10, 20 were under age 5 and five weren’t even born yet.
At the opposite end of the age spectrum from Kahne, the now 18-year-old William Sawalich wouldn’t be born for nearly three years at the time of Kenseth’s win. (Do you feel old yet?) That means basically everyone except Kahne — who won the 2012 Truck race — and a few others who also ran in the Trucks (Jeb Burton, Ryan Sieg) are starting from scratch with a track that’s totally new to them.
Rockingham has gone through many changes since its original run, including a repave in 2022 that may alter how it behaves in the present day. However, the traditional name of the game at The Rock was tire management, with the rough surface quickly degrading rubber and rewarding drivers who could save their equipment during long green-flag runs. Even if the newer asphalt is more forgiving, the lessons of the past could still come in handy this week, in the absence of other experience.
So, keeping that in mind, who are the best tire-savers in the Xfinity Series today? One way to estimate this is to look at who performs better between comparable tracks with reputations for heavy tire wear and everywhere else.
To that end, I looked at the past three seasons of Xfinity races, isolating tracks that are, like Rockingham, between 1 and 1.5 miles in length; I then broke them down into high tire wear (Darlington, Homestead-Miami), moderate tire wear (Kansas, Dover, Loudon, Phoenix) and low tire wear (Charlotte, Las Vegas, Texas, Nashville). Giving double weight to high-wear tracks relative to moderate ones — and extra weight to more recent results — I calculated the average Driver Rating for current Xfinity drivers at tracks where tires are a significant factor versus not (minimum five races at each type), the theory being the top tire-management drivers are the ones who do disproportionately better where saving rubber matters most:
By this method, the best tire manager in Saturday’s field — by far — is Sheldon Creed, who posts an average Driver Rating 18.4 points higher on higher-wear tracks than low-wear tracks between 1 and 1.5 miles long. He’s scored five consecutive top 10s at the highest tire-wear intermediate tracks, and had another streak of seven straight top 10s at moderate-wear tracks snapped last month in Phoenix. He is a much more consistent high finisher at these types of tracks, where tire fall-off is pronounced, than at other comparable tracks.
Additional contending drivers who do better when tire management matters more include Sam Mayer, Jesse Love and, to an extent, Austin Hill, a trio that makes up Nos. 2-4 in the 2025 Xfinity Series standings. But a surprising name near the bottom of the list of splits — ahead of only Anthony Alfredo and the Sieg Brothers — is standings leader Justin Allgaier, whose Driver Rating dips by 6.6 points on higher tire-wear intermediate tracks. The huge caveat, of course, is that Allgaier also has the best average Driver Rating at higher-wear tracks even after the dip — you don’t go for a second consecutive Xfinity title without being good pretty much everywhere. He’s just a bit better at tracks where tire management is less important.
And that brings us to another caveat: The new-look Rock might be one of those tracks now. Based on January’s testing sessions, the dominant theme from drivers was speed, not tire wear.
“This place caught me off-guard, for sure,” said 2024 Trucks champ Ty Majeski after running some practice laps. “It’s fast. [After] the repave and everything, the trucks are barely lifting. We’re off the throttle, dumping just for a couple of truck lengths and we’re right back to it.”
“Even though it is a repave, it still has some of those washboard-y characteristics that we saw on the old track in three and four. That character’s going to come out of it in a few years, but right now, it’s got some roughness to it, but it’s a high-speed race track with, what we’re seeing right now, very little fall-off.”
“We’re hauling ass here,” Majeski added. “There’s no doubt about it. When you’re full throttle basically on corner entry already, in the banking and turn two comes up quick at you.”
But even if it will be a few more years before we get back to the full effects of an old-school Rock — “the race track at Rockingham literally eats the rubber,” Mike Skinner wrote back in 1999 — don’t be surprised if tires play some kind of role this weekend as well … and if an expert tire-saver like Creed is able to use that to his advantage.