Here’s what’s happening in NASCAR with The Great American Getaway 400 presented by VISITPA.COM at Pocono Raceway in the rearview and the Quaker State 400 available at Walmart at EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway) up next.
MORE: Atlanta entry list | In-Season Challenge hub
1. Will RFK Racing be the breakout team of the In-Season Challenge?
After a rousing romp in the Poconos, RFK Racing looks primed to capitalize on a daunting — but lucrative — summer stretch to cement its playoff hopes. Could it come alive in this year’s In-Season Challenge for $1 million, too?
RFK Racing isn’t showing up to the start of this weekend’s inaugural NASCAR In-Season Challenge as a favorite, but it might leave as its defining story.
Over the past month, RFK has quietly assembled one of the sharpest streaks in the Cup Series. Fresh off all three drivers netting top 10s at Michigan International Speedway and Pocono, the Ford-backed organization appears primed for a breakout, and it could happen on the grand stage in the 2025 challenge debut.
The team is already trending in the direction of a steamy summer. Brad Keselowski has three top 10s in the last five points races after looking lost for the first quarter of the season. Chris Buescher has three straight, two of which were top fives. Ryan Preece is delivering career-best consistency in his first full season with a fresh No. 60 team. Together, they’ve created a front-to-back operation that now seems capable of contending in any race format, on any track type, and cohesively working together as well as, or better than, any in the sport.
That kind of form matters now more than ever.
The In-Season Challenge, debuting Saturday at Atlanta, features five high-pressure, high-variance venues in a single-elimination format where one mistake can end a run. RFK’s recent ability to race clean and finish contests with all three cars intact may be its biggest advantage, and to a degree, the only team in the garage that can boast that at the moment.
Atlanta, a pack-style drafting track since its 2022 repave, plays into Ford’s strengths. The manufacturer has earned the pole at every drafting-style race since the reconfiguration, and Keselowski remains one of the sport’s premier superspeedway racers. The two-time “old track” winner nearly added a third in 2023 at Atlanta on the new layout and consistently positions himself at the front in the closing laps of these races. Buescher is no stranger to victory in this style of racing, and Preece has kept his car in contention late during similar events. Atlanta is a race RFK could legitimately win outright; any of the three.
Chicago follows, and while the street course remains unpredictable, RFK’s sample size there is among the strongest. Preece’s No. 60 was driven to a fourth-place finish with a Stage 2 win by road-course ace Joey Hand last year, and Preece himself landed a top 15 there in the inaugural event for Stewart-Haas Racing, while Buescher was a top-10 finisher in that one. This time, all three RFK entries bring improved road-course packages into a weekend where they should be competitive, and with all three still potentially in the bracket.
Sonoma Raceway might be RFK’s biggest opportunity of the five. Buescher is an absolute top-10 machine on road courses, going from “underrated” a handful of years ago to “what the heck happened?” if he’s not battling for the win on any track that turns right. Keselowski has never been an A-grade road racer but is remarkably consistent as a front-half-of-the-field guy at the winding California track. Preece has quietly snuck into Buescher’s old role as a guy who you don’t immediately think of when it comes to road courses, yet he’s consistently been running in the top 15 of those races and turned in a quality P9 last year at Watkins Glen International as SHR was sunsetting.
By the time the ISC gets to Dover Motor Speedway, if RFK still has all three of its cars in … well, hey, there’s your breakout story right there. That could be asking a bit much, but if Keselowski or Buescher (or both) are still alive at that point, it bodes well for one of them advancing to the finale. Both have positive histories at Dover, and neither cracks under pressure, which can certainly happen for some at the high-banked, extremely fast Monster Mile.
Of course, if any of them make the finale, then any of them will be impossible to ignore; each with their own unique story line of what a victory would mean and with a potential playoff spot still on the line. Keselowski has long been a Brickyard favorite and led 34 of the final 41 laps last year before Kyle Larson emerged with the win.
But this run is about more than points or prize money. If RFK “breaks out” during the In-Season Challenge, it signals something potentially larger: a long-awaited return to elite-tier relevance for a NASCAR mainstay. A tournament win or deep bracket run for any of the three would put RFK firmly back in the 2025 championship conversation. It would further validate the team’s strategic growth over the offseason to a three-car expansion while maintaining the technical cohesion between drivers, crews and engineers, along with the internal culture that Keselowski has worked tirelessly to foster in his early days as co-owner. It would show the rest of the garage that RFK is no longer just rebuilding; it’s rejoined the party.
The ISC wasn’t built for the best team on paper — it was built for the best team for the next five races.
And RFK might just be that team right now. And beyond.
2. With Briscoe in the books, is Ty Gibbs’ first win imminent, too?
After watching teammate Chase Briscoe bring home his first victory for Joe Gibbs Racing Sunday at Pocono, and with a strong schedule ahead for him, is the sophomore’s maiden voyage to Victory Lane around the corner as well?
Joe Gibbs Racing is firing on all fronts.
Chase Briscoe’s win at Pocono added fresh momentum after some was lost south of the border. Christopher Bell already has three victories and feels like a slam-dunk Championship 4 contender. Denny Hamlin is Denny Hamlin and remains a weekly contender. And for Ty Gibbs, now the only driver in the JGR stable still chasing his first win for the team owned by his Super Bowl-winning grandfather, the path forward has never been clearer — or more urgent.
The spotlight now dramatically shifts to No. 54, now 104 races into his Cup career, as Gibbs remains the only winless driver on a four-car team that doesn’t historically tolerate droughts, emphasized emphatically by Briscoe in his post-race press conference.
“Bell has won three races, Denny has won three. Me and Ty hadn’t won yet,” said Briscoe, after capturing a relief-inducing Pocono victory. “Last couple weeks especially, I’ve just been like this huge weight on my shoulders, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. My wife is like, ‘What is going on with you?’ I’m like, ‘I have to win. I don’t think you realize how bad it is if we don’t win a race and lock into the playoffs.’
“I feel like I honestly weigh a hundred pounds less already. Literally, when I was doing my contract with JGR, I remember them showing me the stat thing about how out of 40 attempts for the playoffs, they have made it 38 times. The expectation is if you don’t make the playoffs, you’re not going to be in this car anymore.”
Briscoe’s arrival — and near-instant payoff — has reset the baseline. Gibbs, in contrast, enters Atlanta sitting 23rd in points, without a win, a playoff spot or a signature Cup performance to date.
But numbers rarely tell the full story, especially when it comes to growth.
Gibbs’ sophomore season hasn’t felt stagnant — it’s just been a bit of a slow burn. After a 23.9 average finish through the season’s first seven races, Gibbs has four finishes of 11th or better since, recently adding on a P3 at Michigan. He’s also qualified inside the top 10 in eight of the last nine races, and eventually starting races at the front of the field turns into finishing them there, too.
The timing of Briscoe’s win resonates so strongly for the pair. It punctuated something each of them has been hovering around for several weeks: readiness. And it landed at the start of a stretch of tracks where Gibbs can follow suit.
At Atlanta, Gibbs is already a winner in the Xfinity Series on this layout and has scored a pair of top 10s in Cup. That drafting-style chaos often rewards drivers with patience and positional discipline — two qualities Gibbs has shown more of in Year 2. The Chicago Street Race, where he finished third last year in one of the most chaotic events of the season, fits the same pattern. (Notably: he’s 2-for-2 in top 10s at Chicago.)
And at strong JGR tracks ahead like Dover, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Richmond Raceway, Gibbs should settle into a rhythm to close out the summer that offers him plenty of opportunities to be competitive.
That matters. Not just because JGR expects wins, but because the window for being “almost there” in elite equipment doesn’t stay open for long, family or not.
Still just 22, Gibbs has maintained his composure as a Cup driver under unique circumstances and handled the lofty expectations with more grace than many would in his position. But the premier stock-car series has a way of boiling things down and shaking out pretenders. And as the field tightens heading toward the playoffs, there’s less room for “potential” and more of a demand for immediate presence.
That’s what Briscoe’s win captured. It didn’t redefine JGR’s expectations — Briscoe, taking over for a surefire Hall of Famer in Martin Truex Jr, was expected to win — it reaffirmed them, shifting the urgency even further and more squarely onto Gibbs, the driver who’s grown up inside this organization, yet now must find a way to break through on his own terms to make his mark on it.
The next nine races offer plenty of opportunities — some chaotic, some tactical, some pure pace. He doesn’t need to win all of them. He just needs one of them to click, and the ingredients are there: qualifying speed, improved execution, team chemistry, and an increasing ability to stay in the fight when the race turns long and strange, of which there are likely to be many over the next two-plus months. The positioning is there; now comes the part that separates promise from arrival.
Briscoe seized his moment. Gibbs might be closer to his than he’s ever been.
3. Get to know the In-Season Challenge
NASCAR’s top stars take you through the ins-and-outs of the In-Season Challenge; see how it works before the five-race tournament gets underway.
4. Has Kyle Larson turned his luck around at Atlanta?
After initially appearing early in his career to be a track he would master, EchoPark Speedway has given Kyle Larson fits since its reconfiguration. A near-win in the spring inspired hope, however — has he gotten his Georgia gremlins out of his system? (Credit: Racing Insights)
| Kyle Larson at EchoPark, post-reconfiguration | |
|---|---|
| Starts | 7 |
| Poles | 0 |
| Wins | 0 |
| Runner-ups | 0 |
| Top fives | 1 |
| Top 10s | 1 |
| DNFs | 5 |
| Lead-lap finishes | 2 |
| Laps led | 34 |
| Average finish | 26.0 |
5. Catch the pack — news and notes from around the garage
Paint Scheme Preview: 2025 EchoPark Speedway, Lime Rock Park weekend
Checking in on the NASCAR Cup Series playoff bubble before Atlanta
Power Rankings: Denny Hamlin secures ISC top seed – No. 1 rank, too?
Hamlin returns to action with runner-up effort: ‘Everything’s clicking’
Brad Keselowski, No. 6 team lament miscommunications despite Pocono top 10
Most intriguing matchups for the first round of the In-Season Challenge
NASCAR Insights: Positive indicators for Tyler Reddick on verge of 200th Cup start
Relentless consistency, restless ambition drive Elliott’s 2025 season
Kyle Petty: Have we seen the best of Chase Elliott?
Analysis: Truthfully, Chase Briscoe turns impossible into possible
Cup Series favorites break down new In-Season Challenge
Fantasy: Fill out your In-Season Challenge bracket for a chance to win $1 million
NASCAR.com In-Season Challenge staff predictions
@nascarcasm: Fake texts to Pocono winner Briscoe
