Sunday Setup: Charlotte provides latest unknowns after another Saturday wash

CONCORD, N.C. -- For the fourth time in six races, rain washed away practice and qualifying for the NASCAR Cup Series – this time, at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Unfavorable forecasts provided ample opportunity for crew chiefs to be ready for yet another starting lineup set by the metric ahead of Sunday's Bank of America 400 (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). MORE: Charlotte starting lineup | At-track photos Bubba Wallace will take the green flag from eighth place Sunday, matching his finishing result of last week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he earned his career-best 15th top 10 of the season. The No. 23 team at 23XI Racing has been steady through The Chase presented by Mobil 1, garnering four top 10s in five races and sitting 10th in the standings. But with no practice and qualifying on Saturday due to inclement weather, all crew chief Charles Denike has to lean on is the work he and his team put into setting up their No. 23 Toyota at Airspeed, their race shop just 20 minutes west of the speedway. "It certainly puts all the pressure on our preparation and our tools and everything," Denike told NASCAR.com. "But we do the same amount of work preparing for practice, the same level of detail to be ready to unload well for practice. So all that will carry over to the start of the race. You're just not 100% certain whether you get exactly the ideal balance. And then during the race, you're more limited on adjustments during the race than you are for practice on what you can do, certainly within the time that you have on pit road. "So trying to make sure that you stay in a box that is favorable for that on pit stops. If you decide that you want to do some extra work, you're going to be giving up all your track positions. So you don't want to be too loose or too tight and not be able to keep it within a good competitive range." At Spire Motorsports, Carson Hocevar and the No. 77 team rank 11th in points, the second-best Chevrolet behind points leader Kyle Larson. Hocevar has had excellent runs on the Charlotte oval in recent years, but trouble has thwarted those efforts, most notably through an engine failure in the 2025 Coca-Cola 600. Despite the lack of results to show for their speed, crew chief Luke Lambert is optimistic about returning to the facility's 1.5-mile oval instead of the combination road-course/oval that is known as the Roval. "For us, we feel pretty confident," Lambert told NASCAR.com. "The last two Charlotte races, we've been pretty competitive, particularly last year, and obviously things have changed – we've got the new car this year, some things that we've learned over the last year and a half. We kind of have to apply to that, but I think that it's really dependent on the team." The Next Gen car has never been utilized on the Charlotte oval for a fall race or a Charlotte oval race scheduled for less than 600 miles. How crew chiefs call Sunday's race must be different than the approach they bring into May's Coca-Cola 600. "The whole feel of the race is different," Denike said. "The runs are actually generally a little bit shorter. In the 600, you have four 100-lap stages. It pretty much is broken up into two 50-lap runs, which is about the limit of what we put on this intermediate tire, so a little bit shorter runs in Stage 1 and 2. (We) can get over 50 in Stage 3 but just a whole one less stage. So it makes this race feel a little bit more like a normal mile-and-a-half race for us." Charlotte also marks the third intermediate track NASCAR visits in a row, the final in a consecutive stretch of 1.5-mile tracks after Kansas Speedway on Sept. 27 and Las Vegas on Oct. 4. There are "a few things" that teams learned at those two tracks that carry over to Charlotte, but not a ton. "I think that the tracks are very different," Lambert said. "Kansas is incredibly smooth, lower banking compared to Charlotte per se, and Vegas is in some ways similar to Kansas, but with a lot more road content – very rough and it was really hot. Now we're coming to Charlotte, which is its own animal, really. It's an intermediate, but it's high-banked, and there's definitely some roughness. So yeah, they're very different, and the things that we found that work at each of these tracks are not the same." There will be a lot of learning throughout the course of Sunday's 400-miler. The question now is: who aces the test atop the pit box?