Racing Insights is back with NASCAR Insights stats specifically tailored for the entire of Round of 12 tracks. By looking at performances on similar tracks, Racing Insights has come up with ratings for each driver in speed, long-run speed, passing, defense and restarts to see who’s set up well for the upcoming Cup Series Playoffs races at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Kansas Speedway and the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course.
What we’ve done in the chart below is total up those numbers and order the drivers from lowest to highest (with the lowest being the best or the most likely to do well in this round). What’s immediately noticeable from this batch of stats is that Denny Hamlin isn’t among the top eight playoff drivers in the chart. He comes in at just ninth because he’s 15th in both passing and restarts. Does that mean Denny is doomed to fizzle out in the Round of 12?
Not exactly. Hamlin’s ranking of fourth in long-run speed gives him hope that if any of these races ends with a long green-flag run, then he could just as easily be dancing in Victory Lane. What these numbers also don’t take into account is that Hamlin is resting atop a pile of 34 playoff points, sitting 26 markers above the cutline and theoretically gives him some wiggle room should he have a subpar showing in any of the three races.
On the flip side is Chase Elliott, who is the fourth-highest driver on the chart behind only William Byron, Ryan Blaney and Christopher Bell. This rating suggests that we shouldn’t sleep on the 2020 champion, even though he started the playoffs with finishes of 17th, third and 38th. He could easily turn things around and get back in the championship conversation this year, should these numbers hold up — sixth in speed, seventh in long-run speed and in passing. He’s also third in defense, so if he does get to the front, he’ll likely be able to close out the win.
For the record, when we did this exercise for the Round of 16, the formula was 11-for-12 in how it ranked the playoff drivers, with Josh Berry being the lone top-12 driver who did not advance. What’s different about this time around is that the playoff drivers are much more tightly grouped as they take up 12 of the top 13 spots in the chart. That could mean that the difference in advancing or not advancing could be razor-thin this round and provide plenty of excitement for the fans.
As New Hampshire Motor Speedway re-enters the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs for the first time in eight years, it seems appropriate to revisit one of the track’s September traditions, especially given that this year’s Round of 12 opener lands on the eve of autumn.
Few rituals are as synonymous with the fall season as a New England-style Thanksgiving meal, and playoff race day at New Hampshire Motor Speedway once featured an annual nod to one of the region’s most celebrated culinary customs.
Catered by a nearby farmhouse restaurant, an enormous spread of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, squash and gravy would be laid out in the media center a few hours before the green flag.
With apologies to the pilgrims, this buffet had little to do with conjuring the historical significance of a harvest.
It was a bounty that signified the meat of the NASCAR schedule was about to begin.
The Cup playoffs are always accompanied by a spike in tempers, tension, and turning points as the temperatures drop. Amid the brisk weather that heralds the famous foliage of the surrounding area, the 1.058-mile oval nestled in the bucolic countryside of Loudon, New Hampshire, has been the site of many flashpoints and definitive developments in the NASCAR championship.
The “Magic Mile” opened the inaugural Cup Series Playoffs — then known as “The Chase” — on Sept. 19, 2004, with a victory for Kurt Busch, who would capture the championship without scoring another win that year and solidify the track’s importance in setting the tone for a title.
For seven consecutive seasons, New Hampshire kicked off the playoffs — and often in memorable fashion.
The 2005 race was among the most contentious in playoff history, with Busch stridently marching into Scott Riggs’ pit stall after being spun on the third lap, and Robby Gordon angrily tossing his helmet into Michael Waltrip’s car under caution (and then hurling a vulgarity in a nationally televised interview).
In 2007, Clint Bowyer stunningly earned the first victory of his Cup career in his playoff debut. Three years later, he beat Tony Stewart in a dramatic battle that ended with both cars running out of fuel at the checkered flag. When Bowyer’s car failed post-race inspection, Richard Childress Racing appealed its case with the testimony of a former NASA engineer who worked on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. (The team still lost its case after arguing that a push to Victory Lane by a tow truck knocked the car out of compliance.)
That marked the last time New Hampshire held the opener, but there were seven more playoff races and several other impactful moments leading up to the championship.
En route to his third title, Tony Stewart turned his New Hampshire victory in 2011 into an endless dissection of his reference to the “dead weight” that he shook free to win the first two races of the playoffs after a winless regular season.
Because of an air pressure mistake in qualifying, Denny Hamlin started 32nd with a dominant Toyota and breathtakingly swept through traffic to lead the final 193 of 207 laps (he might have lapped the field from the pole) during the 2012 New England running.
In 2015, Matt Kenseth snatched a victory from Kevin Harvick, who ran out of fuel while leading with three laps remaining. A year later, Harvick took revenge by forcefully seizing the lead from Kenseth on a restart with six laps remaining.
In other words, NASCAR has rarely gone hungry for stoking the playoff drama at New Hampshire.
With one weekend of racing remaining to score NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series points, veteran Jacob Goede holds a two-point advantage over young Chase Johnson in the Division I national standings.
Goede, who won the Weekly Series national title in 2019, has enjoyed a stellar season of Super Late Model racing between Dells Raceway Park, LaCrosse Fairgrounds Speedway and Elko Speedway. Across those three tracks, Goede has amassed nine victories and 25 top five performances.
How Goede performs in Elko’s first of two Late Model feature on Saturday will be crucial towards whether he earns a second national title, as it is the only one that counts towards the standings. Goede believes this year could be one of his final opportunities to earn a national title, which is why he is determined to find Victory Lane at Elko.
“If I could somehow pull this off, it’d mean the world,” Goede said. “I’m getting to the end of my career I feel like. My kids are getting busier with sports and we’re racing quarter midgets too. My racing stuff is getting tougher to keep up with. I’ve got a small team and work a full-time, so racing is still just a hobby.
“With the level of competition we’re competing with, [another national title] would mean a lot to me and my family in general.”
Chase Johnson trails Jacob Goede by two points in the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I standings with one weekend left. (Photo: Ted Malinowski/NASCAR)
Over in the Southeast, Johnson has put together a stellar campaign during his first full season in Division I. Fifteen victories across 25 starts this year not only have Johnson within range of national title, but also atop the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I Rookie of the Year standings and Dominion Raceway’s American Racer Late Model points.
Should Johnson usurp Goede this weekend, he will become the youngest Weekly Series national champion at 17 years old, surpassing Layne Riggs, who won in 2022 at the age of 20. With Saturday’s race at Dominion scheduled for 118 laps, Johnson intends to be smart and methodical so he can secure the most prestigious accomplishment of his young career so far.
“[A national championship] is something you can keep with you for the rest of your life,” Johnson said. “You really don’t know [what to feel] until you win. If we can pull it off, it’d be amazing. We’ve got to close out the deal and we’re all working hard to try and give it the best shot we’ve got.
“It’s pretty cool to be in this situation and I’m thankful to have a chance this late in the year.”
On-track action at Dominion Raceway begins at 7 p.m. ET on Saturday evening, while Elko’s festivities commence at 6 p.m. CT/7 p.m. ET. The 2025 NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I national champion will be officially announced next week. Tickets are available at elkospeedway.com or dominionraceway.com, respectively.
Saturday’s Team EJP 175 (Noon ET, FS1, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at New Hampshire Motor Speedway marks the first elimination race of the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Playoffs in the series’ first visit to the New England one-miler since 2017.
Tricon Garage’s Corey Heim and Front Row Motorsports’ Layne Riggs have already advanced with wins in the previous two Round of 10 contests, while ThorSport Racing’s Jake Garcia is 14 points behind Spire Motorsports’ Rajah Caruth for the eighth and final playoff position. Rigg’s FRM teammate Chandler Smith is 24 points below the cutline. Two postseason drivers will be eliminated from title contention following the conclusion of Saturday’s bout.
No current playoff driver has won previously at New Hampshire, and among the field of 10, only Daniel Hemric and Grant Enfinger — third and fifth, respectively, in the playoff standings — have raced there before in the circuit. Cup Series driver Christopher Bell won the last Truck Series race at New Hampshire in 2017 en route to a series championship.
While Heim has turned in a record-setting season — leading the points standings for the last 16 weeks — New Hampshire presents a new opportunity for the field as one of six “new” tracks on the schedule this year.
Hitting on the right set-up has proven to be key — nine of the last 10 New Hampshire Truck Series races have been won by the driver who leads the most laps. The last 10 race winners have all started from the first row of the grid.
Not only will the race determine who moves on to challenge for the season title, but it could also be the scene of a historic achievement. A victory Saturday afternoon for Heim would be his ninth — tying an all-time record set by former series champion Greg Biffle in 1999. Heim is also 219 laps away from matching the all-time single-season laps-led record set nearly 30 years ago by Mike Skinner, another former champion (1996).
Practice will occur at 4:05 p.m. ET on Friday, followed by qualifying at 5:10 p.m. ET. Both segments will air on FS2.
After a chaotic Saturday night elimination race at Bristol Motor Speedway, the 12 drivers who survived and advanced in the Cup Series playoffs could breathe a sigh of relief … for about a nanosecond. Now comes the Round of 12, which promises to be just as nerve-wracking — more so, in fact, as drivers claw their way ever closer to the championship.
But some may have more to worry about than others. Five drivers (Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, William Byron, Christopher Bell and Ryan Blaney) enter the second round at least 19 points clear of the cutoff for the Round of 8, and a sixth (Chase Briscoe) is 10 points above the line. The rest — Chase Elliott, Bubba Wallace, Austin Cindric, Ross Chastain, Joey Logano and Tyler Reddick — are all within single-digits of the cut-line, either positively or negatively.
How does that all play into their chances to make the next round of the playoffs? Once again, let’s consult our Cup Series Playoffs forecast model, which uses projected Driver Ratings to simulate the remainder of the playoffs 10,000 times, tracking who advances (and how far) on average. Here are the numbers through the Bristol night race:
As we see in the chart above, the six drivers with double-digit buffers versus the cut are also sandwiched between 83 and 91 percent odds to move on, currently taking up 5.2 total expected spots in the Round of 8. (This means there are effectively six other drivers fighting over the remaining 2.8 spots to advance!) Hamlin is your favorite, checking in a bit over 90 percent, with Byron, Bell and Blaney not far behind.
At the edge of the top favorites, there are some interesting wrinkles. Briscoe, for instance, has a higher chance to advance than Larson in the model, despite Larson owning 14 more playoff points going into the round, while Wallace and Elliott sit well below them both. A lot of that has to do with Briscoe’s ongoing hot streak — he’s been the best driver in Cup by Average Finish, Adjusted Points+ indexand average Driver Rating since the Food City 500 in mid-April at Bristol, fully 21 races ago:
Even in terms of more recent form, Briscoe has also been better over the past 10 races by all three metrics. So it makes sense he would be expected to drive the wheels off his No. 19 JGR ride — metaphorically, that is, not literally — going forward as well. The others in that quartet, however, are in varying states of form over the previous 10-race span:
Larson hasn’t been doing his best racing recently, but his odds in the model are salvaged by the 32 playoff points he’s banked away — second-most behind Denny Hamlin’s 34 — as well as the fact that we’re headed to a trio of strong tracks for him in Loudon, Kansas and the Charlotte Roval.
Wallace and Elliott, meanwhile, are locked in a duel around 50-50 odds to make the next round, along with Reddick and Logano. That foursome of drivers is, unsurprisingly, under the most pressure immediately as we head to New Hampshire this weekend, followed by Cindric and Chastain (whose advancement odds are each a shade under 40 percent).
What makes their collective battle especially fascinating are all the factors pointing in opposite directions. In terms of recent performance, it’s hard to bet against Wallace — behind the wheel in one of those mighty Toyotas — given that he ranks No. 6 in Adjusted Points+ index and No. 4 in Driver Rating over the past 10 weeks, easily better than any of the other five names he’s tangling with below 80 percent in the model’s advancement odds. If we believe in peaking at the right time (and there’s evidence it matters a lot), Bubba ought to have the Round of 8 in his sights.
However, track selection matters as well — and this is where Elliott, Reddick and Logano hold the major edge. In terms of career performance at Loudon, Kansas and the Roval, each has been well above average in both Adjusted Points+ index and Driver Rating, with Elliott standing out as particularly strong at this set of tracks:
(Note that the forecast model bases its predictions on broad track types — ovals, short tracks, superspeedways and road courses — but doesn’t know about track affinities beyond that, meaning drivers who are disproportionately good at a particular site relative to others of that type will be better than projected.)
For their parts, Bubba and Ross are both former Kansas winners, with the former claiming the trophy in 2022 and the latter doing it a year ago. But neither has been as good there overall as the trio of Elliott/Reddick/Logano — in fact, Wallace has only been around average there in his career, and that’s his best track of the round. If the trade-off between form and fit favors consistent track success, Bubba is facing a real fight to be one of the eight drivers left standing next round.
That’s why we run the races, though. In the model’s simulations, the flashpoint battles that will swing the advancement odds most throughout the round center on just a handful of drivers, in order: Logano versus Elliott and Reddick; Elliott versus Chastain, Reddick, Wallace and Cindric; Wallace versus Chastain and Reddick. If things go according to projections, those are the matchups that will define the pressure-cooker of the Round of 12.
But we also have to leave room for our sport’s favorite plot twist: Chaos. So give the favorites their due, but recognize that no one is truly secure — and plenty of those names currently sitting above 80 percent could find themselves squarely in the middle of the storm a week from now. And honestly? That’s when the real race to survive begins.
RFK Racing announced Thursday that longtime sports executive Chip Bowers will take the organization’s reins as team president.
Bowers previously served as president of business operations for Major League Baseball’s Miami Marlins from 2018-19, before working as president of Elevate Sports Ventures, a global sports and entertainment agency. His role with the Marlins came after nearly six years as chief marketing officer for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, which won three league titles and was named Sports Business Journal’s “Sports Team of the Year” twice during his tenure.
“I’m honored and thrilled to be joining one of NASCAR’s premier racing teams,” Bowers said in a release provided by the team. “As both a fan of the sport and a North Carolina native, this is truly a full-circle moment for me in my career. I’m incredibly appreciative of Jack Roush, John Henry, future Hall of Fame driver and owner Brad Keselowski and our esteemed board of directors for asking me to be a trusted partner in leading the organization to new heights.”
Bowers replaces Steve Newmark, who announced in July that he would become the executive associate athletic director for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Newmark was a NASCAR team president with the Jack Roush-founded organization since 2010, a tenure that spanned the team’s transition from Roush Fenway Racing to Brad Keselowski’s ownership investment and a name change to Roush Fenway Keselowski (RFK) Racing in 2022.
RFK Racing currently fields three Cup Series entries for drivers Chris Buescher, Ryan Preece and Keselowski. The team indicated that Bowers will be tasked with “scaling the business for sustained growth,” plus building stronger bonds in the areas of corporate partnerships and innovation.
“Chip brings a fresh perspective that we’re really excited about,” said Keselowski. “He has proven he can grow organizations and think creatively in some of the most competitive sports markets, and that experience will help us find new ways to strengthen our team.”
Bowers also has experience with the NBA’s Orlando Magic and the former Seattle Supersonics, the WNBA’s Seattle Storm and MLB’s San Diego Padres.
When the Next Gen car debuted in the 2022 NASCAR season, Trackhouse Racing was one of the first Cup Series teams to seize on the nuances of the then-unfamiliar racer. Trackhouse driver Ross Chastain recalled a test on the Charlotte Motor Speedway oval before that season, when their group unlocked some next-level grip — a sudden discovery that helped the team win three races that year and achieve upstart status among the garage’s old guard.
Times have changed in the handful of years since, save for Trackhouse rookie Shane van Gisbergen’s near-automatic beast mode for road-course events this season. The current state of the organization’s oval-track program has left Trackhouse playing catch-up at multiple venues, with no easily identifiable stronghold on the schedule. “We’re not leading laps anywhere,” Chastain says. “So it kind of answers the question.”
That deficit looms large over the Justin Marks-founded team’s aspirations for this year, with Chastain left as the lone Trackhouse driver carrying championship eligibility into Sunday’s Mobil 1 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (2 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App). The contest is the opening event in the three-race Round of 12, the second stanza in the 10-race postseason, and Chastain ranks 11th among the remaining dozen playoff hopefuls in a tightly packed battle on the elimination brink.
The 32-year-old driver launched into the postseason field with a rousing victory in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte at the end of May. He hasn’t posted a top-five finish since, and his 72 laps in the No. 1 Chevrolet this season rank last among the 12 playoff-eligible drivers by a wide margin (23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick is the next rung up on the list with 156 laps led).
The pressure is there, not just to rekindle some of the team’s 2022 magic but also to make inroads into the competition edge currently held by each manufacturer’s most established teams — Chevrolet and Hendrick Motorsports, Ford’s Team Penske, plus Toyota with Joe Gibbs Racing. Nine of the 12 remaining playoff drivers come from those three organizations, and the Gibbs group swept the opening Round of 16 with three different drivers (in order: Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell) claiming victory.
“The question will always be, how do you beat the Big Three?” Chastain said, making an inferred nod toward Hendrick, Penske and Gibbs during a midweek media roundtable in NASCAR’s offices. “I think it’s just the nature of the sport and the quantity of people and the quantity of dollars. They’re cubic over there. So yeah, I feel like we can. Justin (Marks) wouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t all pour the effort and money into it if we didn’t think we could go compete. And like, we can. We did it at Charlotte. We did it at Kansas last year. We’ve done it. Daniel (Suárez) could have won Vegas in the spring, but how do we continue to do that? We do it every now and then. That’s our big question: How did we do it then, and we don’t have an answer, and then how do we do it again? We don’t have an answer, but we’re trying.”
The team isn’t standing pat waiting for that answer to arrive. In mid-July, Trackhouse hired veteran exec Todd Meredith as its president of racing operations, bringing in a key figure who years ago helped set the groundwork for what Joe Gibbs Racing would become. Earlier that same month, Trackhouse announced that the 2025 campaign would be Suárez’s last with the team, paving the way for dynamo prospect Connor Zilisch to begin his full-time Cup Series career under the team’s banner next year.
All those changes will make Chastain, who joined Trackhouse for that fateful 2022 season, the senior-most driver on next year’s team roster alongside rising sophomore van Gisbergen and incoming rookie Zilisch. Chastain admitted that his experience with how Cup teams operate is limited by his exposure — a journeyman stint with car owner Jay Robinson, plus brief stops with Jack Roush, Spire and Chip Ganassi before his current tenure with Trackhouse.
Still, many of the new faces around the Concord, North Carolina-based shop are already tapping into Chastain’s institutional knowledge — and not just focusing on the balance of this season, but for 2026 and beyond.
“They’re leaning into me, and (there) are already processes, new people that have come in this year,” Chastain said. “Some of them are only focused on offseason and next year’s stuff, not right now. We’ve got what we’ve got right now, so let’s start on next year, raising kind of our next group of leaders in the company, and raising the bar for employees is something Todd’s big on. So kind of doing it ourselves and not always looking outside of our four walls is something we’re focused on.”
The more immediate future for Chastain centers on the three tracks in the Round of 12 — New Hampshire this weekend, followed by Kansas Speedway and the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval on successive weekends. Trackhouse’s No. 1 Chevy team has distinct reasons for optimism at all three.
Two months ago, Chastain and Co. were one of three teams to participate in a two-day Goodyear tire test at the 1.058-mile New Hampshire oval, gaining valuable insights, data and track time that could come in handy Sunday. Kansas was the site of Chastain’s lone 2024 victory last fall, and the Charlotte Roval at round’s end will provide an opportunity for the team to draft off van Gisbergen’s road-racing expertise. “If I can replicate what Shane does, if I’m within like five seconds of Shane, I’ll be in second,” Chastain said with a laugh.
The building blocks are already taking shape for Trackhouse to regroup next season. This season, reaching the Round of 8 and taking the next step toward Chastain’s first Championship 4 appearance since 2022 will require finding more of that next-level pace that the “Big Three” are known for.
“That’s what this sport rewards is speed,” says Chastain, who finished 10th at New Hampshire last year. “That’s what most sports reward, like who can run the fastest, who can hit the ball the furthest, like who can kick the ball the hardest, who can drive the car the fastest? We just want to go faster than them, and that’s what makes it so good, is when we do beat them, we deserve it.”
As the 2025 Craftsman Truck Series Playoffs roll on, few in the NASCAR realm are taking any driver to knock off Corey Heim for the championship.
However, Front Row Motorsports’ Layne Riggs is starting to emerge as a legitimate threat to the eight-time winner this season. Riggs took his third race trophy of 2025 last weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway to lock himself into the Round of 8. But it took a while for things to click for the second-year driver in the No. 34 Ford.
Entering his rookie year in 2024, expectations for Riggs were through the roof, set by himself among others, jumping into a championship-contending team after recently winning a NASCAR Weekly Series title. Through the first nine races of his rookie campaign, Riggs tallied just a single top 10, that coming in the spring Bristol race with DNFs in both the season opener at Daytona and at Texas.
“I’m looking at the success that Todd (Gilliland) and Zane (Smith) had in the truck and having to go in the shop every week and look at the win banners,” Riggs told NASCAR.com last Thursday at Bristol. “You hear the broadcast people talking about ‘well, this truck should run up front and win races.’ That’s always tough and a little bit of pressure when I’m just trying to kind of get my footing and figure it out. I wouldn’t say it made me run any worse. It just definitely put some more pressure on me to get a little quicker.”
Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images
Riggs missed the playoffs in his rookie year, but began a turnaround in his fortune as he found his footing.
He touted how one specific track flipped the script on his Truck career and helped lead to top fives in four of the final seven regular-season races.
“It was Gateway,” Riggs said. “I kind of had this breakthrough moment during the race. We made some adjustments that were backwards from what I thought we needed. (Crew chief Dylan Cappello) didn’t tell me till after the race what he did, and I just couldn’t believe it. I just really pieced together. I was like, ‘wow, this is the feel I’m looking for.’ We ran like 15th all day and then we made those adjustments, and I ended up finishing fifth. I think that was the point of ‘OK, this is the feel I’m looking for. This is what it takes to go fast.’ I was running up front and I just kept applying that to this day. After that race, we pretty much started running top five every race and then got our wins and been a contender and threat ever since then.”
The feel took full throttle at a string of smaller ovals as Riggs scored top fives at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park (IRP) and Richmond before finding pay dirt with his first career victory at The Milwaukee Mile in the postseason opener. He followed with a second consecutive checkered flag at Bristol before closing his maiden Truck campaign with consecutive top 10s at Martinsville and Phoenix.
Trying to keep that momentum through the offseason, Riggs looked for avenues to stay sharp before his second season but a string of internal changes at FRM set the course for an adjustment period that he knew would take time.
“It was definitely tough for us because we made the big change, moving shops, added a second truck, building trucks, hiring three times the people we had,” Riggs said. “It was definitely a little bit of a shock to all of us, but we just kept doing our thing. Now I feel like we’ve gotten stronger from that. At first, I feel like it kind of hurt us a little bit just because growing pains, but now I think it’s just really showing that both trucks are running well week in and week out. When you’re two months out of the seat you haven’t driven a race car, you always question yourself the first race. Can I still do this? After the first lap on the race track, you’re like, ‘oh yeah.’ Like I never left. Just like riding a bike.”
Right out of the gate in 2025, the momentum continued. Riggs didn’t kick off the year with a victorious bang, but found himself close to the top of the standings — getting up to fifth in points after the series returned to Rockingham Speedway.
With a win evading him entering the summer, questions arose about where it would come.
Cut from short-track cloth, Martinsville, Bristol and North Wilkesboro came and went for that opportunity. So where did Riggs end up scoring his first win of the year to punch his first postseason ticket?
Pocono Raceway.
The questions immediately flew to Riggs after climbing out of his truck about how the track must’ve felt like a short track to him. But in that moment, Riggs was ready to dissolve the label.
“It kind of annoyed me,” Riggs admitted. “In the post-race, I forgot who it was, asked me, ‘So since you won today, Pocono must feel kind of like a short track the way the corners drive.’ I was like, ‘I’m putting my foot down today. I am not labeled a short-track racer anymore. I can do it all.’ I mean, I’ve proven to be fast on road courses, big tracks, short tracks, speedways. I think I’m kind of an all-around driver. I’ll always be labeled the short-track guy just because of what my roots were and how long I spent at a late-model level. But I think that I have just as much confidence, or more confidence, showing up to a mile-and-a-half than I would a short track.”
With a playoff berth secured and a dominant victory at IRP a month later, Riggs set the tone for the type of contender he wanted to be heading into the postseason.
While title-favorite and regular-season champion Heim got the jump at Darlington, Riggs hung with him and arguably had the truck to beat before slamming the wall late in the race trying to hold off the No. 11 Tricon Garage ace.
Riggs responded in grand fashion. He led 110 of 250 laps at Bristol two weeks later to join Heim with an automatic bid into the Round of 8.
Heim may have more than double the wins than Riggs, but looking at on-track performance, he believes the No. 34 team is nearly even with Heim.
Alejandro Alvarez | NASCAR Digital Media
“I think just the stopwatch is the biggest tell for everything,” Riggs said. “We’re right there with performance and speed and feel like we have just as much mojo as they do. I feel like they can execute a little better just because they have more experience. Corey’s fourth or fifth year in the trucks now. They’re a little more consistent and put together races, but I feel like we have the raw speed. We’re really strong at Phoenix. Both times I’ve ran there, I’ve been good. I really like that race track and it all comes down to one race. Anything can happen.”
This Saturday will mark Riggs’ 50th career start in the Truck Series as the Round of 10 wraps up at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (noon ET, FS1, NRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
It took a couple of months into his Truck career to really get a feel for it. If this version of Layne Riggs got to speak to himself before Daytona to start his rookie year, he would tell him to be patient.
“Ride the course, it’s gonna come to you,” Riggs said. “Don’t question yourself and your abilities. There’s a lot of people telling you that with the struggles, like ‘you’re doing fine. You’re doing everything right.’ It’s just so hard when you look at the stat sheets and don’t really get to see the results pan out, even though you had the speed and the ability to do it. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Stay strong and just believe in yourself and just keep putting that hard work, and then the results will come.”
