CLERMONT, Ind. — Corey Heim has dominated the 2025 Craftsman Truck Series season and added another piece of hardware to his superb resume this year as he scored his second Regular Season Championship in three years Friday evening at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park.
Heim needed 39 points at the 0.686-mile short track and pocketed 45 with a third-place result. Securing the title two races early was a solid consolation for a rare night where Heim didn’t believe he had the best truck.
“Feels really good. Just a testament to how good I’ve been this year,” Heim said after the race. “I feel like this is probably the first race where I haven’t had a legitimate shot to compete for the win, so that really says something.”
Heim started the race on pole after qualifying was washed out earlier in the afternoon due to inclement weather. The No. 11 Tricon Garage driver paced the first 20 laps out front before Layne Riggs took over and never looked back. Riggs dominated the night, leading 160 of the 200 laps to secure his second victory of 2025.
Heim’s night matched the trends of the previous three races he’s competed in at IRP. He led just 18 laps combined in three previous races at the track entering the night, which was the fifth fewest he’s led at any active track on the Truck calendar. However, his 20 laps led and fourth-place result Friday were both career bests for the 23-year-old.
“I was actually excited to come here and try to improve,” Heim said. “I’ve never felt like this track has been my best, but unfortunately, just kind of roamed around the outside of the top five all day and had a really good restart there at the end to get us track position to finish fourth.”
Another 15 playoff points to what was already 39 in the bank for Heim can never hurt. However, nothing is guaranteed when the 10-driver Truck Series Playoffs begin at Darlington Raceway on Aug. 30 (Noon ET, FS1, NRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), and still seeking his first series championship, Heim is going to take the remainder of the season one race at a time.
“I don’t really look at it any sort of way to be honest with you,” Heim said of the extra playoff cushion. “I think we focus on every given week as much as we possibly can to give 100 percent, so the playoffs will be no different. Just very proud of the effort throughout the year for us to get here and onto Watkins Glen.”
CLERMONT, Ind. – The No. 52 Halmar Friesen Racing Toyota driven by Stewart Friesen was disqualified following post-race technical inspection after Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park.
Friesen was third when he drove underneath the checkered flag in Friday’s TSport 200, but his No. 52 truck failed to meet the height requirement, measuring too low in the front during post-race inspection. As a result, Friesen was dropped to 35th place – last – on the official finishing order and will be credited with only two points earned in his 200th Truck Series start, which came on his 42nd birthday.
Friesen, a winner in June at Michigan International Speedway, led 20 of 200 laps in Friday night’s event. The result would have been the Canadian driver’s third top-10 finish in the past four races. Instead, Friesen is credited with his fifth result of 13th or worse in the past seven races.
The team announced Saturday morning that it intends to appeal the penalty.
Layne Riggs won Friday’s race after leading 160 laps, besting Corey Day by 1.864 seconds. Regular Season Champion Corey Heim is credited with a third-place finish as a result of Friesen’s disqualification, while Grant Enfinger and Ty Majeski complete the top five.
Chandler Smith, Daniel Hemric, Tyler Ankrum, Ross Chastain and Rajah Caruth rounded out the top 10.
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series returns to action on Friday, Aug. 8 at Watkins Glen International at 5 p.m. ET with live coverage on FS1, NRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
Layne Riggs planted the nose of his No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford firmly against the outside of the pit row wall and lit up his tires as members of his team stood on the barrier and pumped their fists repeatedly.
The elation was well-deserved after Riggs scored his first NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series victory at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park in Friday night’s TSport 200.
With his second victory of the season and a sweep of the first two stages, Riggs cut into the dominating lead of Corey Heim with two races left in the regular season.
Nevertheless, Heim, who ran third in a balky No. 11 Toyota, clinched the regular-season title.
“I’ll tell you, this truck was badass, man,” Riggs said after climbing from the F-150 on pit road. “It was so great. I was just out front saving my tires at the end. Then I was just waiting for a late-race caution (which never came), trying to run the bottom and trying to keep the least amount of distance to keep the distance off my tires.
“It’s so great to get (sponsor) Clew Nicotine Pouches in Victory Lane. That’s only their second race with us, and we’re super excited to have them. That was a pretty cool celebration.”
Riggs led 160 of the 200 laps at the 0.686-mile short track and beat Corey Day to the finish line by 1.864 seconds. The runner-up result was a career-best for Day, who had run fifth at Nashville Superspeedway in his most recent Truck Series outing.
“It was good to back up Nashville,” said Day, 19, who is running part-time schedules with Spire Motorsports in the Truck Series and Hendrick Motorsports in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. “I was telling everyone it clicked, and it felt like it clicked, but unless I come here and back it up, it means nothing.
“I’m really glad to finally be delivering results. I’ve been working really, really hard at this to be delivering results, and I really want to be doing the burnout up there.”
Stewart Friesen parlayed an early pit stop in the second stage into an ostensible third-place finish but was disqualified after failing height requirements in post-race inspection. The disqualification ruined an astute strategic call by the No. 52 team.
Grant Enfinger ran fourth. Reigning series champion Ty Majeski, currently the last driver above the elimination line for the 10-driver playoffs, came home fifth after Friesen’s disqualification and extended his advantage over ThorSport racing teammate Jake Garcia (15th Friday) from 38 to 61 points.
Chandler Smith, Daniel Hemric, Tyler Ankrum, Ross Chastain and Rajah Caruth completed the top 10.
Though he scored no playoff points on Friday, Heim, who set the fastest lap on his second circuit, already has banked 39 this season. With the seven he added in the TSport 200, Riggs now has 16, second most among Truck Series drivers, with the playoffs set to begin Aug. 30 at Darlington Raceway.
With two races remaining in the regular season, the Truck Series heads to Watkins Glen International Friday, Aug. 8 (5 p.m. ET, FS1, NRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
NOTE: Inspection was completed in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series garage, and the No. 52 truck was disqualified for failing front-end height requirements (too low). There were no other issues.
That goal remains the same 23 years later, as the younger Elliott chases his first Brickyard triumph in his eighth start on the Indianapolis oval (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) and his fifth driving the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“There’s very few, if any, races that mean more to me than this one,” Elliott said Friday. “We want this one really bad.”
The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion returns to the famed “Yard of Bricks” as the series points leader for the first time this season. A winner at his home track of EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway) in Hampton, Georgia, in June, Elliott is setting his sights on another title pursuit. What comes first, however, is the hunt for his second Regular Season Championship.
Momentum is in favor of the No. 9 team’s hands. Elliott led a season-best 238 laps last weekend at Dover Motor Speedway before ultimately finishing sixth for his fifth top 10 in the last six races. He hasn’t finished worse than 20th all year, breaking a personal record he originally set last year.
“I think being the points leader is a product of a lot of different pieces of the puzzle that go beyond just us,” Elliott said. “But certainly from my perspective, I take pride in our team’s efforts over the course of the last four months and the things that we’ve accomplished. I don’t need a sheet of paper that adds up the points to know that we’ve been doing a good job.”
Elliott holds a 16-point advantage over Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron and a 38-point gap over another teammate, Kyle Larson, who won the Brickyard 400 in 2024. Denny Hamlin — who Friday announced a multiyear extension with Joe Gibbs Racing — sits fourth, 39 points behind Elliott. Elliott won the 2022 regular-season title, claiming the bonus of 15 playoff points with it. Every one of those points matters as playoff points carry with a driver through the course of the postseason.
“Especially only having one win, the extra points would be extremely valuable for us,” Elliott said. “And we would love to get another win or two before the end of the regular season too. It’s not just that we’re happy with one. We want to get the regular season deal, but yeah, we want it all, like everybody does.”
Elliott knows the struggles of trying to go through the playoffs without the added benefit of those playoff points.
“I’ve been on both sides of the coin there,” he said. “(There have) been years where I feel like we’ve not had many playoff points, and we’ve had a couple years where we had a bunch, and I promise, it is a lot easier when you have a lot in the bank. That’s a much, much better way to go about it. The way the system is, so many things kind of being out of your control, it’s nice to have something to fall back on.”
The sting of a win that slipped away at Dover lingered slightly for Elliott, the 2022 winner at the “Monster Mile,” but he opted to look at the positives instead after a late pit stop for two tires ultimately didn’t play in their favor as Hamlin fended off the field on old tires to score his series-best fourth win of the year.
“When you have all the answers to the test after it’s over, it’s really easy to sit back and look at what was the right thing to do and what wasn’t,” Elliott said. “I thought that Denny did a really good job holding off the tires behind. Does he stay out if we stay out as well, knowing that tires (were) going to line up right behind us on the second row, and he didn’t have control of the restart? I don’t think they do, but maybe they do. Regardless, it’s a tough spot to be in, and it went the way it went. We can’t change it, but we can certainly take some lessons from the day and from the weekend and try to apply that forward to put ourselves in positions like that more often.”
What’s next is Indianapolis, where Elliott will have another chance to kiss the bricks if he can break through for his first Brickyard 400 triumph.
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — With adjacent streets decked out in Indianapolis Motor Speedway banners and neighborhoods displaying NASCAR and other motorsports-related memorabilia on front lawns, Brickyard 400 weekend feels big around the 2.5-mile facility just outside Indiana’s capital city.
No other driver in the Cup Series garage understands the sense of that spectacle more than Indiana native Chase Briscoe.
From the town of Mitchell, around 90 minutes south of the track, Briscoe frequented Indianapolis and discussed his very first trip to the track.
“I was seven years old and that was the first time I’d ever seen this race track, and I remember getting my uniform embroidered,” Briscoe said Friday during a press conference. “Getting my name on it, coming over here, coming inside the race track, and that was the first time I’d ever been inside the walls at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Just being in absolute awe. First off, the race track that’s this big. I’ve been to dirt tracks my whole life that were a quarter of a mile, and then to see this place and the grandstands, it was just unbelievable.”
Briscoe also mentioned attending the Indianapolis 500 and Brickyard 400 as a kid and sliding past the notoriously strict security to get to the garages for autographs.
But one of the standout memories for Briscoe is fellow Hoosier and NASCAR Hall of Famer Tony Stewart winning his first Brickyard 400 in 2005 with Joe Gibbs Racing. Twenty years later and also piloting a hot rod for JGR, a victory at Indy would mean everything for Briscoe.
“It’d definitely be really, really special,” Briscoe said. “I actually texted Tony this week about that. We went to the new museum and they had that 2005 car over there, and I took a picture of it. I sent it to him. I said, ‘hopefully another Hoosier can win 20 years later.’ So, yeah, it would be super, super special. I mean, there’d be nothing like it for me, just from a personal standpoint, than to win this race.”
Briscoe has won at Indianapolis, but it came on the road-course layout in 2020 amid a nine-win Xfinity Series campaign for him. He nearly shocked the Cup field in 2021 on the road course. However, a late scrap with Denny Hamlin for the lead resulted in Briscoe going off-course and rejoining the track before spinning the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing driver. Briscoe was penalized in the final laps for cutting the course and he ultimately finished 26th.
In the lead-up to Sunday’s Brickyard 400 (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, IMS Radio, HBO Max, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), the idea of winning at the famed oval began seeping into Briscoe’s mind after hopping off the simulator in preparation for the 160-lapper.
“I was driving home and just kind of running laps through my head, and, yeah, I’ve never really thought about winning a race before,” Briscoe said. “It was just kind of like imagining what it would be like to win here and do it in the Brickyard 400 and I’ve watched Tony’s race the night before just randomly on YouTube, and just watching his celebration, everything. I just kind of put myself in that moment just as an Indiana guy, and it’s just different. I don’t know how to explain i. I just thought about it. I mean, there’s a quick 20-second thought, but just got goosebumps literally as I was driving down the road thinking about it.”
Briscoe admitted that he wasn’t in a position to win last year’s Brickyard 400. It was his first on the oval after the Cup Series ran the road course from 2021-2023.
This year, he’s got a different attitude and the results prove it.
While Briscoe’s had growing pains adapting to his first campaign piloting the No. 19 Toyota for JGR, he’s already scored the most top fives he’s ever had in a Cup season (eight entering Indy) and matched his career high in top 10s (10, 2022). With a win at Pocono last month to clinch a playoff berth and entering this weekend off back-to-back runner-up results at Sonoma and Dover, Briscoe can sense that he’ll have the car under him to compete and fully understands the magnitude the moment would mean for his career to have his first crown-jewel win be at Indianapolis.
“If I was able to win the Brickyard 400, it would be the biggest win of my career,” Briscoe said. “I don’t think I could ever win a race that would mean more to me. I just was talking about how many times I came here as a kid and what this place meant to me. So for me, yeah, winning on Sunday, there’s no race I’d rather win in the world.”
The NASCAR Cup and Xfinity series take on the famed Brickyard this weekend for their annual stop at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, while the Craftsman Truck Series is back in action at nearby Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. Bookmark this page and come back often for your race-week essentials — from links to qualifying order, average practice speeds, results and more.
Race day: Sunday at 2 p.m. ET on TNT Sports. The categories listed below will be filled out with links as the information becomes available.
Tires: Fifteen sets (11 race sets plus one set transferred from qualifying). Teams will also have three sets for practice.
Note: A 50-minute practice session scheduled for Friday was canceled due to weather. Teams will have a 25-minute session Saturday at 2 p.m. ET before qualifying.
Race day: Friday at 8 p.m. ET on FS1. The categories listed below will be filled out with links as the information becomes available.
Tires: Five sets for dry conditions (three race sets plus one set transferred from qualifying). Teams will also have one set for practice and three sets of wet-weather tires for Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park.
Larson wheeled his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to the crown-jewel victory in the 2024 edition of the event at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway, carving through the field with more fuel than most. But that was last year. A new task awaits on Sunday (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Just happy to be back,” Larson said Friday before practice. “Hopefully, our car is good again. I believe it should be fast, if not better than it was last year. So hopefully have a good practice, good qualifying tomorrow and execute your race on Sunday.”
Despite his California roots, Larson is linked to Indy more than any other active NASCAR Cup Series driver, thanks in large part to his 2024 and 2025 attempts of the Memorial Day Double — competing in the storied Indianapolis 500 as well as the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on the same day.
Neither attempt went to plan. Year 1 was marred by weather delays and a speeding penalty in the Indianapolis 500 that sank his finish, with the weather in both Indy and Charlotte ruining his chances of getting behind the wheel of his Cup car. This year’s try was arguably more heartbreaking. Time allotted him to compete in both events, but crashes in both races after the intense logistical planning and preparation ultimately soured the experience.
Returning to the Racing Capital of the World gives Larson an opportunity to put those disappointments behind him for good.
“It’s great to be back here in Indy and back in the stock car,” Larson said. “Hopefully, I’ll do a much better job than I did in May. It’s a privilege to get to run here and race this facility and would love nothing more than to have a good run, and hopefully put the bow on the Double stuff with another Brickyard 400 win.”
Larson enters Indianapolis with some much-needed momentum. Though he sits third in points heading into the 160-lap race, Larson had finished 13th or worse in five of the eight races since winning at Kansas Speedway in May, including a 37th-place DNF in the Coke 600. His fortunes changed for the better last weekend, however, with a fourth-place finish at Dover Motor Speedway.
“I knew that Dover would be a great opportunity for us to have a day like that,” Larson said, “where we could just be clean all race long and have speed and have things work out. But yeah, I mean, it got a little sketchy there when Bell spun. I thought I was going to get collected in that and be like, ‘Oh yeah, just continuing on our bad finishes here.’ But that was good. Hopefully that’s the beginning of us turning it around for us, but we’ll see.”
His track record at Indianapolis is stout: In seven starts on the Indy oval, Larson has one win, two top fives and four top 10s. Crew chief Cliff Daniels attributes that success to Larson’s persistence behind the scenes.
“He’s such a student of the game, and he has such versatility in so many different types of cars,” Daniels told NASCAR.com Friday. “He’s so adaptable. There are certainly some techniques that are different in clean air, fast pace here, versus being in traffic and the approach you have to take there. He’s studied that. He’s good at kind of changing himself to adapt to the moment. And he does that everywhere, really, but certainly at this place, he catches on pretty quick. So it’s a lot of fun to be here.”
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Joe Gibbs Racing announced Friday that Denny Hamlin signed a multiyear contract extension that keeps the No. 11 driver behind the wheel with the organization through 2027.
Hamlin ranks 11th all-time with 58 NASCAR Cup Series victories and currently leads the field in wins this season after collecting his fourth at Dover Motor Speedway last Sunday.
When asked if the extension would be his last, Hamlin replied with a simple “most likely,” but laid out why the door remains open to continue racing beyond his 45th birthday in November.
“I would say it’s kind of a two-fold thing,” Hamlin said Friday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “Some of it is myself, motivating, right? I have goals I’d like to reach in the Cup Series and a really strong relationship with [team owner] Joe [Gibbs] and doing it for them and their family as well to keep going. Then, obviously, the ability to win week in, week out, that certainly is a high-motivating factor in wanting to do this. I think about on a weekly basis, would I want to do this if I didn’t have the ability or couldn’t win as much? It probably would not. The motivation wouldn’t be there. But certainly, as competitive as I am, I’m motivated by being able to win.”
Hamlin’s resume is prestigious, and he’s certainly in line to be a Hall of Famer when he chooses to step aside from full-time racing.
The 20-year Cup veteran owns three Daytona 500 trophies (2016, 2019, 2020), three Southern 500s (2010, 2017, 2021) and a Coca-Cola 600 triumph (2022). Hamlin owns the record for Cup Series Playoffs appearances with 18 and has made the Championship 4 on four occasions (2014, 2019, 2020, 2021).
From raising three kids to running a Cup team, Hamlin’s life is consumed with factors outside of piloting the No. 11 Toyota on a weekly basis. However, regardless of age, Hamlin says he won’t wait until the proverbial cliff approaches on his on-track abilities before hanging up the fire suit.
“I want the ability to know I can win my last race,” Hamlin said. “That’s going to be the deciding factor. I’m not going to wait until I start to head downward and then retire. I don’t want to go through a whole year of that. I understand if it just happens naturally in the second half of the final year — then it just happens. But I don’t want to have to go through another season, if I start tailing off, then the next year I’ll just retire. I can retire whenever I want to retire.”
It’s been a devilishly delightful highlight of Ty Dillon’s miracle run through the In-Season Challenge.
After each unbelievable upset, the 32nd seed lightheartedly calls out the favored driver (or team) that he just vanquished.
Dillon stole the thunder of “I beat your favorite driver” in saying farewell to Denny Hamlin. He teased Brad Keselowski for his subpar basketball skills (a deep cut for fans of Charlotte’s NBA team).
Hendrick Motorsports and Alex Bowman were scolded for a failed promise to silence NASCAR’s Cinderella story, and fans were encouraged to buy the “extra small size” Ty Dillon T-shirt that John Hunter Nemechek wore (and then playfully ripped up) before being beaten at Dover Motor Speedway.
“I just want to have fun,” Dillon said. “I try not to be too personal and keep it somewhat light.”
It will come as no surprise to learn that Dillon and his kids are fans of pro wrestling. “I love those mic moments that create the character,” he says, but this goes deeper than just “cutting a promo” (as the men in the colorful tights would say).
“I’m a huge sports fanatic, and I love the entertainment side of sports,” Dillon said. “I feel a lot of drivers hone in just on their personal performance, but we are entertainers. This is an entertainment sport. I always try to think of ways that I can be a more entertaining athlete, and this in-season tournament opened up the opportunity.”
It’s done much more than that for a journeyman driver whose prior claim to fame was being the grandson of Hall of Fame team owner Richard Childress.
Dillon, 33, has made 266 starts in the Cup Series and driven in seven full-time seasons since 2017, and yet he admittedly was “invisible” when the $1 million bracket-style challenge began a month ago.
With NASCAR Nation finally getting to appreciate his affable charm, Dillon has noticed a massive surge of supporters. Fellow Cup drivers, fans and even security guards at Dover are cheering on a pilot who has been quite likable now that he commands the midsummer attention usually sucked up by playoff races.
“Our story doesn’t get told in years past,” Dillon said. “So I’m grateful that we’ve been able to show our personality as a team and myself as well in this run.
“It’s been really cool this in-season tournament has given us a spotlight that typically at this point in the season a team like ours isn’t getting, even though we’re still improving.”
His No. 10 Chevrolet still is far from setting the world on fire, but Dillon has enjoyed big moments. Starting with an eighth-place result at EchoPark Speedway, formerly known as Atlanta Motor Speedway (his first top 10 since April 2022), he advanced to the final round by ripping off four consecutive top 20s for the first time in nearly three years – and with a dramatic flair.
Whether moving Alex Bowman aside on the final turn of the last lap at Sonoma Raceway or taking Nemechek and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. three-wide into Turn 1 on an overtime restart at Dover, the feel-good story line of the inaugural In Season Challenge has been defined by the grit and determination of Kaulig Racing.
Meg Oliphant | Getty Images
“We’re finding ourselves as a bulldog of a team,” Dillon said. “We’re going to fight until the end, and don’t count us out until the last lap.
“We want to pull all these teams out to the deep water and then see who can survive the deep, deep water with us. Because we know we’re tougher than them.”
He speaks from surviving a career on the brink many times. If there’s been a knock on Dillon, it’s his lighthearted nature that he believes has been misunderstood as a lack of competitive fire.
But his goofy and blustery post-race barbs belie the fact that he is battle-tested. A winless decade of toiling in obscurity taught him the value of competitive persistence balanced with vulnerability and introspection.
“I’ve worked hard in the dark and not really had any recognition for a long time — and probably rightfully so as we haven’t done anything in the sport since my Xfinity career,” said Dillon, whose lone Xfinity victory was at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2014. “So I found peace in my own journey when nobody was watching or talking about me. Grinding in my own hard work and being pleased with what I’m putting into my career and my life and the way that I handle myself.
“When you find that satisfactory and you’re not really worried about the attention, but then the results and the attention start coming, you’re able to appreciate it in a different way.”
Sunday at the Brickyard, he will face off against Ty Gibbs, with the highest finisher earning $1 million.
Dillon aims to continue riding the momentum and spotlight for as long as he can.
“I keep telling my friends like I’m riding this wave and we’re going to ride it as long as it goes, but it is just that,” Dillon said. “Life comes in waves, and it’s always good to stop in the moments that are good and just be so present and happy. And to not look past the good moments in life because you have to find peace in your own journey and the things that you’re accomplishing when no one’s really looking.”
OK, but what bulletin board material does he have ready if he manages to beat Gibbs, the grandson of another NASCAR Hall of Famer?
Dillon laughs off the suggestion while explaining his next In-Season Challenge win would stand on its own without the need for any bravado.
“And I feel like we’ve already won this thing no matter what happens on Sunday anyway,” he said.
Just five races are left until the 2025 Cup Series Playoffs begin, and the current postseason leaderboard has some signs of movement after the most recent stop at Dover Motor Speedway.
Playoff Probabilities provided by Racing Insights (entering Indianapolis)
Four spots are still up for grabs, and the same four drivers above the elimination line before Dover are still in position to clinch one of the 16 playoff berths. All four, however, gained points relative to the playoff threshold at the “Monster Mile” to solidify their place.
At the top end of the playoff standings, Dover winner Denny Hamlin moved ahead of Kyle Larson as the provisional No. 1 seed on the playoff grid with his fourth victory of the 2025 season. Larson is the defending winner of Sunday’s Brickyard 400 (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), and Hamlin is seeking his first Indianapolis Motor Speedway win, a potential triumph that would complete the circuit’s grand slam of crown-jewel events.
With the latest postseason projections provided by Racing Insights, let’s dive into the probabilities to see who has the upper hand for a playoff spot heading to Indy and who could be in a post-Brickyard bind.
GREEN FLAG[Who’s in a great spot for Indianapolis]
Tyler Reddick has tasted victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway before, but that triumph came back in 2022 when the road-course configuration was in place. When Indy went back to the traditional 2.5-mile oval for NASCAR competition last season, Reddick remained a contender, rolling to the pole position and backing that speed up with a runner-up finish in the main event. Regardless of his Indy fortunes, Reddick’s 156-point cushion above the elimination barrier has him in the running to clinch a spot early — barring a rash of first-time winners in the regular season’s final five.
Alex Bowman made the week’s biggest jump in the probability spectrum after finishing third at Dover, rising nearly 22 points to an 84% likelihood of making the playoff field. Chris Buescher’s chances also received a boost after a Dover top-10 result. He’s plus-44 to the cutline, but has an upcoming stretch that bodes well for him with Watkins Glen, Richmond and Daytona — the regular season’s final three races — all tracks where he has recent wins.
YELLOW FLAG [Who’s on the fringe for Indianapolis]
Bubba Wallace stemmed an early summer string of four straight finishes outside the top 20 by converting a seventh-place outcome at Dover, putting him in the “Last 4 In” category, probability-wise. He has landed top 10s in his last three Brickyard oval starts, giving the 23XI Racing driver extra reason for optimism — even though he’s just plus-16 relative to the bubble.
Wallace may have corrected a brief dip in the results column, but fellow Toyota driver Ty Gibbs has been a recent riser with seven consecutive top-15 finishes and a string of three straight top 10s. His 15.23% number in the probability index could use the same sort of sustained oomph.
RED FLAG [Who I’m concerned about heading to Indianapolis]
Ryan Preece’s season has been marked by overachieving, especially for an RFK Racing expansion team that didn’t exist before the dawn of the season. That said, the prospects for more bright spots seem dim on the Indy oval, where Preece has raced just three times, exiting after a crash his last two times out.
Preece fell from “Last 4 In” territory onto the outside of the probability bubble after a 19th-place Dover effort — a drop of just more than 20 percentage points. He’s also slotted to finish 25th in Racing Insights’ Brickyard 400 projections, leaving it up to the talented 34-year-old and his No. 60 team to buck the indicators at Indy.
