See where your favorite NASCAR Cup Series driver will pit for the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
See where your favorite NASCAR Xfinity Series driver will pit for the Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250 at Sonoma Raceway on Saturday (4:30 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
SONOMA, Calif. — For the second straight weekend, Shane van Gisbergen dominated NASCAR time trials — and predictably so.
On his second lap Saturday at Sonoma Raceway, the New Zealander became the only driver to top 96 mph on the 1.99-mile, 12-turn road course.
Touring the circuit in 74.594 seconds (96.040 mph), van Gisbergen secured the pole position for Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 NASCAR Cup Series race (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Van Gisbergen beat second-place qualifier Chase Briscoe (95.719 mph) by 0.25 seconds to claim his first Busch Light Pole Award at Sonoma, his third of the season and the fourth of his career.
His pole-winning run followed Friday’s top qualifying effort for the Xfinity Series race at Sonoma. Last weekend on the Chicago Street Course, van Gisbergen swept the poles and races in both series.
Qualifying in Group 2, SVG picked up speed substantially from his first lap to his second, from 74.833 seconds to 74.594.
“I thought it could be faster,” said van Gisbergen, who won last season’s Xfinity race at Sonoma but will be making his first start here in a Cup car. “And then in the first group, we saw big gains from people in their second runs. I think the 24 (third-place qualifier William Byron) made a huge jump, which is pretty abnormal, I think, on these tires, especially this new soft tire.
“My first lap was just a banker almost. The second lap was really good.”
Byron navigated the course at 95.488 mph to claim the third spot on the grid. Ross Chastain was fourth at 95.409 mph, followed by AJ Allmendinger (95.367 mph) and Ty Gibbs (95.357 mph).
Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Alex Bowman and Christopher Bell claimed the seventh through 10th starting spots, respectively.
Drivers facing off in the third round of the In-Season Challenge qualified as follows: Gibbs, sixth vs. Zane Smith, 12th; Bowman, ninth vs. Ty Dillon, 26th; John Hunter Nemechek, 18th vs. Legacy Motor Club teammate Erik Jones, 31st; and Reddick, eighth vs. Ryan Preece, 20th.
Preece, two points below the current elimination line for a berth in the Cup Series Playoffs, may be more concerned with the position of 30th-place starter Bubba Wallace, who is two points to the good, with seven races left in the regular season.
Katherine Legge, who finished 19th last Sunday on the Chicago Street Course, did not make a qualifying attempt and will start 37th.
Allmendinger tops the chart in practice
Allmendinger paced practice Saturday in a session divided between two groups, with each group hitting the track for a 25-minute session. The Kaulig Racing driver turned the fastest lap at 94.325 mph, besting Gibbs (94.024 mph), van Gisbergen (93.965 mph), Chastain (93.782 mph) and Kyle Larson (93.711 mph). Bell, Blaney, Daniel Suárez, Reddick and Nemechek rounded out the top 10. Suárez was the fastest among Group 1 drivers.
Brad Keselowski, as well as all three Spire Motorsports cars driven by Michael McDowell, Justin Haley and Carson Hocevar, went for spins in Group 1 practice.
SONOMA, Calif. — Last weekend, Bubba Wallace was sliding backwards down DuSable Lake Shore Drive in Chicago after contact from Alex Bowman off Turn 2.
By the time they made their ways west to California on Thursday night, Wallace was buying Bowman dinner as both put their incidental run-in behind them.
“I was wondering if he was gonna mention that,” Wallace said. “See, I’m a nice guy!”
A miscommunication led Wallace, driver of the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota, to cut across Bowman’s nose after a fierce battle for position that involved plenty of contact on the Chicago Street Course. Before Saturday’s NASCAR Cup Series practice at Sonoma Raceway, Wallace detailed what led to the error.
“For some reason, my perfectly working digital mirror wasn’t looked at,” Wallace said. “I didn’t look there and assumed that he was to my right. He was to my left. I was just getting back up to give him room for the bottom, and he was actually on the top. So I looked like an idiot.”
Fighting each other as In-Season Challenge opponents last week, the two spoke shortly after the race ended to clear the air, with Wallace assuring Bowman there were no hard feelings after the dustup.
“I think the media definitely wanted that to go in a direction that it didn’t go,” Bowman said. “Yeah, we talked after the race and I saw him the other night at dinner. I think we’re all good. Like, I certainly hate that he got wrecked. I don’t think that much contact was necessary in that situation. But I also understand that he’s trying to race for the bracket challenge and finish the best he can. Kind of is what it is. And he bought me dinner the other night, so we’re good. I’ll move on from it.”
On-track rivals in NASCAR frequently tend to find each other after recent incidents. That proved true again Thursday when the two wound up at the same restaurant for a meal.
“We get to the hotel for dinner two nights ago now, and he’s waiting to get seated right in front of us,” Wallace recalled. “I just come up, give a big bear hug and told him again, ‘Hey, we’re good. Nothing’s wrong.’ And so the hotel we’re at, a lot of (NASCAR) industry people are there. My dinner was bought by somebody else, so I paid for Bowman’s dinner. It just kind of felt right.”
What was a battle for seventh place ultimately plummeted Wallace to 28th, five laps down. Wallace, who apologized to his team this week, is two points above the provisional elimination line in the 16-driver Cup Series Playoffs grid entering Sunday’s race at Sonoma (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the In-Season [Challenge],” Wallace said. “Like, instead, at the end of the day, I gave up 20- something points, and look where I’m at: plus-two. So yeah, it’s just going through it. Like I felt like that was my debut race. Rookie mentality. And it was like, what the [expletive] are you doing?”
Wallace admitted it took a few days to forgive himself for the error at Chicago. In years past, those few days may have lingered into the weekend or longer. That wasn’t the case this time around.
“To start, it was the same,” Wallace said. “Like Monday, Tuesday, I was pretty down — and mad at myself, right? And then like, oops — I made a mistake doing something else around the house. And it’s like the magnitude is different, but still, a mistake’s a mistake, so you just move on. It’s been fine the last couple days. But yeah, I would say it’d be totally different last year.”
The NASCAR Cup and Xfinity series head to Wine Country this weekend for a stop at Sonoma Raceway in California. 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 3:30 p.m. ET on TNT Sports. The categories listed below will be filled out with links as the information becomes available.
Tires: Six sets for the race (five race sets plus one set transferred from qualifying). Teams also have one set for practice, plus six total rain sets for the weekend, if needed.
Race day: Saturday at 4:30 p.m. ET on The CW. The categories listed below will be filled out with links as the information becomes available.
Tires: Four sets for the race (three race sets plus one set transferred from qualifying). Teams also have two sets for practice, plus four total rain sets for the weekend, if needed.
See where your favorite NASCAR Xfinity Series driver will roll off for the Pit Boss / FoodMaxx 250 at Sonoma Raceway on Saturday (4:30 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
STATESVILLE, N.C. — Thin cardboard boxes are strewn throughout the upper levels of Legacy Motor Club. Soon-to-be-completed desks and workspaces are slowly unpackaged and assembled — not by outside installers, but by the same hands that piece together the Nos. 42 and 43 Toyotas driven each weekend by John Hunter Nemechek and Erik Jones.
Downstairs on the shop floor where those men and women perform their day jobs sit roughly a dozen Next Gen chassis, ranging in stages from fully completed race cars to shells of bare-bone chassis clips. Alongside them in one corner are pallets of furniture, couches wrapped in the plastic they arrived in, waiting to be placed in their future locations.
“We don’t have furniture installers,” shop foreman Tony Cardamone tells NASCAR.com. “It’s our guys, so we have to break away from a car to do this stuff. It’s just stuff that we have to do that people don’t see. But we’re all doing it for the right reason.”
Why? To drive Legacy Motor Club forward together as one, an intentional deviation from past years that those within the shop have witnessed over the last 12 months.
Collectively, those who don the black and gold of Legacy Motor Club have bought into the visions implemented and set forth by Jimmie Johnson, the seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and majority owner of Legacy. And after years of struggling to find its footing, Legacy is reaping the rewards as Jones and Nemechek begin to bring their cars to prominence.
“Jimmie’s vision is to make it a club where everyone feels a part of it, everyone wants to work hard,” Nemechek told NASCAR.com. “And everyone wants to do that at every race team, right? But there are some that are strictly business, per se, and there are some that feel like one big family. And I think that that’s kind of the vision that Jimmie has, is to make it one big family and to make it a club that everyone is a part of — and when there are successes, that everyone feels that.”
Seemingly everything at Legacy has changed over the past two years — and more is anticipated as the team continues to grow both figuratively and literally.
A wave of leadership hires started in July 2023 when former race-team owner Cal Wells III joined as the team’s CEO, helping oversee the program’s shift from Chevrolet in 2023 to Toyota in 2024. Amid admittedly considerable struggles as the organization adapted to its new manufacturer partner, Jacob Canter was hired in August 2024 as the team’s director of competition after spending nearly 16 years at Joe Gibbs Racing, first as a race engineer and lastly as its Research and Development Team Manager. His hiring coincided with Bobby Kennedy’s as the program’s general manager, which was then a new position at Legacy. Former Hendrick Motorsports and Team Penske employee Brian Campe was then added to the team’s roster in October 2024 as Legacy’s technical director.
Those moves all culminated in January, when Johnson became the majority owner of Legacy Motor Club in a partnership with Knighthead Capital Management, LLC. Former team co-owner Maury Gallagher stepped back as part of the deal after 12 years heading GMS Racing, a title-winning organization across the Craftsman Truck Series and ARCA Menards Series before acquiring Richard Petty Motorsports in 2021 to forge Petty GMS in 2022.
James Thomas | NASCAR Digital Media
The 2025 statistics prove the changes are paying off, even if those results didn’t come immediately. Through 19 races, the team has racked up 10 top-10 finishes — seven of which came in the last nine races. At least one of the program’s drivers has finished inside the top 10 in six of the last nine races; Legacy only ended with a driver inside the top 10 in two of the first 10 this season.
Results are the ultimate measuring tool in a hypercompetitive sport. The measuring sticks, so far, are in the team’s favor. The inaugural In-Season Challenge highlights both Jones (the No. 20 seed) and Nemechek (No. 12) as they have advanced to the third round, where they will face off against each other Sunday at Sonoma Raceway (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) as two of just eight drivers remaining for a $1 million prize.
Legacy Motor Club
2024
2025 (through 19 races)
Top fives
1
4
Top 10s
6
10
Average finish
24.9
19
No. 42 points position
34th
20th
No. 43 points position
28th
17th
The goal was always to compete for race wins — something Jones did in 2022, winning the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway for then-Petty GMS. But Jones said the ability to drive further forward was hindered.
“There was, for a while, just a lack of leadership,” Jones said. “Especially in racing, you need to have an engineering group, an engineering flow chart. People need to have positions, people to report to. And we lacked that structure in our company until Brian and Jacob came around and they were able to set that up. We had some good people, like I said, but we had to give them positions and places to go and people to report (to). Once that was in place is when we started to see things improve.”
Upon his arrival and taking in the lay of the land, Canter made solving that disorganization one of his immediate focuses.
“The way it was laid out prior, there was a lot of silos, per se,” said Canter. “Physical division becomes more real and hurts communication. So we’ve tried to really open it up and open up our workflow to encourage communication. When you put people together closer together physically, then it forces more of that communication. And then it starts to become more organic and more natural. Then you start to bear fruit from it because the guys know who to go to. They know who to talk to.”
But for as much work was needed, so too was patience. While Canter saw things to change — like physically changing the layout of the building to enhance communication — he and the team’s leaders recognized they couldn’t implement every new idea overnight, and that it instead needed to be a process.
“This offseason, we had a real big line in the sand: ‘Hey, let’s start fresh,’ ” Canter said.
Such a pivot, he and Campe recognized, can be difficult for longtime employees to accept immediately.
“It’s hard when you’re working somewhere and everyone comes down and like, ‘We’re starting fresh tomorrow! Whole new program!’ ” Canter said. “That can feel like a slap in the face. Our group, collectively, everyone bought in and was like, ‘How can we be better?’ And that ‘how can we be better?’ is still present today.”
Jared C. Tilton | Getty Images
A keen example came in April. Nemechek finished 30th, one lap down at Talladega Superspeedway after the season’s lone off week. The No. 42 team’s single biggest hiccup came at Lap 112, when Nemechek spun exiting pit road under green-flag conditions.
“We had a miserable race,” Campe recalled. “The cars didn’t have speed. We missed on the execution side. We made mistakes on pit road, and I think that was right after the Easter break. And we had a lot of hard conversations in small groups with ownership to individually within our groups of, ‘OK, hey, this isn’t working. What needs to change?’ We laid this stuff bare on the table. And we said, ‘OK, there are 30 things. Here’s the five we’re gonna go do to get better.’
“And I felt so confident that the team — and that’s everyone here — had made those right decisions. After the race, I went up to John Hunter, and I said, ‘You’ll have a better car in Texas.’ ”
Nemechek remembers the moment well, in large part because he was incredulous at Campe’s promise.
“To be honest, I didn’t believe him,” Nemechek said. “When he said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have way better race cars when we come back,’ well, how does that happen? Right? Like, what is that?”
Flash forward to the following week at Texas Motor Speedway: Lining up for the race’s final overtime restart, Jones and Nemechek were both inside the top 10, with Jones fourth and Nemechek ninth, a chance to win in hand.
“That was the moment for me,” Campe said. “I was like, OK, we have the right people. We’re trusting the process. Everyone’s bought into this. Now it’s my job, Jacob’s job, Bobby’s job, Cal, Jimmie’s to build the 43 feet of road ahead to make sure we just continue on down that path.”
“I think it was a lot of small things,” Nemechek said. “But I also think it’s the buy-in from everyone that works at the shop and everyone that works on both the 42 and 43.”
James Thomas | NASCAR Digital Media
The collective jostling around Legacy centered on the common vision laid out by Johnson, a seven-time series champion who has climbed into a No. 84 Legacy Toyota to compete in a handful of races for the past three seasons. Nine different team members — ranging from drivers to crew chiefs to crew members and directors — mentioned Johnson’s leadership as a key guide toward their willingness to buy into Legacy’s future and ultimate uptick in performance.
In the nine races from Talladega through Atlanta Motor Speedway on June 28, Jones tallied the sixth-most points in the Cup Series while posting two top fives, three top 10s and eight top-20 finishes in that span.
“It’s just kind of a mentality of it was time to turn it around,” Jones said. “I felt like we had good tracks coming up. We had been putting more and more speed in our cars. I would say right around Charlotte is probably the time things started to go good. I kind of reset on my own and said, ‘All right, I need to do the things that I do well again and just focus on what I can control and try to make it work.’ And about that time, cars started getting better, (and) I felt like I started making good decisions. And since then, it’s worked out really well.
“We haven’t always got the finishes, I think, that we’ve been capable of, but we’ve ran well in stages and got a ton of points. So it’s all going to come together more and more. The more you bring top-10 cars, that’s going to come your way more consistently. But the points rally has been probably the biggest, I think, in my career.”
There are no delusions held within the shop. Their work isn’t done, and they are not yet where they would like to be. But they know where they’d like to be.
“The next realistic step is to win a race in the next [eight],” Campe said. “That’s everybody’s goal is to get into the playoffs. It’s tangible. It’s not just a ‘roll your eyes after the technical director says it in a meeting.’ … I hope everyone here believes that it’s possible.”
On the shop floor is where much of the magic happens to make those once-lofty goals possible. There is a camaraderie throughout the expansive garage — lighthearted as Nemechek rolls past on his scooter and laughs with crewmen but diligent as tasks are completed. On the back wall stands a quote from Johnson himself: “A Legacy is more than what you leave behind; it’s something you build every day.”
What is being built now is an opportunity. What was once improbable is now not just possible — it lies within the grasp of a club trying to build its legacy.
Seven races remain in the Cup Series regular season, and the final laps of the Chicago Street Race last weekend saw a massive swing in the playoff standings.
Playoff Probabilities provided by Racing Insights (entering Sonoma)
Instead of fighting for another day and taking an important top-10 points day, Bubba Wallace played a little too rough with Alex Bowman through the tight confines of the 2.2-mile track and spun off Turn 2 after trying to clear ahead of the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. What would’ve been a top 10 faded to a 28th-place result for Wallace and the 23XI Racing team and now the eight-year veteran finds himself just two points above the elimination line with Ryan Preece on the move.
Two more road courses still loom before the playoffs, and Sonoma Raceway on Sunday (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) will likely see another major shift in how the picture looks at the bubble. With stats and probabilities provided by Racing Insights, see who’s trending in the right direction and who is on the back foot with another road course looming.
Preece has found the treasure as those above him in the playoff picture continue to make mistakes and bleed points away. It’s been a relatively quiet summer for the No. 60 RFK Racing driver, but the numbers should not go overlooked as he has finished inside the top 15 in seven of the last eight races, including five top 10s in that span. Preece fought through the final-stage calamity in the “Windy City” and brought home a massive seventh-place result, proving his talent extends far beyond the short-track scene. He also saw the highest jump in his playoff probability, up to 38.53% from just above 20% before Chicago.
Another driver to keep tabs on, and still seeking his maiden Cup win, is Ty Gibbs (18.65% playoff probability). He was runner-up to Shane van Gisbergen at Chicago and was matching the Kiwi on pace and strategy in Mexico City before an untimely Carson Hocevar caution nipped the No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing team’s plan. He currently sits 66 points below the elimination line, and while not impossible to make up with just under two months left, a win will surely put a lot of noise and pressure to rest for the third-year veteran who has found a knack for road courses at the national level.
YELLOW FLAG [Who’s on the fringe for Sonoma]
I’m only slotting Chris Buescher here because the No. 17 RFK team left a lot of points on the table after a mechanical issue ruined what otherwise could’ve been a day where Buescher really built his cushion to the elimination line. However, the stats for the Prosper, Texas native in Northern California are mind-blowing. He hasn’t finished worse than fourth in the three Next Gen races at Sonoma and led 32 laps in last year’s event. As long as the No. 17 car is at full song Sunday afternoon, look for Buescher to be in the mix for his first Cup win since Watkins Glen last season.
RED FLAG [Who I’m concerned about heading to Sonoma]
Back to the No. 23 team. If you are out of contention for the race win and running well, you have to pick and choose your battles. Yes, Bowman and Wallace were battling to advance in the In-Season Challenge, but there needed to be a balance between that and the big picture of trying to make the postseason. Wallace has certainly improved on road courses over the years, but a two-point buffer won’t make even the biggest No. 23 supporters confident going into Sonoma.
The numbers don’t bode well at Sonoma either for Wallace, as he does not own a top 10 in six starts at the track and has a best finish of just 14th (2021).
After an eye-opening experience on the streets of Chicago, Connor Zilisch knows what to expect from JR Motorsports teammate Shane van Gisbergen in Saturday’s Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250 at Sonoma Raceway (4:30 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Zilisch led the field to green with two laps left in Chicago, only to have van Gisbergen dive to his inside entering Turn 1, run him wide in the corner to take the lead and pull away to win the race.
“I was clear there, just barely, on the front straight, and I just let him get to my inside, and he took advantage of it,” Zilisch said after the race. “I should have been a little more aggressive there. I just thought he was going to race me a little cleaner.
“I’ve just got to be better and not let that stuff happen. I’ll learn from it and move on.”
As they were in Chicago, SVG and Zilisch are the top two choices to win on Saturday, by a wide margin. Van Gisbergen won last year’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race in his only start at the 1.99-mile circuit.
The 36-year-old New Zealander is coming off a weekend sweep at Chicago, where he won both races from the pole.
“Last weekend was epic,” van Gisbergen said. “JRM built me a rocket, and I’m glad our strategy ended up working out and we were able to get the win. I’m a lucky guy to be able to drive some fast Chevrolets.
“Looking forward to Sonoma this weekend. It’s an awesome track and I had a blast racing there last season and even brought home the win. Hoping to do it again this weekend for my No. 9 JRM team.”
SVG won last year’s Chicago and Sonoma races in the No. 97 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet. This year, he’s driving for JRM, which has won all three road-course races this season with three different drivers and the last five (dating to last year) with four different drivers.
Though SVG and Zilisch are the most likely winners, their battle won’t be the only one of significance at Sonoma. There are eight races left in the Xfinity Series regular season, and five playoff spots remain open.
Taylor Gray and Harrison Burton are just eight points apart on either side of the current elimination line, with Gray holding the final playoff berth after the Chicago Street Race.
In that event, Burton finished 13th to Gray’s 34th and trimmed 20 points off Gray’s advantage entering the race.
When Austin Beers became a regular competitor on the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour, he didn’t have much experience racing at the tracks throughout the Northeast that make up the bulk of the series schedule.
His competition — drivers like Justin Bonsignore and Ron Silk — grew up competing at places like Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park or Riverhead Raceway, staples on the schedule for decades. If there is one track where Beers has the upper hand in terms of experience, though, it’s Lancaster Motorplex outside of Buffalo, New York.
“When I go to Thompson or Riverhead, Justin (Bonsignore) and Ron (Silk) and all those Connecticut or Riverhead guys have all those laps,” Beers said. “Lancaster was one of the first tracks that, when I started to travel with the RoC Modified Series, it was one of the first tracks I went to.
“So, I kind of have an advantage on them more so than when we go to Thompson or Riverhead when they have thousands of more laps than me.”
Beers, from Northampton, Pennsylvania, ran his first full Modified Tour season in 2022 when he was 19. He has quickly become one of the series’ fastest rising stars.
Austin Beers in action during the World Series 150 at Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park on Oct. 13, 2024. (Photo: Rob Branning/NASCAR)
Beers scored his first victory in 2023 at Richmond Raceway, which he followed with another win later that season at Lancaster. He won once last season at — you guessed it — Lancaster.
So what makes Beers, who is younger by at least a decade than most of his competition, so good at Lancaster?
“There is nothing that really suits me,” Beers explained. “It’s more of an experience thing. I just have a lot of laps (there).”
Lancaster is one of the most unique tracks on the Modified Tour schedule. The multi-purpose facility features a drag strip that is integrated into the frontstretch portion of the oval on which Beers and the rest of the Modified Tour field will compete Saturday night.
As a result, Beers says, drivers must attack the frontstretch different than the rest of the track. One wrong move could cost a competitor the entire race.
“It’s definitely unique. The increase in grip (on the frontstretch) is crazy,” Beers explained. “You almost have to set your car up to be straight going onto it, because if you’re turned sideways getting onto the grip, once it grips up and you’re turning right, you’re going right into the fence.
“It’s pretty tricky. It takes some getting used to at the exit (of Turn 4). Out of (Turn) 4 the top groove kind of tapers off over to the drag strip even more, so if you catch it early, then it upsets the car, as well.
“It’s all little nitpick things you have to figure out the longer you run there.”
Beers, who drives the No. 64 KLM Motorsports Modified for team owner Mike Murphy, used different methods to win at Lancaster each of the last two seasons.
In 2023, a fast pit stop catapulted Beers to the lead, and he held off Matt Hirschman to win. One year later, a storm before the race created tricky track conditions, which Beers figured out the best.
“Hopefully this season we can win by more than a car length, because I feel like it’s been just about a car length each time we’ve won,” Beers said. “I’d like to have a bit of a gap coming to the checkered flag.”
Austin Beers celebrates his victory in the Nu-Way Auto Parts 150 at Lancaster Motorplex on Aug. 3, 2024. (Photo: Jeffrey Barnes/NASCAR)
Saturday’s race marks the seventh event of the 2025 Modified Tour season, a year in which the series has seen six different winners through the first six races. The record, seven, was set in 1999.
Despite being the most consistent driver on Tour so far this year, Beers has not yet found Victory Lane. As the two-time and defending winner at Lancaster, he’s the obvious favorite to not only win, but also match that series record of different winners to start a season.
Beers knows winning again at Lancaster won’t be a cakewalk, but based on experience, the odds do appear to be in his favor.
“I think it shows how competitive the Tour actually is,” Beers said, “Six different winners in six races is pretty incredible, and there are plenty of other guys that can win. Obviously Trevor Catalano got a win last year; he’s a contender. Tommy (Catalano) is still looking for that first win, and I think Lancaster is a place he can win. There are plenty of other guys that can still win.
“We just need to keep doing what we’re doing. The team is doing a great job bringing great race cars to the track. The pit crew is doing a hell of a job. It’s very comforting coming down pit road knowing we’re probably going to gain a few spots on pit road because out pit crew has been amazing and very consistent. I know when we make the right adjustments we can go forward.”
This year’s national title chase, though, is up in the air. Goede has multiple competitors on his tail as the midwest racer pursues what would be his second Weekly Series national championship.
Below are the Division I standings as of the morning of July 10.
Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series national standings
1. Jacob Goede – 346 points
Goede, the 2019 NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I national champion, has 344 points on the strength of four wins in 13 starts at Minnesota’s Elko Speedway, Wisconsin’s Dells Raceway Park and LaCrosse Fairgrounds Speedway, also in Wisconsin.
2. Chase Johnson – 344 points
Goede’s closest pursuer is Division I rookie Chase Johnson, a regular at Virginia’s Dominion Raceway. Competing in the American Racer Late Model class, Johnson has won nine times in 13 starts and sits just two points behind Goede in the battle for the Division I championship.
3. Brandon Ward – 316 points
Brandon Ward, the 2023 Bowman Gray Stadium Modified champion, is third in the Division I standings thanks to a strong season at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina track. He has scored two wins in 12 starts to go along with 11 top fives and 12 top 10s, giving him a point total of 316.
4. Trevor Ward – 288 points
Fourth in the standings is 2023 Virginia Triple Crown champion Trevor Ward. The current South Boston Speedway championship points leader has scored four wins this year while competing at South Boston in addition to starts at Ace Speedway and Langley Speedway. Through 15 starts this season, his point total is 288.
5. Tim Brown – 286 points
Tim Brown, a record 12-time Modified track champion at historic Bowman Gray Stadium, finds himself fifth in the Division I standings. Despite being winless this season at Bowman Gray, his nine top fives and 12 top 10s in 13 features have him near the top of the national championship standings.
Complete NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series standings can be found on MyRacePass.
Below are updates on the championship battles in Divisions II-V.
In Division II, Chase Robertson leads four other Bowman Gray Stadium competitors in the battle for the national championship. Through 14 starts this season at Bowman Gray in the Sportsman class, Robertson has won four times and leads defending Division II national champion Zack Ore by 86 points.
The battle for the Division III National championship appears to go through Berlin Raceway. Brian Thome, with three wins, leads his Sportsman division rival Josh Frye, who has scored two wins, by 18 points.
Another Berlin Raceway competitor leads the Division IV standings. Justin Roelofs, who competes in the 4 Cylinder class at Berlin, has secured six wins and leads defending Division IV national champion A.J. Sanders by 38 points through early July.
In Division V, New Smyrna Speedway Bomber B competitor Zach Curtis holds a two-point advantage on Evergreen Speedway Hornet class racer Damon Claibourn. Curtis has scored eight wins to Claibourn’s one, but Claibourn’s strength of field is keeping him in the championship hunt. Christian Miller, another Evergreen Speedway competitor, is also in the battle, only four points behind Curtis.
