LAS VEGAS — Corey Heim made a mistake on pit road, but his crew picked up the slack when it counted.
A lightning-fast stop under caution on Lap 86 put Heim in the lead, and that was the impetus the driver of the No. 11 Tricon Garage Toyota needed to win Friday night’s Ecosave 200 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The stellar work of the pit crew allowed Heim to overcome a pit road speeding penalty he incurred at the end of the first stage on Lap 31.
“First of all, the pit crew did such a good job of getting the truck up front,” said Heim, who won his second race of the season, his first at LVMS and the 13th of his career. “I made that mistake in Stage 1 when I sped on pit road and put us behind.”
In a race run in uncharacteristically cold weather and stopped twice for sudden rain showers, Heim took the lead for good on Lap 101, passing Layne Riggs after the final restart following the fourth and final caution for Jack Wood’s accident in Turn 4 on Lap 93.
Heim led a race-high 42 of 134 laps to 39 for Stage 2 winner Tyler Ankrum and beat runner-up Grant Enfinger to the finish line by 0.825 seconds.
“This wasn’t exactly what we wanted in terms of the weather being cold and whatnot,” Heim said. “It seems to be a lot better when it’s hot and greasy, and we’re sliding around.
“I was doing everything I can there. I think all of us were completely wide open at the end. I spent a lot of time looking at my mirror, and it worked out.”
Enfinger passed Tanner Gray for the second spot on Lap 126 but couldn’t catch Heim over the final eight laps. Enfinger felt the battle with Gray might have cost him a chance to win.
“We got side by side and lost a little but right there,” Enfinger said. “And we probably went over our tire limit a little bit right there and that hurt us at the end.
“Corey was a lot better than us in the short run, and (crew chief) Jeff (Stankiewicz) really got this (No. 9 Chevrolet) really, really strolling on the long run. Our pit crew did an amazing job getting us from 11th to fifth (on the final stop). And when we were in the top five, we could race with those guys.”
Gray held third place at the finish, followed by reigning series champion and Stage 1 winner Ty Majeski and Riggs. Stewart Friesen, Rajah Caruth, Chandler Smith, Matt Crafton and Ankrum completed the top 10.
There were 21 lead changes among 12 drivers, both race records. Rain interrupted the race at the end of the first two stages, with red-flag periods lasting 55 minutes, 51 seconds and 19 minutes, 42 seconds, respectively.
The Truck Series returns to action next Friday at Homestead-Miami Speedway for the Baptist Health 200 (8 p.m. ET, FOX, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, Sirius XM NASCAR Radio).
NOTE: Post-race inspection was completed without issue in the Truck Series garage, confirming Corey Heim as the winner. The No. 07 had one lug nut not safe and secure.
This stoppage, which comes just past the conclusion of Stage 2, marks the second weather delay of the evening. The first caution flag of the evening waved at Lap 26 for inclement weather, just four laps before the conclusion of Stage 1, which ended under yellow-flag conditions.
Majeski won the opening 30-lap stanza over Ankrum, Day, Corey Heim, Stewart Friesen, Jake Garcia, Haley, Chandler Smith, Gio Ruggiero and defending race winner Rajah Caruth.
Heim worked his way to the top five from a 16th-place starting position but incurred a speeding penalty on pit road after Stage 1 concluded and had to restart from the tail of the field. The driver of the No. 11 Tricon Garage Toyota charged through the field and finished Stage 2 fourth. Tyler Ankrum won the stage over Smith, Friesen, Heim, Ben Rhodes, Haley, Garcia, Caruth, Kaden Honeycutt and Day.
With two stages complete, the race would be considered official if the event is unable to be restarted.
Thornburg, Virginia’s home for grassroots racing, Dominion Raceway is gearing up for another season of “Bad Ass Fast” action in 2025 with a major change that could shake up the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series (NAAPWS) national championship race.
As a part of the track’s upcoming campaign, Dominion has designated their America Racer Late Models as their recipient for Division I points.
The NAAPWS is NASCAR’s short track national championship program, and tracks are tasked with designating what car class they choose to receive points at the program’s five division levels. Division I is the feature class in which drivers compete for the overall national championship.
In the southeast, tracks typically choose late models, and Dominion Raceway had been no different dating back to their inaugural season in 2016. Over the last handful of years, Dominion was a player in contributing to the national championship battle. With Peyton Sellers bringing home the title in 2021 and Layne Riggs in 2022, DR helped shape who hoisted the trophy by season’s end.
Connor Hall won the last two championships out of Langley Speedway in Hampton, Virginia. However, with Hall’s move to JR Motorsports and the CARS Tour, fresh opportunity has presented itself to tracks who want to crown national champions.
To do so, Dominion is elevating their previous Division III entry, the Virginia Racer Late Models, and are rebranding them as the America Racer Late Models.
The America Racer division is the fastest growing affordable stock car in Virginia. Developed at Dominion Raceway in 2017, the series features late models running Crate motors at 450 horsepower with a Holley 500 carburetor, 8-inch America Racer tires and no bump stops. This rules package was designed to allow the drivers holding the steering wheel to generate the racing action. These affordable late models attract a wide array of drivers and are a perfect proving ground for up-and-coming talent looking to race stock cars.
Chase Johnson (Photo: Mitchell Richtmyre/Dominion Raceway)
Last year alone, the division generated the largest field of racers and the most exciting action. Chase Johnson not only won the track championship, but the NAAPWS Division III Southeast Region championship.
“We had five cars every week that could win,” Johnson said. “It is awesome to be in Division 1 this year. I think it is going to bring in more competition, which I am super excited for the challenge that will bring.”
NAAPWS rules require a field of 16 cars in order to award season points and payout toward the championship. With rising costs and the creation of other touring late model series tempting racers away from weekly racing, car counts for late models were sparse nationwide.
Despite a phenomenal battle for the track championship between Landon Pembelton and Dustin Storm last year, Dominion Raceway’s late model fields were not excluded from this problem. To combat the issue, Dominion decided to make the switch away from late models to the America Racer Late Models for top points.
“We set up the America Racer Late Model to succeed the Late Model, because we knew the cost would kill it, and it has,” said Dominion Raceway owner Steve Britt. “I think if you have a late model team at this point, you’re either running a CARS Tour season or maybe even doing an ASA. You’re probably running a touring series and committing a lot of resources to that, and that is the result of the expense to race. We didn’t see how our local teams could expend the cost to go race with us every weekend. That resulted in a smaller field, and we don’t think that is fair to our fans to buy a ticket and see eight late models run around the track.”
Not only will moving this class to Division I help promote their young crop of drivers like Johnson and Conner Weddell, but it will allow late model racers who may have struggled to keep up with the lucrative financial cost.
While a change to divert the spotlight away from traditional late models is a nerve-wrecking innovation, it is one tactic that has already worked out in Dominion Raceway history. When similar financial issues led to car count issues prior to the 1978 season, Old Dominion Speedway president Dickie Gore met with competitors and developed a new rule set to keep costs down. By putting an emphasis on strictly using stock parts, like carburetors, exhaust and shocks on a brand new stock front-end, cars could be built for around $4,000, about half the price of what was the precedent at the time. Thus, the Late Model Stock Car as we know it was born.
While that first year in Manassas, Virginia saw five late models grow into 11 by season’s end, the stock-car racing community resisted the idea of upsetting the status quo.
Late Model Stock Racing at Old Dominion saw increased car counts, and ultimately more fans in attendance. By 1981, the rule set was added to the NASCAR rulebook. Britt also mentioned this cost-saving renaissance was something he experienced over a decade ago when he first purchased Old Dominion Speedway.
“We had experienced this once before with the advent of the Crate motors. We were part of that effort when I was at Old Dominion Speedway 10-15 years ago, and the reason for that was the cost of buying a race engine had again gotten out of control,” Britt said. “When we went back to thinking about what we were gonna do with late models, we went back to how they kind of started. They didn’t have bump stops and shocks that were ridiculously expensive, and they had cheaper 8-inch tires.
“The America Racer class was about resurrecting that with cost-containment items in it with the idea that we could create a racy type stock car that was
cost effective.”
Now late model stock car racing is the foundation of motorsports in the heart of NASCAR country. With legends like Dale Earnhardt Jr. occasionally strapping into a late model to prolong their racing careers, the emerging popularity of the CARS Tour, and streaming services like FloRacing putting more eyes on late model stock car racing, a move away from them would be another deviation from the status quo.
For Britt and Dominion Raceway, it is one that could rewrite history.
“It is scary; it is a lot of risk,” Britt said. “This venue is unique, and it has wide-open thinking; that’s the way it was built. You have to have courage; you have to believe.”
While the Dominion oval-track season starts April 5 with the ASA Stars Super Late Models, fans can see the America Racer Late Models on April 12, which will start the NAAPWS season.
Heading home to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Kyle Busch is enjoying the fruits of the labor he and the Richard Childress Racing team around him have poured into their NASCAR Cup Series program.
A series of offseason additions and promotions have paid off handsomely through the opening stanza of 2025: John Klausmeier and Richard Boswell both joined in November from Stewart-Haas Racing, with Klausmeier the team’s new technical director and Boswell the new crew chief for Austin Dillon and the No. 3 Chevrolet. Keith Rodden was promoted to vice president of competition in November, and in February, Mike Verlander was promoted from the team’s chief operating officer to become the team’s new president, replacing Torrey Galida who, after 14 years in that role, shifted to that of vice chairman.
Busch is reaping the rewards of that reshuffling early in 2025. The two-time Cup champion — in the midst of a career-long 61-race winless streak — has notched three top 10s in the first four races of the new year. That includes a seventh-place finish at Atlanta after leading 13 laps, and more notably, a fifth-place result at Circuit of The Americas where he led a race-best 42 laps in run that was nearly victorious.
Those stats represent a crucially needed uptick in performance for Busch, who, in his 20th full-time season in 2024, posted career lows in top fives (five) and top 10s (10).
Ahead of last week’s race at Phoenix Raceway, Busch told NASCAR.com he would “love to be able to go there and race for a top 10.” He accomplished that mission with an eight-place finish and sits eighth in the season standings.
“Phoenix is the first true test of where we lie,” he said, “just because we’ve sort of struggled at the short tracks, and Phoenix has been one of those places that we’ve struggled mightily.”
Alejandro Alvarez | NASCAR Digital Media
Now comes another test at Las Vegas, the first 1.5-mile oval on the 2025 schedule. His 26th-place finish in last year’s spring doesn’t show it, but Busch was a contender in the spring race before pit-road woes — most notably a Lap 213 penalty for pitting outside the box — sent him to the rear of the field despite leading 18 laps and fighting eventual race winner Kyle Larson for the lead early.
A rocky start on pit road in 2024 brought change to its roster throughout the course of the season, but tire carrier Lamar Neal, rear changer Shiloh Windsor and fueler Justin White returned to their roles in 2025 while front changer Shayne Pipala and jackman Dylan Moser are new additions to the crew.
“I feel like last year at Vegas, we were really fast,” Busch said. “We were probably one of the only guys that passed Kyle Larson under green there. But unfortunately, we just had some pit-road issues and miscues that took us out of the running to be able to race for a win. But overall this year, I would say (I’m) real happy with the pit crew. They’ve done a great job, and real happy with our speed and how our cars have been at the race tracks these first three races.”
Early momentum can be hard to find, particularly on the heels of a 34th-place DNF in the Daytona 500, where Busch was in contention for victory before a late-race crash at the front of the field. But Busch and the No. 8 team currently have it, which is thanks in large part, he says, to the in-house reshuffling at RCR’s shop in Welcome, North Carolina, and the leadership from the team owner himself, Richard Childress.
“I really think that that comes down to those people and those guys and at the race shop, how everybody’s kind of gelling together, working together,” Busch said. “And I will say, I feel like there’s a lot of grit and there’s a lot of determination, and it starts from the top. It starts with Richard, but it then trickles down to everybody there that we’re a hard-working group, and I don’t think anybody’s gonna outwork us. It’s just a matter of making sure that we’re working as smart as we can work and making fast race cars when we get to the shop. So far so good with the first three weeks and we really want to see that continue.”
Despite being the winningest driver in NASCAR history, Busch has only one Vegas win in his long, illustrious Cup career — and that came way back in 2009, 16 years ago. He aims for a second in the Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube on Sunday (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Modified and Supermodified winner Jon McKennedy announced Thursday a busy schedule for the 2025 racing season. Again for 2025, McKennedy will compete in both the Tour-Type Modifieds and the Supermodifieds, mixed between multiple different divisions with both classes.
Between all divisions, McKennedy has roughly 35 races planned.
McKennedy’s season will begin at Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park on Saturday, March 29 for the Icebreaker Propane Plus 75 with the Monaco Modified Tri-Track Series. It will be the first of 10 races with the Tri-Track Series that McKennedy plans to run in 2025 – making him full-time with a chase towards the series championship.
McKennedy is also slated to run eight of the 16 events on the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour schedule, beginning with Monadnock Speedway on May 3. He will also run events at Seekonk Speedway (May 31), White Mountain (June 28), Monadnock (July 19), Thompson Speedway (August 6), New Hampshire Motor Speedway (September 20), Thompson Speedway (October 12) and Martinsville Speedway (October 23).
McKennedy is also scheduled to compete in select Open Modified events, including the Northeast Classic at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (April 12) and the prestigious Spring Sizzler at Stafford Speedway on April 27. Also, he plans to run the Modified Racing Series (MRS) event at Riverside Speedway on July 5 and the MRS event at Star Speedway on September 13 for Star Classic weekend.
On the Supermodified side, McKennedy is scheduled to run four events with the International Supermodified Association – May 10 (Jennerstown), July 11-12 (Berlin Raceway), August 15 (Lee USA) and November 7-8 (Caraway Speedway). He will also run the Bud Classic Supermodified race at Oswego Speedway on August 31.
In the New England Supermodified Series (NESS), McKennedy is slated to compete in eight races. His NESS season will start at Star Speedway on May 12, and will also go to White Mountain (May 18), Thunder Road (June 5), Star (June 15), Oxford Plains (August 24), Star (September 13), Thunder Road (October 4) and Thompson (October 12).
“It’s definitely going to be a busy season,” McKennedy said. “We’re excited for all different types of racing. Two things I love are Tour-Type Modifieds and Supermodifieds. To have the people behind me to be able to run both of them in some of the most competitive races in the country, it’s a great honor.”
A race-ending mistake last Saturday at Phoenix Raceway cost Austin Hill the NASCAR Xfinity Series points lead.
Just 61 laps into the fourth event of the season, Hill bounced off the inside wall in Turn 3 and collected the cars of Sheldon Creed and Dean Thompson. Hill finished 37th and fell to fourth in the standings as Richard Childress Racing teammate Jesse Love took over the points lead with a ninth-place finish.
“I was right behind the No. 8 (Sammy Smith) and just messed up,” Hill said ruefully. “I misjudged the inside wall, and that may be the dumbest move I’ve had happen to me in racing.
“We’ll rebuild for Las Vegas and try to have a good outcome there.”
Hill will look to regain the form that earned a victory at Atlanta Motor Speedway and the series lead in Saturday’s The Liuna! at Las Vegas Motor Speedway (4:30 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Hill is the only former Las Vegas winner in the field for Saturday’s race, but he’ll have plenty of competition from perennial contender Justin Allgaier. The driver of the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet has more second-place finishes (4), top fives (11), stage wins (3) and laps led (330) than the rest of the field combined, despite being winless at the track.
Last week’s winner, Aric Almirola, will make his third start of the season in the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, seeking his first top-10 finish at Las Vegas in his seventh start there.
Woody Pitkat, a four-time NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour winner, will return to the series to compete part-time with Danny Watts Racing in 2025. Driving the No. 82, Pitkat will run select events, including all three races at Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park, beginning with the Icebreaker on March 30.
Additional Thompson events will take place on Aug. 6 and Oct. 12.
Pitkat is also scheduled to compete in NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour races at Monadnock Speedway on May 3 and July 19, along with the Tour event at White Mountain Motorsports Park on June 28. He will also return to Oswego Speedway on August 30 to run the 150-lap event in upstate New York, and plans to compete at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on September 20.
As of now, eight races of the 16-race schedule are planned. Adjustments may be made as the season moves along.
“Working with Danny and the entire team is always a great time,” Pitkat said. “We’ve selected some of the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour races we feel we have the best chance to run up front and contend for wins. That’s what we are out to do with this team – capture a few trophies and get Danny’s car back in Victory Lane. We’re looking forward to Thompson’s Icebreaker to get the season started”
Four different drivers won the first four races in 2024 — part of a season that had zero back-to-back winners for the first time since 1984, and 18 distinct race winners overall. That latter number was tied (with 2011) for the second-most distinct winners in any season since 2004 — trailing only the first season of the Next Gen car in 2022, when 19 different drivers won races.
Meanwhile, the start of the 2025 season couldn’t be more different. After William Byron won his second straight Daytona 500, Christopher Bell rattled off a historic streak of three consecutive wins at Atlanta, COTA and Phoenix. Although other drivers have been competitive — Team Penske teammates Joey Logano and Austin Cindric have combined to lead more total laps (319) than Bell and Byron (214) — there’s no question the most dominant drivers, especially at the most important moments of each race, have been the only drivers to win races this year.
If you look at my rolling driver rankings, the distribution is heavily skewed toward the top duo of No. 1 Bell and No. 2 Byron. Because things have been a bit mixed for other preseason top-10 members (Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Logano, Denny Hamlin, Alex Bowman, etc.) — while Kyle Busch has been the next-best driver by Driver Rating — Bell and Byron have ended up with a huge gap in base predicted performance (independent of track type) versus everyone else.
After four races, the average of Bell’s (109.8) and Byron’s (109.1) rolling ratings is 109.4, 13.8 points clear from that of No. 3 Blaney (95.6). That’s the second-widest gap between Nos. 1-2 and No. 3 in the rankings at this stage of a season since 2006: The only wider gap belonged to 2015, when Kevin Harvick (129.9) and Logano (111.5) were well ahead of No. 3 Brad Keselowski (103.6).
Harvick was coming off a championship the previous season, and while he didn’t ultimately repeat in 2015, he won two of the first four races on the calendar, with Logano and Jimmie Johnson splitting the other two. It was early in a highly dominant 2014-2020 run for Harvick in the No. 4 car after leaving Richard Childress Racing for Stewart-Haas Racing, a seven-year stretch during which he handily led the Cup Series in wins (35), top fives (125), top 10s (180) and average Driver Rating (109.6). Not coincidentally, it was also the peak of the sixth-generation car, which lent itself to many of the most top-heavy season starts in the chart above.
The same could not really be said of the Next Gen car — hence, all of those different winners last year. So it’s surprising to see Bell and Byron pull away from the pack to begin the 2025 season, representing what might be the first true powerhouse rivalry of the Next Gen era.
It’s not necessarily the rivalry at the top we were expecting, either. Larson was the betting favorite for the championship heading into the season, perhaps unsurprisingly, while either Logano or Blaney had won each of the previous three titles. Hamlin had equal or better odds to win the title than Byron as well. Any combination thereof would have seemed as likely or more likely to rise above the rest and start the 2025 season as a two-man show.
But it was Bell and Byron, and there’s a certain logic to it — plus plenty of shared history, too.
The pair got very different starts in racing: Bell on dirt tracks with sprint cars, Byron on computer sims. But by the time they reached NASCAR’s national ranks, their careers became deeply intertwined. They both entered the 2015 Truck Series as highly touted prospects, and both moved up to Xfinity in 2017. They each won titles that year — Byron in Xfinity, Bell in the Trucks — and by 2021, both were race winners at the Cup level. They’d share the Championship 4 stage together in 2023 as well. Each has spent the past three years consistently finishing in the top six in points, establishing themselves as two of the cleanest, most talented drivers in the sport. Now, after years of knocking on the door, they appear to be on a collision course for the 2025 title.
The drivers handled the fallout with the grace we’ve come to expect from them. There’s no question, however, that the lingering competitive fire — and the raw feelings — from that moment still burn.
Although there’s a lot more racing left to do this season, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that we’re watching Bell and Byron establish themselves as the class of the field in 2025. In addition to the statistical driver rankings, Bell is currently the 2025 Cup Series championship favorite according to DraftKings, but it’s actually Byron who leads the points standings despite Bell’s win streak. In other words, this battle is set to go back and forth all year long. And if last year’s playoff drama was any indication, their paths will probably cross again when the stakes are highest.
NASCAR officials updated the Cup Series Rule Book on Wednesday, revising rules around the Open Exemption Provisional (OEP) berth to mandate a 41-car field when it is granted.
Competition officials released a bulletin Wednesday afternoon to Section 5.1.F under the “Entry Guidelines” heading, adding a sentence that states: “The Open Exemption Provisional will be applied only if more than 40 vehicles are qualifying for the Event. In that case, it will be applied regardless of the vehicle’s Qualifying position, and the starting field will be 41.”
If there are 40 or fewer cars on an event’s entry list, officials indicated that OEP rules will not be activated. Under that format, the OEP entry would be eligible for points and prize money — which would not otherwise be awarded to an OEP entry if used in a 41-car field.
Previously, the OEP rule stated that if a driver eligible for the provisional berth qualifies for the race, the field would remain at the typical 40-car maximum. Going forward, starting fields with an OEP in play will be 41 cars, regardless of the provisional entry’s qualifying outcome.
The Open Exemption Provisional was announced before the 2025 season, creating a guaranteed “promoter’s choice” provisional spot in the field for accomplished, world-class drivers, including those with compelling credentials from other forms of motorsports. Trackhouse Racing applied for the OEP for this year’s Daytona 500 within the required 90 days’ notice, and Hélio Castroneves — a four-time Indianapolis 500 winner — drove the team’s No. 91 Chevrolet to a 39th-place finish after starting last in the 41-car field.
Competition officials also added language to the rule, saying, “NASCAR has full discretion to deem certain Events ineligible for the OEP.”
This year’s Daytona 500 had the largest field since 2015, when the starting lineup was capped at 43 cars.
Drivers are stumped right now in their pursuit of ending Christopher Bell’s run. Is there anybody out there who can halt his hot streak at Las Vegas?
When Denny Hamlin exited his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway, all he could do was put his hands on his hips and stare off, at a loss for words, into the desert distance.
Short of dumping his teammate and making for an uncomfortable Monday afternoon in Huntersville, Hamlin did everything he could to outmaneuver Christopher Bell in the two-lap sprint to the finish … and yet the Oklahoma native, now in the midst of a dominant three-race win streak, remained insurmountable.
No. 20 is now the fourth driver in history to win three of the first four races of the season, the first to win three in a row since Kyle Larson’s 2021 championship season and the sole proprietor of JGR’s last five Cup Series wins. Considering the team’s 2024 lineup featured two easy first-ballot Hall of Famers before even examining his own resume, what Bell is doing on the race track so far in 2025 is just wild the more one thinks about it.
At this point, it can’t be very fun to race against Bell. This must be what it felt like watching a certain No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet run roughshod over the field in the late 2000s. Coincidentally, Bell has a good chance to become the first driver since Jimmie Johnson in 2007 to win four in a row.
The one saving grace for the field is that Bell has yet to win at Vegas — and JGR as a whole hasn’t won there in the Next Gen era — but, really, that’s just grasping at straws. Bell’s going to be great at Vegas. We know this.
Not to take anything away from what Bell is doing, which is truly remarkable, but he has a gigantic target on his back right now. If you asked his competition, they’d all say something to the effect of “control what you can control … we’re only focused on ourselves, etc. etc.,” but I’m here to tell you it’s all hogwash. Literally every other driver in the field is singularly focused on doing exactly one thing right now — beating Bell.
The odds favor the field in that scenario, and had the first four race wins been split among four different names instead of one guy winning three of them, we would be talking about somebody else as the clear favorite this weekend — Kyle Larson.
The winner of two of the last three Las Vegas races is the unquestioned man to beat in Sin City, and Hendrick Motorsports — winners of five of the last eight there, including all four spring races in that span — is the team to beat. Larson’s 629 laps led there (second-most at any 1.5-mile track for him) are second all-time to Kevin Harvick (679), and there’s a significant chance he takes the top spot this weekend. No. 5 has earned a top five in almost half of his 17 Vegas starts and a 9.4 average finish is his best at any active intermediate track.
Just because a fellow driver is on a hot streak doesn’t just wash away recent history, which almost exclusively favors Larson over Bell here. Surely, they both know this. And surely, it’s eating Larson up watching his biggest rival take command of the series he had in the palm of his hand just a few seasons ago.
In our preseason coverage we highlighted this as the “rivalry to watch” in 2025 and it feels inevitable several more chapters will be written over the coming months. We already saw an entry on the final lap at Atlanta Motor Speedway a few weeks back.
Expect the next one to come this Sunday.
Meg Oliphant | Getty Images
2. Four races in — is anybody sweating yet?
How much can actually be taken away from the season’s first four races? For some teams, not a whole lot. For some other strugglers out there … perhaps the heat is rising a bit.
Joey Logano isn’t doing a whole lot to dispel that whole even year/odd year phenomenon.
Fresh off his third title — all of which came in an even-numbered year — there was reason to believe that Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe, arguably the strongest pairing in the garage, would build off an exceptional playoff run and come out firing on all cylinders to start this season, odd-numbered year be damned.
Instead?
No. 22 is the first defending champion in Cup Series history to fail to earn a top-10 finish in the first four races of the following season. Not exactly how they drew it up, I’m guessing.
But is it that simple? Not quite, as Logano actually is having a decent campaign so far with plenty of speed in his No. 22 machine, sitting ninth in the standings by virtue of collecting the second-most stage points (46) of anybody so far to help buoy his positioning.
This points to how fluky and unpredictable the start to this season has been — one guy is winning most of the races while 29 of the 45 drivers to start a 2025 race have incurred a DNF, the most through four races since 2001. Thirty-three different drivers have a top-15 finish as well — the most through four races since 2001 and only the second time since 1985.
Some drivers we’re not used to seeing near the front are finishing well and the opposite is true, too.
But how many of them have reason to worry?
Logano is likely fine — and can probably toss his hat into the ring with Larson this weekend as one of Bell’s biggest threats — but his former Team Penske teammate and fellow champion Brad Keselowski is 33rd in points — tied for his worst start ever through four races since in a full-time career that started in 2010.
I’m just using him as an example among the many, and it’s possible Keselowski, a 2024 playoff driver, will be fine as well, but the underlying markers aren’t as favorable as they are for Logano. The No. 6 RFK Racing driver also has no top 10s — but he also has just nine stage points, with no laps led and a 28.3 average finish.
Again, four races … and 32 to go.
But some of these early season trends are likely to continue well into the summer months and perhaps beyond.
Just makes you wonder how many of these drivers and teams are confident in their processes and will stay the course hoping for a period of stabilization — or if the sweating is already starting and we could see shakeups sooner than normal as parity throughout the field increases and holes become too deep out of which to dig.
Christopher Bell joins Corey LaJoie’s “Stacking Pennies” podcast to discuss the No. 20’s rise in success following the team’s thrilling victory at Phoenix Raceway and why they are thinking long-term despite the early-season success.
4. West Coast is the best coast for these drivers
NASCAR’s West Coast swing wraps up this weekend with a 1.5-mile barn burner at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Races on the opposite side of the country from NASCAR’s North Carolina hub have tended to favor drivers with West Coast ties. (Credit: Racing Insights)
Driver
West Coast wins
Career Cup wins
Jimmie Johnson
15
83
Kevin Harvick
13
60
Kyle Busch
11
63
Jeff Gordon
11
93
Matt Kenseth
8
39
Martin Truex Jr.
8
34
Kyle Larson
8
29
Joey Logano
8
36
5. Catch the pack — news and notes from around the garage
