After months of waiting for the dawn of a new season, the NASCAR Cup Series will fire up its engines for Sunday’s Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (8 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM). No, the race doesn’t pay any official points, and it features a unique format at a unique track, but it will give us a first look at some of this season’s new faces in new places for 2025.
Furthermore, it could also provide some valuable early clues about how this year’s teams and drivers will end up running during the season — especially at short tracks.
Bowman Gray is a special venue, with a rich history going back to the late 1930s as both a football stadium and a race track. Every week throughout the spring and summer, it hosts races across multiple divisions, from Stadium Stock to Modifieds, and it even held points-paying Cup Series races up until the early 1970s. Modern Cup cars have not raced here since then, however, leaving us with little direct precedent for how today’s field might fare on its tight, quarter-mile layout.
Still, let’s dig into a few numbers that might give us a bit of insight. We’ll begin by looking at the best short-track drivers in Sunday’s field, according to both traditional Driver Rating and my Adjusted Points+ index (which scales every driver’s finishes relative to a field average of 100) during the Next Gen era:
(Click here to explore the full chart.)
Unsurprisingly, Kyle Larson is the best statistical short-track driver in the series over the previous three seasons, followed by Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell and Chase Elliott. Those guys are all among the championship favorites as well, so at the very least, the Clash will give us an early chance to see some bumping and banging between rivals who’ll be jockeying for position with each other all season long.
But we have to remember Bowman Gray isn’t a normal short track. At 0.25 miles, it’s shorter than any other track on the Cup Series calendar by a factor of at least double, if not triple in the case of Richmond Raceway. The closest examples from official points races are Martinsville (0.526 miles) and Bristol (0.533), which are the shortest of the regular short tracks. So when trying to see who might be best suited to the cramped conditions of the Clash, it’s interesting to look at which drivers saw their performance change the most at very short tracks versus all short tracks during the Next Gen era:
(Click here to explore the full chart.)
By that standard, yes, we see Larson show up once again among the masters of the shortest short tracks. But we also get a few other interesting names at the top rightmost side of the chart, who improved their performance the most: Chase Briscoe, now of Joe Gibbs Racing; Cole Custer of Haas Factory Team (formerly Stewart-Haas Racing); Ryan Preece, now of RFK Racing; and John Hunter Nemechek of Legacy Motor Club, with 2023 Cup Series champ Ryan Blaney also in that mix.
Some of this may tell us that the old SHR team ran especially well at Martinsville and Bristol in the Next Gen era, so it remains to be seen whether their former drivers like Briscoe and Preece can carry that over to new teams — but if we believe driver skill also matters to these metrics, they at least have experience beating expectations under tight conditions.
(And maybe this also tells us that Josh Berry isn’t primed for a big run.)
Of course, both Martinsville and Bristol are imperfect comparisons for Bowman Gray, even though they are the closest thing we’ve got to such a short track on the main schedule. One other relevant point of comparison more in line with the quarter-mile length of the new Clash? The old one, previously held on a 0.25-mile temporary track at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
We don’t have loop data for those races, so we can’t say what the top Driver Ratings were in the Clash’s Coliseum era. But we can still calculate Adjusted Points+ index at the Clash across the previous three seasons — here are those leaders:
This accounting gives us some interesting names at the top who didn’t show up well in our previous short-track chart: Kyle Busch and 2022 Clash winner Joey Logano. At the other end of the spectrum, Chase Elliott hasn’t fared as well at the Clash as we might expect from his short-track resume overall. And then there is Larson – along with Custer – near the top again, as we saw in our other data.
A couple of drivers in the field that we don’t have data on from any of these samples? Burt Myers and Tim Brown, who have combined to win a staggering 23 track championships at Bowman Gray under the modified classification in their careers. We have no idea how they’ll fare against Cup competition, but anyone who has won that often at a track is worth watching.
But perhaps the most important finding in all this number-crunching is that the Clash actually does matter to the regular season, despite not contributing any points in the standings.
Based on the data above from the Coliseum, we found that drivers who do better at the Clash perform better at short tracks during the subsequent season, even after controlling for their previous level of performance at short tracks. For instance, a driver who posts an Adjusted Points+ index 10% higher at the Clash can expect to do 1.2% better at short tracks overall that season – and 1.6% better at half-mile tracks specifically. This effect gets amplified the better you do: for example, a 30% increase in performance at the Clash predicts a 3.5% improvement at all short tracks and a 4.7% improvement at very short tracks.
So Sunday’s race could end up telling us something important about the season to come, even if the effect is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. In part, that’s because it’s a brand-new season – and every little bit of information we gain can carries more weight than we might think at first.
