Alex Bowman’s return to NASCAR competition ran into early trouble in Sunday’s Cup Series race, with a four-car crash relegating him to a last-place finish at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Bowman was running 31st in the 37-car field when Shane van Gisbergen’s No. 97 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet spun on the 160th of 505 laps in the Food City 500. Van Gisbergen’s car collected Bowman’s No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy, as well as the cars of John Hunter Nemechek and Todd Gilliland, as the quartet squeezed along the outside retaining wall.
Bowman’s car spent several laps behind pit wall for repairs before his No. 48 team determined that the damage was terminal.
Bowman entered and left Sunday’s event 36th in the Cup Series standings after missing the last four races with vertigo. He started 27th and said the pre-race preparations felt routine, even though he hadn’t competed since March 1.
“I don’t think my emotions were much different to start the race,” Bowman said after an evaluation at the infield care center. “Honestly, I think you know coming here, thankful to be back in a car, but at the same time, like just looking at the challenge that we have and just how far behind we are and off we are, and how much better we need to get. So really, we need one good week to start the ball rolling in the right direction, and honestly, I thought this could be a really good one for us, even after qualifying. I think this is a good place for us historically, and just didn’t happen today.”
Bowman was 30th at the end of Stage 1 on Lap 125. He completed just 38 more laps and exited as the race’s first retiree.
Bowman said he felt “totally fine” physically after his first race back, though he was surprised by the performance at one of his better tracks. Bowman had finished among the top 10 in three of his last four Bristol races, and that span included a pair of pole positions.
He’ll aim to rebound in next Sunday’s race at Kansas Speedway (2 p.m. ET, FOX, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where he has 11 top-10 finishes in 20 starts.
“Just all you can do is keep digging,” Bowman said. “I’ve had plenty of ups and downs throughout the course of my career, and yeah, I mean, we can just as easily go win next week, not saying that we’re going to. We have a lot of work to do before we can contend for wins, but it is a great race track for us, and the way this stuff ebbs and flows, you never know what can happen. So we’re gonna go try to win next week, the best we can.”
NASCAR returns to Bristol Motor Speedway for a high-intensity tripleheader weekend, with the Cup Series, O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and Craftsman Truck Series all set for action at “The Last Great Colosseum.” Bookmark this page for everything you need — from qualifying order and practice speeds to results and more.
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Last season served more lows on the race track than highs for Daniel Suárez.
He had zero wins, just two top fives and a 20.9 average finish that was the second-lowest mark of his career in that category — capped off with Trackhouse Racing casting aside the driver that broke ground for the organization in 2021 during the offseason as Connor Zilisch received the call-up for his rookie campaign.
Now, Suárez finds himself piloting the No. 7 Chevrolet for Spire Motorsports and currently holds the 16th and final spot in The Chase through the first seven races of the year.
Suárez also revealed personal news during the off-week that has him smiling ear-to-ear: he and his wife, Julia, announced they are expecting their first child together.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>The best is on the way 🤍 <a href=”https://twitter.com/JuliaPiquet?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@JuliaPiquet</a> <a href=”https://t.co/CEX3EVtHU0″>pic.twitter.com/CEX3EVtHU0</a></p>— Daniel Suárez (@Daniel_SuarezG) <a href=”https://twitter.com/Daniel_SuarezG/status/2040855234033913912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>April 5, 2026</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
“Yeah, we’re super excited to start a new chapter in our lives,” Suárez said during a Saturday press conference. “Super blessed to have Julia. And yeah, we had a good time during the off weekend, going to Greece and exploring a little bit. We thought it was maybe a good time to share the news with everyone. We have known for a while. She’s already halfway into the process. So yeah, very, very excited.”
Suárez’s Cup career so far has been a grind, a testament to overcoming a handful of obstacles while still tallying a pair of victories in 10 seasons and making the prior version of the NASCAR postseason three times.
The work Suárez put in to quickly transition to a growing Spire organization, now with a growing family, has yielded the return Suárez was looking for after leaving Trackhouse.
“Obviously, I have had a lot of great times in my career,” Suárez said. “A lot of tough ones, as well. But I will say that so far this year, it’s been amazing. We definitely worked hard in the offseason to make sure that we hit the ground running this year, and I believe that we have done that. Obviously, we are not winning races yet. We don’t have the speed to win races today. But I believe that we’re in the right track to get there. We have the right people. We have the right sponsors. We have the right structure to be able to get there.”
Suárez started 2026 strong, finishing just outside the top 10 in the Daytona 500 before snagging a top five the following week at EchoPark Speedway, site of his second career win two years ago.
The No. 7 team then had some setbacks on the West Coast swing at Phoenix and Las Vegas before delivering a seventh-place run at the always difficult Darlington Raceway.
The early uptick in performance is a welcome sight for the 34-year-old veteran, but Suárez said he’s remaining realistic, especially ahead of Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) where he’s finished outside the top 30 in each of the last three events at the Tennessee short track.
“Do I think that we have had the winning speed this year? Actually, there is a couple races that maybe we could have knocked it out,” Suárez said. “Darlington, we were a top-10 car the entire race. There were a couple races that were right there. But the next step is to become a top-five car, and that’s when you start winning races. Once you’re in the top five, now you can win because you’re already there in the hunt: strategy, cycles, whatever that may be … adjustments, then you’re right there. So I believe that we’re one step away from when we are in our best.”
This current phase of Suárez’s career will be the most impactful on his future.
As he grows into this transition, Spire is increasing in size and resources, and the talent currently on their full-time Cup roster includes savvy veteran Michael McDowell and the fiery youngster Carson Hocevar.
All signs point to Spire becoming a weekly contender in the not-too-distant future, and Suárez admitted the organization is the right place for him.
“I believe that consistency is extremely important on everything,” Suárez said. “And today, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. You can tell me anywhere, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else because Spire Motorsports is growing. Spire Motorsports is believing in myself. I’m believing in them. We’re continuing to get better and better. I believe that Spire Motorsports is going to be a powerhouse in the next few years, and I want to be part of that. I saw last year from the outside looking in — I’m a very curious person, so I was always very curious on what Spire Motorsports was doing that they were increasing performance so quickly. And now that I’m inside the building, I can see many of those things. So I really want to continue to be part of this group, hopefully for a long time, because I can see the direction where things are heading.”
Jonathan Bachman | Getty Images
Both on and off-track, there’s everything to smile about in Suárez’s life, and just like he’s come into his own at Spire, he’s looking forward to the dynamic he and Julia will have at home once they welcome their child to the world.
“I believe that right now, in this point of my career, it’s going to be a lot of fun to start a family with Julia,” Suárez said. “I hope that I prove that very soon, but I do believe that this is going to make me faster because it’s going to be more fun outside of the racing stuff.
“I can tell you something. We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but if it’s a girl, that girl is gonna have me wrapped around her finger.”
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Connor Zilisch collected Saturday’s winning trophy in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway, but his JR Motorsports teammate Justin Allgaier secured his eighth total six-figure check as the Dash 4 Cash winner at the “Last Great Colosseum.”
Allgaier, the 2024 series champion, hung around inside the top five all night while chasing Zilisch and Kyle Larson, but the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet was just a step behind being a race-winning contender.
With a not-too-shabby fourth-place run, the longtime O’Reilly Series veteran continued his gratitude for the Dash 4 Cash program.
“We made adjustments on the car that I thought would help it,” Allgaier said after the race. “For whatever reason, we never could quite get where we wanted to get to when you flip-flopped both sides of it. I thought the team did a really good job. We just came up short. I am super pumped, though. O’Reilly Auto Parts had the opportunity to not bring the Dash 4 Cash back, right? So to have that back and to keep that trend going is really, really cool, really special, and something that means a lot to me.”
A caution with 30 to go flipped a dominant Larson day on its head, and asserting his name into the mix with Zilisch, Allgaier and Larson was rookie Brent Crews.
Making just his fifth O’Reilly Series start, the 18-year-old phenom for Joe Gibbs Racing drove from a 17th-place starting spot to a third-place result — his first career top five.
Another eye-popping performance pocketed by Crews, but he lamented after the race that it ‘sucks’ to lose to his good friend Zilisch.
“Connor is one of my best friends when we step foot out of a race suit,” Crews said. “And when we get in the car, we are the world’s biggest rivals. Not necessarily that we’d wreck each other or anything, but there’s no one on this earth I would want to lose to rather than Connor. Made some rookie mistakes there, getting free up into the wall. If I just kind of backed it up some, I could have helped myself out. But it was tough with Larson breathing down my neck, packing air on me. So it’s tough, but grateful to be here.”
Matt Kelley | Getty Images
The two-time Cup Series champion Larson battled both rising stars in the heated closing laps. He tallied a race-high 230 laps led, but a call to pit under a late caution ultimately cost the No. 88 Chevrolet driver the chance to cap an otherwise dominant performance. Regardless, Larson said he enjoyed racing both Crews and Zilisch to the finish.
“We’ve all known that they’re really good long before tonight,” Larson said. “They did a great job. It was a lot of fun racing with them and Brent did a super good job to get to the lead. It was easy to just kind of step and get over it. He unfortunately did, and then Connor did a good job of getting in front of me up top at the right time. I was hoping he’d run the bottom one more corner and leave me an opportunity to get to his outside. But yeah, he did a great job. So that was fun.”
Allgaier has also taken notice of Crews, observing the youngster’s talent for a handful of years on the local scene at tracks like Millbridge Speedway.
“He has everything he needs, tool-wise, to be able to go and do this at a high level, and be a Cup champion at some point,” Allgaier said. “He got a little more aggressive than I would have liked to have there with about 30 to go or so, but that’s just how it works. You’ve got to go out there and you’ve got to go for it. Then at the end, I thought if he kept getting the wall, we were gonna have a shot to get by him. I have no doubt that he’s gonna be a threat next week when we go to Kansas.”
Both Allgaier and Crews will compete for the second of four Dash 4 Cash races next Saturday at Kansas Speedway, along with Carson Kvapil and Sheldon Creed (7 p.m. ET, The CW, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Allgaier is looking to accomplish a milestone of $1 million earned in the program this season.
“That’d be fantastic. I would love that,” Allgaier said. “To think about that, and to think about how many men and women that work at our shop that that has affected. How many tools and resources that that has provided for us to do what we did tonight, right? To finish 1-2-4-5, those are big deals and I feel like our company as a whole does a really good job of using the budgets that we have to the best of our ability.”
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Crew chiefs will have their eyes glued to two things in Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway: tires and traction compound.
Goodyear brought a new tire combination to the 0.533-mile high-banked short track, one intended to be less dependent on varying weather conditions than previous iterations brought to the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile.” Additionally, PJ1 traction compound has been sprayed along the bottom of each set of corners, creating more grip along the yellow line.
Through Saturday’s practice session, that lower lane remained the dominant, preferred groove. The Goodyear rubber cooperated with the conditions, laying into the track’s concrete surface to create a visible black streak to reveal where drivers drove.
The question crew chiefs will ponder in Sunday’s race (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) is how the trends of the track evolve over 500 laps of heart-pounding action.
“I think it’s more so what the PJ1’s gonna do,” No. 38 crew chief Ryan Bergenty told NASCAR.com Saturday. “If the PJ1 comes up, does the rubber on the right sides make it slicker at the bottom? And then it’s a matter of how many people migrate to the top. You can’t go up there by yourself because it’s still dirty, but if you get a handful of cars that go up there and there’s pace up there, then people go up there. For me, it’s (Saturday night), having a plan and adjustability in the car.
“It’s easiest for me to just say the track’s going to do two things and I come up with those two scenarios and have a game plan for either of them. To come up with one or 20 is not realistic. So I’ll look (Saturday) at some photos and how the track took rubber. There was a couple cautions between practice. See if it pulled any rubber up like a Dover style, and then you just kind of throw a dart at the wall of what the PJ1 is going to do after we put a couple hundred laps on it.”
Bergenty and driver Zane Smith were 13th-quickest in practice before qualifying 15th. Charles Denike, crew chief of the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota, watched his driver Bubba Wallace practice fifth-fastest before qualifying 12th. Denike’s curiosity matched Bergenty’s: When will the top lane become the preferred lane?
“It’s how quickly the lane can move up, when the top takes some rubber, ” Denike told NASCAR.com. “The PJ1 will wear out over time on the bottom. We’ll go through a period where the two lanes are equal, and then who knows after that? So understanding what our balance is on the top versus the bottom, it’s definitely two different lanes that we’ve got to deal with.”
Alejandro Alvarez | NASCAR Digital Media
Denike and the No. 23 team had the advantage of being one of three testers for both Goodyear and NASCAR last November, joining the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports group and the No. 60 RFK Racing team in testing the right-side tire that was selected for this weekend’s competition, as well as the higher horsepower and short-track diffuser new to Bristol this year. The comparison from the test to this weekend isn’t exact — especially considering the cold conditions in late November — but it is enough to give the No. 23 team comfort in its learnings.
“It’s obviously different than the test,” Denike said. “Everything’s a little bit different, so trying to adapt to that. Good news is that we’re close, so encouraging for what we need to work on (Saturday) to go into (Sunday).”
The other unique feature of Bristol is dual pit roads — one pit lane on the frontstretch and another on the backstretch. Under green-flag conditions, drivers can simply enter and exit their respective pit lanes for service. But under caution, cars enter pit road on the backstretch and maintain pit speed all the way onto the frontstretch pits, exiting at the entry of Turn 1.
Bergenty chose pit stall No. 24 for Sunday’s race, which is the stall second from pit exit on the backstretch entering Turn 3. There is plenty of data to suggest which pit stalls to select. Bergenty prefers to go more by instinct.
“I put an emphasis on probably not so much analytics, the numbers of it, but I pay attention more to what makes it easier on the driver,” Bergenty said. “So I use more optics than analytics if that makes sense. And that’s just a style of mine. Everyone does something different, but I just put myself in his seat, knowing pit road is going to be tight — a mess in and out. What’s going to be the easiest for him to execute? And I feel like that’s kind of where our team’s at right now. We feel like we can run 10th to 15th any weekend so far this year, and we just need to operate like that on pit road. And so we don’t need to be chasing tenths of roll time on pit road. We need to be chasing optimizing our day.”
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Connor Zilisch rediscovered his identity on Saturday night — as a winner.
Thanks to a bold call from crew chief Rodney Childers, Zilisch stayed out on older tires with 28 laps left in the Suburban Propane 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway and took the checkered flag.
With track position at the front of the field, Zilisch was able to hold off the dominant car of Kyle Larson, who had to settle for second place after leading 230 of 300 laps and sweeping the first two stages in the ninth NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race of the 2026 season.
For Zilisch, his first victory on a short track was a welcome respite from the struggles he had faced as a rookie in the Cup Series.
“That was awesome,” said Zilisch, the fourth different winner for JR Motorsports this season. “It’s been a tough past two weeks for me in the Cup Series, and it feels good to come back down here into the O’Reilly Series and prove that I can still do it.
“It’s tough. You finish in the back every week and you forget who you are. This feels good. We played strategy. Rodney made a great call to keep us out. The tires weren’t wearing much all night, and we were able to get our (No. 1) Roto-Rooter Chevrolet in the track position that I needed to go out and win the race.”
Zilisch picked up his first win of the season, his first at Bristol and the 12th of his career. He was one of four JRM drivers in the top five, a group that included Larson, Justin Allgaier (fourth) and Carson Kvapil (fifth). Joe Gibbs Racing driver Brent Crews crashed that party with a third-place finish on the same strategy that propelled Zilisch to the victory.
For the eighth time in his career, Allgaier collected a $100,000 bonus in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Dash 4 Cash program as the highest finisher among four eligible drivers (the top four in last Saturday’s race at Rockingham Speedway).
A three-time winner this year, Allgaier retained his series lead by 130 points over second-place Sheldon Creed, who ran sixth at Bristol.
Larson was leading with Allgaier in pursuit early in the final stage when the engine in Mason Maggio’s No. 91 DGM Racing Chevrolet exploded on the backstretch, filling the “Last Great Colosseum” with smoke.
Maggio steered the car to pit road, where it erupted in flames. Several of Allgaier’s crew members helped pull Maggio from the car. The driver was uninjured.
But the fireworks were just starting. After the resumption from a three-minute, five-second red flag period, Larson dominated — until Gray Gaulding’s spin in Turn 1 caused the seventh caution of the evening on Lap 270.
Zilisch, Crews and Corey Day stayed out on older tires, with Larson fourth on new rubber. Larson, Zilisch and Crews battled for position until the eighth caution for Anthony Alfredo’s spin on the frontstretch slowed the race for the final time.
An intense battle for the lead followed the subsequent restart with 11 laps left. Larson passed Crews for second and harried Zilisch until his No. 88 Chevy slipped in Turn 4 with just over two laps left, giving Zilisch the margin he needed to win by 0.703 seconds.
The victory was Childers’ first in the O’Reilly Series, after a long and successful run as a Cup crew chief, predominantly with Kevin Harvick.
“It’s a bummer, but I had a lot of fun tonight,” said Larson, who will race in Sunday’s Food City 500 NASCAR Cup Series event (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “Our car was really good. Just tough being the leader in that situation of knowing to pit or not…
“But I’m happy with the run. It just doesn’t always work out.”
Pole winner William Sawalich was seventh, followed by Day, Parker Retzlaff and Taylor Gray. Day recorded his eighth straight top-10 finish.
The O’Reilly Auto Parts Series’ next race is scheduled Saturday, April 18, at Kansas Speedway (7 p.m. ET, The CW, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Note: Inspection in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series garage was completed without major issue, confirming Zilisch’s victory. The No. 44 Alpha Prime Racing Chevrolet that Brennan Poole drove to an 18th-place finish had one lug nut unsecured in a post-race check, which will result in loss of pit selection for the circuit’s next race.
BRISTOL, Tenn. — Bubba Wallace has put his misstep at Martinsville Speedway in the rearview mirror and set his sights on Sunday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway.
But Wallace did admit he was mad at himself for initiating contact with Carson Hocevar that ended Wallace’s day and left him with a 36th-place finish.
Wallace texted Hocevar, and the two are moving forward with smiles.
“Oh, it was good. He didn’t do anything wrong Sunday, so I apologized to him, but all good,” Wallace said.
Hocevar — who has initiated his fair share of contact in the NASCAR Cup Series — dove three-wide to Wallace’s left on a late-race restart and passed Wallace without issue. In the next corner, Wallace contacted Hocevar and spun him out, but the damage was more severe to Wallace’s car than Hocevar’s. Hocevar had no qualms, especially considering he continued racing until the finish.
“Yeah, he texted me, and I kinda laughed about it because there’s times where I feel like I’m definitely deserving of something,” Hocevar said. “And I was laughing that — luckily my stuff was still rolling — but I didn’t feel like I deserved it and still got it. So I was just laughing at how it worked out. But no, he texted me and said he was just having a rough day, and when I passed him, he’s like, ‘you did nothing wrong. I was just already mad and that sent me over the edge.’ I was like, it’s cool, man. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve ended plenty of days, and obviously, it hurt him more than it did me. So we’re all good.”
The biggest impact happened off the track in the Cup Series points standings. Wallace fell from third in points entering Martinsville to a four-way tie for eighth, leaving him 11th on paper. Asked if he felt like he was eighth or 11th in points, Wallace said he “hadn’t even noticed.”
At one time in Wallace’s career, he dwelled on points week in and week out. That time is behind him, no matter the current-day importance of points. The problem, of course, is his recent fall in the standings. A Darlington crash out of his control sank his No. 23 Toyota to a 34th-place finish. One week later was Martinsville, where he earned his first DNF of the year. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Wallace harbored that frustration again.
“I’ve been mad at myself my whole life. It’s just another day,” Wallace said with a laugh. “Yeah, it sucks. I gotta tuck my tail and take it on the chin and move on. No one was happy about it, but we do know we have another opportunity in front of us to go out and rewrite the history books.”
Indeed, there is no panic inside the No. 23 23XI Racing camp. Before this two-race setback, Wallace hadn’t finished worse than 11th in the season’s opening five races. With a week off after Martinsville, the team has regrouped and is charging back in full force for Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“I mean, we’ve still got a lot of racing to go,” Wallace said. “Just like The Masters, there’s still a whole ‘nother 18 to play (Sunday). We’ve given up a lot of points in the last two races, unfortunately. Had a nice off weekend to reset and to get back up on the horse and go on for the next however many we’ve got.”
