SPEEDWAY, Ind. — The Kaulig Racing No. 16 and No. 31 entries and Team Hezeberg No. 26 entry each failed NASCAR Cup Series pre-qualifying inspection twice Friday, resulting in the ejection of one crew member from each team at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
NASCAR officials indicated that each of Kaulig’s car chiefs have been ejected. The No. 16 Chevrolet team for driver AJ Allmendinger will be without car chief Andy Seuss, and the No. 31 Chevy of Justin Haley will not have Jaron Antley on hand. For Team Hezeberg, the No. 26 Ford and driver Danil Kvyat will be without mechanic Devin Foken this weekend.
Allmendinger is the defending winner of Sunday’s Verizon 200 at the Brickyard (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, NBC Sports App, IMS Radio, SiriusXM) on the Indianapolis Road Course layout. Busch Light Pole Qualifying is scheduled Saturday at 10:35 a.m. ET on USA Network.
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — The Nos. 11 and 18 teams from Joe Gibbs Racing were back in the NASCAR Cup Series inspection line at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Friday, five days after both cars were disqualified in post-race tech at Pocono Raceway. Instead of starting and finishing 1-2 last Sunday, teammates Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch were knocked to the back of the finishing order, elevating third-place finisher Chase Elliott to victory.
JGR officials opted against appealing the penalty for modifications to the front fascia of both cars earlier this week. Friday, it was back to business for both teams.
“I think we all sort of admitted we made a mistake or an error in the build process,” Ben Beshore, No. 18 crew chief, told NASCAR.com. “So we accept the penalty, and yeah, we’re going to move forward, march on and try to make the best of Indy this weekend.”
Had the victory stood, Hamlin would have been level with Elliott as the series’ only three-time winners. Instead, Elliott stands alone as a four-time victor, and Hamlin became the first driver to have a win revoked since 1960, when Emanuel Zervakis was docked for an illegal fuel tank.
The No. 11 Toyota unloaded Friday in an effort to turn the page, without the looming uncertainty of a Pocono appeal.
“There were things we need to do better, so that’s what we’re focused on,” Chris Gabehart, No. 11 crew chief, told NASCAR.com. “The appeals process is typically a pretty tall mountain to climb. It takes a lot of effort and exercise, and history shows you kind of how that goes. So we’re more focused internally on how we can get better, just like we do each and every week.”
Hamlin tried to make at least some light of the situation on social media the day after the decision, playfully offering up the trophy and champagne for eBay auction fodder. But deep down, Gabehart says, the ruling smarts, and that’s for everyone who makes the No. 11 go.
“It stinks for everybody, not just Denny. Denny is one member of this 11 team — one member. It stinks for everybody, and if it didn’t, I would be disappointed with the amount of intensity with which the 11 team wants to win,” Gabehart said. “So it stinks for everybody, but it’s motivating, too. In my three and a half years with the 11 car, we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve won a lot of races. I don’t know of any team that’s won more in that time frame, but we have lost a lot of races, too. So this is no different. We’ll learn from it, get better and move on.”
SPEEDWAY, Ind. – One day after the fire that cloaked the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports hauler in smoke, the team had a day of relative quiet at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. On a Friday without on-track activity, crew chief Rudy Fugle and the rest of the group assessed the damage, which was thankfully minimal.
The No. 24 team unloaded and began its initial prep for William Byron’s efforts in Sunday’s Verizon 200 at the Brickyard (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, NBC Sports App, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) with some adjustments necessary. Parts, spares and tires that ordinarily would have found homes by the No. 24 hauler all took up real estate in the Speedway’s spacious garage area, and some extra cleaning helped to remove the soot smell from the car and the team’s uniforms.
Fugle said he’d received a phone call Thursday evening as the hauler was still ablaze in a staging area adjacent to the track. He said a fortunate stroke for the team was the presence of a wash crew that was actively cleaning road grime from the NASCAR Cup Series haulers. When the fire sparked, they sprang into action and kept the flames at bay until the fire department’s arrival.
“It was a great team effort from NASCAR personnel and track workers, fellow truck drivers, the fire department to be able to get it contained where we have everything we need this weekend,” Fugle told NASCAR.com, adding that fire department officials were investigating the cause of the incident. “We have to get a new hauler, but everybody’s safe and all the equipment was able to be salvaged so that part’s great.”
Fugle said the call he received mid-fire initiated a series of contingency plans, including moving the team’s flight to an earlier time, arranging for a reserve hauler and leaning on Hendrick Motorsports’ other three teams for resources. Once on the ground in Indy, the overall assessment was a blend of thankfulness and relief.
“We’re not gonna really know until we go on track but as of right now we don’t see any kinds of performance damage at all,” Fugle said. “The biggest impact is just not having a trailer, which is our hub in the garage area for now. We probably won’t have one that we can work out of until Sunday, but we have teammates that we can borrow from and NASCAR has helped us out by having an internet hub in here so we can use our garage area toolbox generator and kind of use that as our home base for looking at information, data and things for inspection, and tomorrow to make good decisions.”
Byron arrived at the team’s garage stall shortly after lunchtime, chatting with Fugle and the rest of the crew. He said he was thankful first and foremost that no injuries were reported, and secondly that the impact of the incident to the car and equipment was small.
“I just think our team just takes it in stride, and just moves on and focuses on what we can control this weekend,” Byron told NASCAR.com. “I’m excited for it, and it doesn’t really change much for the weekend. I feel like these guys do a really good job of just adapting. We’re really fortunate to have a lot of good resources at Hendrick, so I think they’re going to bring the test hauler that we ran at Watkins Glen and tested with, so we’ve got a lot of great resources. If we were a single-car team or something, I’d be concerned, but thankful for all the people and support we have at Hendrick to deal with something like this.”
Byron is a two-time winner this season, which locks him into the Cup Series Playoffs field. His victories have come at Atlanta in March and Martinsville in April, but he hasn’t scored a top-five finish since that second tally – an especially dry 13-race stretch.
An early indicator that a turnaround could be nigh: Byron showed speed and won the pole position for the series’ Indianapolis Road Course debut last year. This year, the team has already had another first – an unwanted distinction before the haulers ever parked on the Brickyard’s grounds.
“I worked with some older guys as you’re growing up, and they say if you do this long enough, you’re gonna have something new happen and something crazy happen, and things you never thought would happen to you always happen,” said Fugle, who has been a crew chief in NASCAR national-series competition since 2011. “So definitely mark this off when they go write it down in the book.”
There are many race teams at Alaska Raceway Park, but presumably, only one of them has a shark mascot.
Dustin Hayden competes in Alaska Raceway Park’s Baby Grand class, and his team is keeping their spirits up, lifting the spirits of race fans at the track, and bringing new fans to the 0.333-mile NASCAR-sanctioned track in Palmer, Alaska.
In 2021, Hayden’s Great White Racing team won Alaska Raceway Park’s Best Appearing Team Award. The team takes their Baby Grand, and shark mascot, to car shows and trade shows for their sponsors, do giveaways for kids on race nights and do as many promotional visits as they can.
In Hayden’s mind, it’s all about building a community around the racetrack, and bringing in new fans.
“We show out when we go,” Hayden said. “We do a little bit more than your average grassroots racer would. We’ve pulled in some amazing sponsors and we want to make sure everyone knows how proud we are of our sponsors and show our appreciation.
“It still baffles me to this day, I talk to people every now and again who are like, ‘I had no idea we had a racetrack up here.’ So that’s one of our big goals is to show people, yeah, we have a racetrack and this is how we do it. We get involved with our community. All of our sponsors are small businesses in Alaska, so we’ll go to their events and introduce ourselves and just try to promote ourselves as best we can, and our sponsors too.”
Dustin Hayden with his race team’s shark mascot at Alaska Raceway Park. (Photo: Courtesy of Dustin Hayden)
This is Hayden’s fourth season racing at Alaska Raceway Park, and his first experience racing full-sized cars on a circle track. When he was growing up in Alaska, he and his dad would watch NASCAR events on television together.
When Hayden was “finally old enough, or tall enough, to start racing,” he said, he got in a go-kart.
“Not anything competitively, it was just fun little road runner courses that are in the cities and stuff like that,” he said.
After high school, Hayden joined the military. When he got back, he did some wheel-to-wheel road racing on an air field in Alaska.
About four years ago, a friend of a friend raced at Alaska Raceway Park and decided to move up a class, and still had his Baby Grand.
“My buddy was like, ‘Well, don’t let it just sit there, you should have it out on the track. My buddy Dustin races and he’d be into it,’” Hayden said. “He was like, ‘Get a crew together and you can race the car and sustain it and everything. And I was like, OK, cool. And halfway through the season I was like, this is fun, and I ended up buying the car and that’s kind of how our team started.
“I ended up finding my way into the circle track racing, and I fell in love with it, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
The first person Hayden wanted to join his team was his dad, who now serves as his crew chief.
“I hadn’t told my dad I was going to go racing,” he said. “I invited him over one night and before he walked in I said, ‘We’re going to go racing.’ And I showed him the car. He was so excited.”
Going from road racing to a circle track was a “huge adjustment,” Hayden said.
“Coming from road courses, when you are adjusting your car on the suspension you’re doing essentially everything you do on the left side you’re doing on the right side because you want it to be essentially the same because you’re turning both left and right,” Hayden said. “Getting into the circle track racing, every single corner of the car is set up differently. And realizing that was a huge adjustment. Just being able to determine how the tires were reacting and how I was reacting as a driver, it was a huge adjustment.
“But we got into it and we had a ton of fun, and it’s been a huge learning experience overall. We’ve all learned a massive amount about these cars and just circle track racing overall.”
Thankfully for Hayden, having a tight-knit team behind him helped make the adjustment much easier. His spotter is one of his best friends, and lives across the street from Hayden, making working on the car more often possible.
“Just having that camaraderie and knowing what we’re all doing really helps out just because we kind of have a flow for most of it,” Hayden said.
It’s all about more than just racing for the Great White Race Team. They get together to work on the car during the week, and on race day it’s time to celebrate. The team brings campers to the track, other friends cook food and they have a full family get-together in the pits.
“Really racing is a bonus to everything else,” Hayden said.
The rest of the racing community at Alaska Raceway Park is just as close-knit as Hayden’s team. The Baby Grand class gets together often and has discussions about what’s going on at the track.
Hayden considers his class the cleanest group of racers at Alaska Raceway Park.
Dustin Hayden drives for the Great White Racing Team in the Baby Grand class at Alaska Raceway Park. (Photo: Courtesy of Dustin Hayden)
“The racing community up here, I don’t really have experience elsewhere, but I feel like it’s unlike any other place,” Hayden said.
“I try to take pride in our class specifically … We don’t go out there and try to tear each other’s car up or anything like that. We race clean, have fun, we’re always helping each other out and trying to keep the pack tight. We want to have that competitiveness out there and still maintain safety and have fun. It’s unreal, actually.”
While Hayden said he can’t imagine racing anywhere else, his goal is to one day get the chance to try out other circle tracks across the country.
This season has seen its ups and down for the Great White Racing Team. Hayden has two top-fives and three top-10s in three races, but he’s had to sit out twice. The first was because the car started having engine issues that he called “very peculiar.”
Getting parts to Alaska can sometimes be a lengthy process, and the team was unable to get the car on the track in time.
No long after, Hayden caught COVID-19, and had to sit out another race.
He’s healthy now and has plans to finally be back on track for Alaska Raceway Park’s two-day event on Aug. 6-7.
The team’s goals the rest of the season is to get on the podium a few more times, and hopefully take home the Best Appearing Team Award for a second-straight season.
No matter what happens on the track the rest of the summer, the Great White Racing Team will be still be having fun.
“Racing is the bonus to all of this. Being able to spend time with friends and family and get together with the community is a lot of fun,” Hayden said.
“It’s been all thanks to awesome family, friends, and our amazing sponsor support that we have.”
NASCAR racing will return to Alaska Raceway Park on Aug. 6-7 for the NASCAR/INEX Shootout, featuring GCI Late Models, Baby Grands, The Legends of Classic Country 100.9, Pruhs Construction Thunder Stocks, Bomber Stock and Extreme Fun Center Bandoleros.
Everyone’s favorite annual summer festival is here — 2022 Almirolapalooza. See which famous musical acts are playing this year’s event on the poster below.
A new car, new race tracks and new rivalries reshaped the NASCAR Cup Series this season, fueling on-track action and off-track story lines worthy of their own TV series.
Fortunately for fans, that’s exactly what’s in store this fall.
NBC Universal announced Friday in a press release that USA Network’s new unscripted series “Race for the Championship” will premiere Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
The announcement also included the first official trailer for the series, which you can watch above.
The 10-episode series will tell the story of the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season and NASCAR Playoffs, from the competitive introduction of the Next Gen car at the Busch Light Clash at The LA Coliseum through the treacherous postseason road that brings four drivers their chance at championship glory in Phoenix.
As “Race for the Championship” documents the lives of NASCAR’s best on and off the track, viewers will get a rare glimpse of what it takes to balance personal relationships with the pressure to perform in the high-stakes world of NASCAR Cup Series racing.
The series will feature a variety of drivers at different points as the drama of the 2022 season unfolds, including past champions like Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski, along with others eager to write their own NASCAR legacies such as Ryan Blaney, Daniel Suárez, Ross Chastain, Corey LaJoie and others.
The premiere episode serves as a perfect primer for the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, which begin three days later at Darlington Raceway on Sunday, Sept. 4. That opening race airs at 6 p.m. ET and will also be broadcast on USA.
“Race for the Championship” is produced by NASCAR Studios with NASCAR’s Tim Clark, Amy Anderson, Matt Summers and Tally Hair, along with production industry veteran Chaz Gray, serving as executive producers.
Entering the 2022 Camping World Truck Series Playoffs, Ty Majeski is having a season that’s up to par with the top of the field.
He’s tied for third in season top 10s with 10 and tied for second in top-five finishes with seven. Even without a victory, Majeski is on solid ground to start his run toward a championship.
What you may not know about Majeski is that his high-quality season comes in his first full-time NASCAR campaign. He joined the ARCA Menards Series in 2016, running a part-time schedule, which would be the story for Majeski’s next five years.
Majeski saw part-time rides in the Xfinity Series with Roush Fenway Racing (2018) and Niece Motorsports (2020) before an opportunity arose with ThorSport Racing.
“I told them I was interested and a few months later, they got back to me and offered me an engineering job and said they would put together a few races for me in 2021 and with the intentions of building something bigger in the future,” Majeski said.
He ran just four Truck Series races in 2021 but grabbed two top-10 results at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Nashville Superspeedway.
In February, ThorSport announced Majeski would run a full-time 2022 schedule.
Safe to say, Majeski is making the most of his maiden full-time season.
Majeski credited the success he’s had this season to learning from past champions like Matt Crafton, Johnny Sauter and Ben Rhodes.
“It’s cool to be a part of that seniority,” Majeski said. “Ben [Rhodes], Matt Crafton & Johnny Sauter have all won championships so it’s nice to have those guys as assets and at our disposal to seek advice going to a new track or how to handle different situations.”
Majeski isn’t the only full-time newbie at ThorSport as Christian Eckes returned to full-time racing this season, driving the No. 98 for the team.
Neither has been able to secure wins this season but both start the postseason above the Round of 8 cutline entering the Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park Friday.
“They are certainly turning it on at the right time,” Rhodes said. “They were good at the start of the year but have gotten better and better as the years progressed. To have all four trucks in the playoffs is pretty dang good. I don’t think any team’s done that recently.”
With Majeski first working as an engineer for ThorSport, he’s said he’s able to keep his mind occupied during the week to keep the pressure off him before the race weekend.
“I keep myself preoccupied in the shop. It’s business as usual,” Majeski said. “I have a day job at ThorSport and work with my crew to come up with setups for race day so it keeps my mind occupied during the week. It’s made me better as a driver knowing what I’m going to the race track with and having input each and every week. It’s a part of what’s made us good at every type of track.”
Majeski opens the postseason seventh in the 10-driver playoff standings with a four-point gap over Grant Enfinger, who sits just below the cutline.
The 2022 Truck Series Playoffs open Friday at IRP (9 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“When I came to ThorSport, this is what I envisioned and hoped for,” Majeski said. “I’m thankful for the opportunity and do what I always thought I could do. Duke and Rhonda have assembled a great team around me.”
