Entering the penultimate NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race in 2024, Chandler Smith saw the writing on the wall. Despite two victories that season for Joe Gibbs Racing — and an opportunity to still qualify for the Championship 4 — he fully believed he’d be without a full-time ride in NASCAR the following season.
“For somebody that don’t have a job next year in the industry, I’m probably going to be working for my dad on the construction side, just because of how some things are unfortunately playing out,” Smith said in an NBC Sports interview at Martinsville Speedway. “I feel like I don’t owe anybody anything.”
The Talking Rock, Georgia, native fell short of a title-race berth, but lived up to that quote. Smith had a heated scuffle on pit road with Cole Custer after the then-Stewart-Haas Racing driver moved him as they battled for the win late, with Smith quite literally fighting for every inch, unsure what would come next.
“I was very much serious about it because of how late in the season I was notified that I wasn’t going to be back at [JGR],” Smith told NASCAR.com this week, reflecting on that interview. “There was no open seats available for the following year, really.”
Smith learned late that summer he wouldn’t be returning to JGR in 2025. He kept in contact with Bob Jenkins, Front Row Motorsports’ owner and founder, after building a relationship with him while driving for Kyle Busch Motorsports. Smith said a NASCAR Cup Series ride with the organization was on the table, but Front Row hired Zane Smith to drive the No. 38 Ford.
Instead, a different No. 38 Ford came into the picture. Just days before Christmas, Chandler received a call from Jerry Freeze, FRM’s general manager, about driving in the Truck Series. He accepted almost instantly. Freeze went to work on securing race trucks and a hauler for FRM’s second full-time foray and tapped Smith to build out the team’s personnel from scratch.
‘”You go start building your team,” Smith said, recalling the conversation with Freeze. “I was like, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He’s like, ‘Well, do you know any crew chiefs that are available, any engineers? Like, we don’t have anybody at all.’ I was like, ‘You want me to start actively pursuing people?’ He’s like, “Yeah, I’m giving you the liberty and freedom to go do that.’
“I’ve never been in a situation like that, but it made me have a deep respect for the people that have to go through that year after year of finding engineers, finding crew chiefs, all the things that have to go into motion to making a race team successful. Man, I was in the trenches of it at the very start of it, and I’ve never been in that situation where I’ve seen that part of it, looking through those lenses.”
Smith first called Danny Stockman, his former crew chief at KBM from 2020-22, for recommendations. Stockman immediately mentioned Jon Leonard, who, at the time, called shots for a Niece Motorsports entry. It didn’t take much convincing from either party.
“It kind of fell in my lap,” Leonard told NASCAR.com. “To be able to have an opportunity to come to a company that wants to win, or the driver that wants to win, and have that chance … it was a pretty quick and easy decision on my part.”
And that driver/crew chief pairing didn’t take long to develop, either. Both joke that they see and speak to each other more than their spouses.
“[My wife] calls me three times a day, and I feel like I probably talk to Chandler as much or more,” Leonard said with Smith laughing in the background. “You’re around your race team more than you’re around your family a lot of times, and that relationship is super important to me because I can’t have success without him having success, right?
“Everything takes time. The longer we work together, the more we understand, and once you get a baseline, the next step is, OK, what can we do to make this a little bit better, and what’s the next knob we can turn, and what’s the next little tiny thing that will make a difference. Maybe it isn’t a wedge or an easy adjustment, it’s a theory-based conversation, and that’s where me and Chandler talk a lot — I’m able to pawn stuff off of him and he’s able to give me some feedback on what he needs to be better, and I feel like I can give him some stuff that maybe would help that isn’t such an easy knob to push.”
James Gilbert | Getty Images
In their first season together, they won two of the first 10 races and entered the playoffs as the No. 3 seed. But in the opener at Darlington Raceway, Smith pushed too hard early, resulting in contact with the wall and a DNF. The No. 38 team suffered a mechanical issue at Bristol Motor Speedway, forcing a must-win situation in the Round of 10 cutoff at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. They ultimately finished second in Loudon and were eliminated.
Smith and Leonard used that disappointment as motivation. When the calendar flipped to 2026, it didn’t take long for them to find Victory Lane. Smith survived an epic overtime restart in the season-opener at Daytona International Speedway, going from sixth to first in the final set of corners and prevailing in a four-wide finish.
“I really do think that is a huge part of why we did win Daytona. We didn’t turn and start pointing fingers [after last season]. We said, yeah, you’re right, it’s pretty evident this was not meant to be,” Smith said. “It truly wasn’t a good reflection of what we were capable of, and we showed that even throughout the entire playoffs. The Lord didn’t will it that way for us to make it to Phoenix and make it to the final four, but it wasn’t a lack of being able to go out and perform.”
That “childhood dream come true” of winning at Daytona set the tone for a season where Smith remains a top championship threat. Through 13 races — and with just five remaining in the regular season — the No. 38 team sits third in the series ranks, trailing shopmate Layne Riggs by 128 markers heading into Lime Rock on Saturday (1 p.m. ET, FS1, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Overall, the numbers are stout, with six top fives and eight top 10s. But the 24-year-old wheelman points to a few races in particular where there were missed opportunities. The team surrendered a top-five finish at Rockingham Speedway in the spring after failing post-race inspection, resulting in a disqualification and just one point. Wrecks took him out of contention at both Charlotte Motor Speedway and Naval Base Coronado, accepting blame for the former. He felt that Dover Motor Speedway was the only race all season where he lacked pace.
“Taking out those four races … I would say we’ve been performing really well,” Smith said. “All those other performances where crap happened, we were still performing at a high level, so I would say on paper it’s kind of rocky, but reality is we’ve been running pretty well, so just need to clean up a few small things. I feel like our pit crew is starting to progressively get a little bit better, which that’s been a weakness of ours.”
And after Lime Rock, the schedule lines up right in Smith’s wheelhouse. The next five races are at tracks a mile or shorter, spanning The Chase opener at Bristol. Five of his eight career Truck wins came at those types of tracks.
Expecting a strong stretch ahead, Smith and Leonard target a final push for the Regular Season Championship — knowing the benefit of additional points to start The Chase. The top team after 18 races begins with 1,100 points — 25 above second and 35 above third.
Is that attainable?
“If you look at Denny’s run [in the Cup Series] and obviously even Layne’s run, I feel like if you do your job and you win stages and you win races, you go string together two, three, four of these next races, I think we can,” Leonard said. “It’s gonna be hard. I think you’re going to need a little bit of help. I do feel like Layne and Kaden [Honeycutt] are probably the two that we got to compete with every week, but he made up a good chunk of ground in a good amount of time, and we’re just kind of feeling like we’re coming into our stretch of tracks we’re really strong at. It’s gonna be work, but I feel like we can do it as a team and a company, for sure.”
This Sunday’s Quaker State 400 (7 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) already marks the 10th event at the reconfigured EchoPark Speedway. And each time back has been a certified banger with action galore. William Byron, Joey Logano and Chase Elliott have all scored multiple NASCAR Cup Series wins in the nine prior meetings and should be in the mix again.
Returning to Fastlane this year is my weekly NASCAR 36 for 36 pick, where you can come play along. It’s a season-long points battle introduced in 2024 where strategy is the primary emphasis. With 36 chartered cars and 36 races on the 2026 schedule, players can choose each car once for the duration of the season.
Driver:Chase Elliott, No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Selections remaining: 6 Comment: The defending race winner and hometown hero has top 10s in half of his eight starts at the reconfigured Atlanta. (He missed the spring 2023 event with a broken leg.) Elliott leads the league with a 9.38 average finish in those starts, and he has four top-five and five top-10 finishes in the last seven drafting-style events.
Driver:Ryan Blaney, No. 12 Team Penske Ford Selections remaining: 3 Comment: Blaney is the hot hand in the Ford camp. The No. 12 team sees lucky sevens across the board entering Atlanta, riding a career-best streak of seven straight top-10 finishes into the weekend. Blaney has also earned seven top 10s at the new Atlanta, leading all Cup drivers.
Driver:Joey Logano, No. 22 Team Penske Ford Selections remaining: 7 Comment: The final seven races of the regular season are favorable for Logano as he ranks 18th in the standings, 16 points behind bubble driver Erik Jones. It’s been feast or famine for him at Atlanta, however, with a pair of victories and five finishes outside the top 15. He has paced the field for a series-high 359 laps at Atlanta in the last nine visits.
Krista Jasso | Getty Images
DRIVERS TO AVOID
Driver:Kyle Larson, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Selections remaining: 3 Comment: Aside from a podium effort at Atlanta in the spring of 2025, Larson hasn’t had much to celebrate in the Peach State. That third-place effort remains his only top 10 in nine starts on the reconfigured layout, with his six DNFs — all from accidents — being the most among all drivers.
Driver:Denny Hamlin, No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Selections remaining: 1 Comment: Nearly everything has gone the way of Hamlin and the No. 11 team over the last seven weeks, gaining 173 points on Tyler Reddick in that timeframe. That positive momentum could come to a halt this weekend with five finishes of 23rd or worse on the reconfigured layout.
James Gilbert | Getty Images
SLEEPERS OF THE WEEK
Driver:Daniel Suárez, No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet Selections remaining: 8 Comment: Suárez was on the winning side of an epic, three-wide finish in 2024, outlasting Blaney and Kyle Busch. He is consistently in the mix here as his five top-five finishes are the most among all drivers at the reconfigured Atlanta. He’s shined at superspeedways of late, with only one finish worse than 13th in the last seven races.
Driver:Ricky Stenhouse Jr., No. 47 Hyak Motorsports Chevrolet Selections remaining: 8 Comment: The ever-assertive Stenhouse is always a force at drafting tracks, winning a pair of superspeedway races in the Next Gen era. Specific to Atlanta, he has a quartet of top 10s — all in the last six starts — with a best finish of fifth last spring. He has placed sixth or better in three of the last five Atlanta visits.
Meg Oliphant | Getty Images
FEATURED MATCHUPS
Todd Gilliland vs. Alex Bowman Pick: Bowman Comment: While Bowman is the final seed of the 32-team NASCAR In-Season Challenge, Gilliland is the true Cinderella of the tournament. He has a pair of 15th-place finishes and led a career-high 58 circuits in the spring 2024 race. I don’t think that’s good enough to beat Bowman, though, who has a pair of top-five and three total top-10 finishes, placing third in this event last year.
Chase Elliott vs. Chase Briscoe Pick: Elliott Comment: This is the first of three heavyweight matchups this weekend that could truly go either way. Elliott was my original winner of the In-Season Challenge when the bracket dropped, so leaning the way of the No. 9 team. Briscoe finished runner-up in the spring, his only finish better than 15th in nine starts on the reconfigured layout.
Denny Hamlin vs. Christopher Bell Pick: Bell Comment: The Herculean drive from Bell with a fractured wrist continues to the third round, where he’s a recent Atlanta victor (spring 2025). His recent drafting results leave room for improvement; he’s finished 21st or worse in four of the last six Atlanta races and only has one top 10 in the last seven drafting events, period. Hamlin hasn’t been any better in the Next Gen era, so let’s go with the slight upset.
Ryan Blaney vs. William Byron Pick: Blaney Comment: This is the toughest matchup of the tournament thus far. Both are titans when it comes to the reconfigured Atlanta, with Blaney having the most top 10s and Byron being tied for the most wins. The No. 12 team has earned my trust when it comes to consistency, plus he made it to the championship round in my bracket.
MY LINEUP
Starting five: Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano, Bubba Wallace, Daniel Suárez. Garage pick: Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
36 FOR 36
Pick:Austin Hill, No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Comment: It may have come in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, but Hill has been an unstoppable force at his home venue. He has a knack for success in the draft, scoring a series-record 11 of his 16 checkered flags at superspeedways. He has a 55.5% winning percentage at Atlanta alone.
Editor’s Note: The “Racin’ With The Boys” podcast contains explicit language.
Zane Smith has remained abundantly clear: he is not a Carson Hocevar fan.
The driver of the No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford reemphasized that point in a new episode of “Racin’ With The Boys,” alongside fellow driver Riley Herbst and show host Taylor Lewan, which debuted Thursday.
Hocevar, driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet and a frequent topic of conversation because of his on-track aggression, came up in an exercise in which Lewan asked his guests to describe a driver in one word. Smith didn’t hesitate to call him a “bum-[expletive]” before later explaining his disdain for Hocevar.
“You’ll have run-ins with certain guys, and you’ll have that throughout your career with certain people,” Smith said. “He’ll try to talk to you after saying, ‘Oh, I don’t talk to anybody out there.’ But he’s full of [expletive]. He tries to be your buddy and then will go and screw you. Like, just don’t talk to me in the first place because, one, I don’t like you, and we’re gonna eventually have a run-in together, so let’s just not talk in the first place.”
There is a history of animosity between the pair. During last year’s race at Iowa Speedway, contact from Hocevar sent Smith crashing into the wall, ruining Smith’s day. One week later, Smith shared similar thoughts on Hocevar, and those feelings do not appear to have cooled a year later. Last weekend at Chicagoland Speedway, Smith made contact with Hocevar on Lap 32, sending both drivers up the track and into the wall. Each made his 100th career NASCAR Cup Series start that evening.
“Honestly, my approach with Carson — because he’s fast — me and him had a run-in at Iowa, and we’ve raced hard and whatnot,” Smith said. “And there’s a difference (because) certain guys will race you hard, but he’ll just put us both in a bad spot to where it’s costing us lap time and neither of us are benefiting from it. That part gets frustrating. But I remember he made a mistake — I don’t know if he made a mistake — but he wrecked us and then spends the rest of the race waving at me like playing nice guy of, ‘So sorry! I’m so sorry!’ Then he goes on social media and posts like ‘Admit One’ like ‘I don’t give a [expletive].’ ”
“Like ‘take a number,’ ” Herbst added.
Hocevar addressed their most recent run-in during a Wednesday night Twitch stream after a question was posed in the live chat.
“What’s Zane’s problem? I don’t know, man, maybe his T-shirt sales were low,” Hocevar said. “I don’t know. Who cares?”
Smith said Hocevar puts on “an act to get people to buy in,” which Smith takes exception to.
“It’s like if you’re going to be the guy like hiding behind social media, like I don’t know. That’s a coward in my opinion,” Smith said. “Like, act that way in person. Say that to my face. And it’s like, all right, I’m going to be the same way. But don’t be one way in person and then hide behind your phone. …
“You don’t try to go down a road of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope he gets wrecked,’ or something like that. You’re focused on your own race. But it’s just the hiding behind the phone is what’s the most annoying part.”
Drivers have not shied away from weighing in on Hocevar’s persona, including on Lewan’s show.
“Every single driver that’s come on this bus — and you guys have been the most blunt about it — but after, will be like, ‘no dude, [expletive] that guy. The way he drives,’ all this,” Lewan said. “I think [Kyle] Larson basically said, ‘I don’t respect the guy because of the way he drives.’ And [there’s] something about some dude just solely sitting on an island and being hated by everybody — essentially being the Joker from Batman — he’s just like [expletive] it.”
NASCAR reviewed the contact between Smith and Hocevar after Chicagoland and issued no penalties. The two drivers, however, will meet with NASCAR officials prior to Sunday’s race at EchoPark Speedway (7 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Saturday’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series’ Focused Health 250 at EchoPark Speedway (7 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) completes the day’s unique two-venue race doubleheader after an early afternoon NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race on the Lime Rock Park road course in Connecticut.
And judging by the last two series races on Atlanta’s high-banked 1.5-miler, there is every reason to believe the day may end with an exclamation point. First-time race winners have claimed the last two races there. Nick Sanchez won last summer’s contest, and this February, Haas Factory Team’s Sheldon Creed earned his first O’Reilly trophy.
The driver to beat is the home-state favorite: five-time EchoPark winner Austin Hill. A sixth victory this weekend would give the No. 21 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet pilot the all-time mark — breaking a tie with NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee Kevin Harvick. Hill’s 11 wins and 925 laps led on drafting tracks are tops in each category.
Jesse Love, Hill’s RCR teammate, is the only driver with top-10 finishes at all the drafting tracks in 2026. The No. 2 RCR Chevrolet driver is ranked second in the driver standings to JR Motorsports’ Justin Allgaier, the season’s most dominating racer. Yet Love is still racing for his first win of the season — the only driver ranked among the top six in the standings without a victory.
The 21-year-old — who announced June 17 he’ll move into the NASCAR Cup Series’ No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford full-time next year — has had three runner-up finishes (Phoenix, Watkins Glen and Charlotte) and led the most laps at Nashville Superspeedway in May, only to finish 16th. He’s on a streak of three straight top-10 results and finished fifth after leading 31 laps at Atlanta in February.
Allgaier’s domination continues to be the storyline for the series. His five wins lead all drivers, but the 2024 series champ has endured a couple of recent “off days” by his standards, with sub-25th-place showings in two of the last three races.
The 2024 O’Reilly champion’s 457 laps led, 12 top fives and 15 top 10s — all best among full timers — have contributed to that unprecedented 195-point lead over Love and the field. That gap is bigger than the points difference from Love to Joe Gibbs Racing’s Brent Crews, who sits 12th in the table.
Hill, Love and Allgaier all expect to be challenged again by the defending race winner Creed, who is looking to gain points after a steady couple of months. He hasn’t led a lap since Talladega Superspeedway in April, but has three top-10 finishes in the last four races.
Only four races remain to set the 12-driver field for The Chase. And although Allgaier has secured a spot in the postseason, there is still a lot of movement possible on the other end of scale. Crews holds a 44-point lead over his JGR teammate William Sawalich for that 12th and final Chase position. Rajah Caruth is 48 points off Crews’ pace.
Qualifying is at 11 a.m. ET on Saturday (The CW App).
The 2026 In-Season Challenge rolls into Round 3 this Sunday when the NASCAR Cup Series visits EchoPark Speedway (7 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). It’s the first track the series visits for a second time in 2026, and the hybrid superspeedway will almost certainly put on a summer showdown worth remembering for a long time.
Round 2 at Chicagoland Speedway had plenty of excitement, featuring five statistical upsets — including No. 32 seed Alex Bowman advancing into the quarterfinals over No. 16 seed Austin Cindric, as well as No. 25 seed Todd Gilliland defeating No. 9 seed Carson Hocevar. But generally speaking, the cream has risen to the top through two races as Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports each still have three dogs in the hunt with Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney lurking as well.
Coincidentally, three Round 3 matchups feature a pair of cars from powerhouse organizations, while the two Cinderella stories square off in the fourth. When it’s all said and done, three Hendrick cars could make up the semifinals — which would undoubtedly prove the organization is headed in the right direction after a shaky start to 2026.
(No. 2) Denny Hamlin vs. (No. 10) Christopher Bell
(No. 3) Ryan Blaney vs. (No. 11) William Byron
(No. 4) Chase Elliott vs. (No. 12) Chase Briscoe
(No. 25) Todd Gilliland vs. (No. 32) Alex Bowman
TRACK BREAKDOWN
EchoPark Speedway’s reputation as Daytona on steroids has quickly made the Atlanta-area facility one of the hottest tickets in NASCAR. Six different drivers have won in nine races since the pre-2022 reconfiguration, and no driver has won more than twice. It’s the ultimate test between superspeedway prowess and car control, all while hauling wide open at 180 mph on a 1.5-mile track.
Three of the remaining In-Season Challenge drivers have victories at EchoPark, and two of them count as multitime winners. William Byron won the inaugural race in 2022 and picked up another dub the next fall, while Chase Elliott has won a pair of summer races — including last year’s race. Elliott owns the best average finish among all drivers at 9.38, with Ryan Blaney right behind him in third at 10.78. All three drivers rank inside the top seven for most laps led in the Peach State draft.
Shockingly, despite Ford winning the pole for each of the nine races since the reconfiguration, the manufacturer has won just twice, both coming from Joey Logano — who was eliminated in Round 1. Some of that, however, is due to crashes. Per Racing Insights, an average of 25.3 cars are involved in incidents at EchoPark races, and twice the crashed-car count exceeded 30. Certain drivers clearly perform better than others at EchoPark, but it’s still a wild card at the end of the day.
MATCHUP OF THE WEEK: (No. 2) Denny Hamlin vs. (No. 10) Christopher Bell
A pair of Joe Gibbs Racing teammates will square off at EchoPark Speedway with a trip to the semifinals on the line. Both Bell and Hamlin finished on the podium at Chicagoland behind fellow JGR driver Chase Briscoe, each making significant gains in their championship points situations. But with a drafting track on deck, how much will these two shopmates help each other in this high-speed chess match?
Once one of the best in the draft — as evidenced by his three Harley J. Earl trophies for winning the Daytona 500 — Hamlin has struggled at superspeedway-like tracks in the Next Gen car, specifically EchoPark, where he has just two top 10s in nine races since the reconfiguration. Meanwhile, Bell is sneaky good here with three top fives and a last-lap victory in 2025.
But as we’ve learned in years past, anything can happen when the Cup Series visits the Atlanta-area facility. EchoPark served as the In-Season Challenge opener last year and busted brackets with eight Round 1 upsets. And with these two teammates pitted against each other, this could serve as the most significant matchup in the entire tournament. Both drivers are contenders at every oval on the circuit, and Toyota continues to show incredible strength across the board. With North Wilkesboro and Indianapolis to follow, the winner of this head-to-head duel could very well go all the way.
KEY MATCHUP: (No. 3) Ryan Blaney vs. (No. 11) William Byron
This is about as good as it gets with a pair of multitime drafting-track winners squaring off for a spot in the semifinals. Both Blaney and Byron won their first two matchups fairly easily. Blaney’s first two opponents finished outside the top 20 as the Team Penske driver scored a sixth at Sonoma and a seventh at Chicagoland. Byron beat Ricky Stenhouse Jr. by nine spots at the road course, while capitalizing on teammate Kyle Larson’s misfortunes at Chicagoland with a top five and a race-best 94 laps led.
Ford generally has more speed in these types of races, and Penske drivers always seem to work the best in the draft. Blaney has seven top 10s in the last eight EchoPark races, and while Byron has wrecked his last three times in Atlanta, he’s still a two-time Daytona 500 champion. Expect Ford to qualify well on Saturday, which should give Blaney the necessary track position. If he can keep it, Blaney will likely move on to Round 4 — but keep in mind the No. 12 team still ranks outside the top 30 in pit-crew performance.
KEY MATCHUP:(No. 4) Chase Elliott vs. (No. 12) Chase Briscoe
It’s pretty safe to say Chase will win this battle, but which one? Elliott has the numbers to back it up at EchoPark, earning a pair of victories and boasting the aforementioned best average finish at his home track. But Briscoe has all the momentum in the world, as he nearly defeated Shane van Gisbergen at Sonoma before finally ripping the bandage off with a victory last weekend at Chicagoland.
To that point, Briscoe’s record at EchoPark is borderline abysmal. He did finish second this spring, but before that, he had just one top-15 finish since the reconfiguration. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver is improving at drafting tracks, though, as Briscoe banked a Talladega win last fall to make his first Championship 4. However, Elliott’s numbers are far more impressive across the board at these types of tracks, and as one of the Cup Series’ most consistent drivers, he’ll set a high bar that will be difficult to beat. Elliott is the favorite, but in a year dominated by Toyota, anything is possible — especially at this place.
KEY MATCHUP:(No. 25) Todd Gilliland vs. (No. 32) Alex Bowman
Everyone certainly penciled this as a quarterfinal matchup in their brackets, right? This year’s two Cinderellas are on a crash course, and something obviously has to give. Bowman’s on one of his better stretches this season, earning a pair of top-10 finishes at Sonoma and Chicagoland. Gilliland, however, is benefiting from a survive-and-advance mentality. His 29th-place result at Sonoma eked him past No. 9 Daniel Suárez, who suffered an early tire issue at the road course and ran most of the race off the lead strategy. At Chicagoland, Gilliland’s Round 2 rival, Carson Hocevar, got fenced by Zane Smith, and the Spire Motorsports driver could never recover.
As evidenced by his six front-row starting positions for the Daytona 500, Bowman has plenty of speed at drafting tracks. His results don’t necessarily reflect that, but the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team quietly has four top 10s in the draft since the start of 2025. Bowman should be the favorite here.
The stretch run of the Cup Series season is generally Team Penske’s time to shine. Since the 16-driver, elimination-style playoff era began in 2014, the team has tended to produce second-half finishes 9.9% better (by Adjusted Points+ index) than in the first half, and they’re known in particular for turning things up during the postseason itself. Over that same span, only two of the team’s 32 full-time entries — Joey Logano in 2017 and Austin Cindric in 2023 — failed to make the playoffs, and the team won four of a possible 12 championships as well.
So, with the second half of the 2026 Cup Series season officially underway (Round 19 of 36 was this past weekend at Chicagoland), we might expect The Captain’s crew to settle in for another potential championship bid — or at least to send all of its cars to the postseason, as has happened in seven of eight seasons since Penske went to three cars in 2018.
Instead, Team Penske is in a real fight to get as many of its drivers into The Chase as possible. While Ryan Blaney is No. 3 in the standings and ought to have his eye on the championship prize again without worry that he’ll miss The Chase — his place there is practically guaranteed — the team’s other two drivers have a lot to fret about. Austin Cindric ranks 15th in the points, just 27 points clear of Ryan Preece on the wrong side of the cutline, and Joey Logano sits an unthinkably low 18th, trailing Preece by 12 points.
In other words, if the season ended today, one of the Penske drivers not named “Blaney” would barely hang onto a Chase spot, and the other would miss it altogether. If somehow they both missed, it would be the only time a single Team Penske entry made the postseason during its time as a three-car outfit.
In part, Cindric and Logano can point to a down year for the Fords overall. Between Penske, RFK Racing, Front Row Motorsports, Wood Brothers Racing and Carl Long’s Garage 66, Ford has one win (by Blaney in March at Phoenix), seven podiums and 12 top fives — all of which lag behind Toyota in a banner season and Chevrolet (six wins, 19 podiums and 36 top fives, albeit with about 70% more cars in the field each week).
Logano and Cindric have at least been outdriving the other Fords; Logano has a 93-86 head-to-head record (52.0%) against fellow Ford drivers, while Cindric is 91-88 (50.8%). But those are uncharacteristically low numbers for Penske drivers — especially Logano. Since 2014, only five seasons by full-time Penske drivers even saw a head-to-head success rate against fellow Fords below 59.8%, much less hovering around 50%. Meanwhile, Blaney’s 143-36 mark against Fords (79.9%) is the fourth-best for Penske in that era.
Which gets us to the truly unflattering comparison for Cindric and Logano: Blaney’s parallel performance. The No. 12 is 31-7 (81.6%) versus his teammates head-to-head this season, the best mark by one Penske driver against the rest of his team since Brad Keselowski went 33-4 (89.2%) against AJ Allmendinger and Sam Hornish, Jr. in 2012. Certainly, it’s by far the best head-to-head showing since the team expanded to three cars in 2018:
The flipside of when one of your drivers is having a dominant head-to-head season against teammates is that your other drivers are, by definition, not performing at the same level. (In fact, Blaney actually has a worse H2H record against all Cup Series foes: 508-191, or 72.7%.) For Cindric, this is kind of par for the course — the rest of his numbers are around his usual output, and he even has a winning overall record against the Cup field (363-336) despite going 10-28 against teammates.
But for Logano, 2026 has a good case to be the worst season of his Cup career, and certainly since his first full-time season as a teenager replacing Tony Stewart in the Home Depot No. 20 for Joe Gibbs Racing. Logano’s Driver Rating (74.7) is his lowest since 2011 (73.8) and 13.3 points below his average from the five years before; his Adjusted Points+ index (96) is his lowest ever as a full-time driver, 47 points below his previous five-year average. This is his worst head-to-head showing against teammates (16-22) since going 13-23 versus Keselowski in 2017, and the first time ever his overall record against the Cup field (332-367) has been under .500 in a full season.
The good news is that, with both non-Blaney drivers hovering around the cutline, there’s still a halfway-decent chance that both the Nos. 2 and 22 cars can join Blaney in The Chase despite the down performances. Right now, though, it’s more likely Penske gets only two of three drivers in — and maybe even just one of three, based on the odds from my 10,000 simulations of the remainder of the season:
Changing that begins this very weekend. Logano has the best recent record of any driver at Atlanta and its similar tracks, while Cindric ranks seventh. Though hoping for strong performances at a drafting track is far from ideal, this is also a unique opportunity — particularly coming on the heels of their second-best combined finish (12.5) since Bristol in mid-April at Chicagoland this past weekend.
But if Penske’s old second-half magic is going to show up again for anybody outside the 12 car, now would be a good time. Because for Cindric and (especially) Logano, this year’s stretch run isn’t about rounding into championship form as much as it is about surviving life on the cutline.
“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’ ”
Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger was nowhere to be found in the Midway this past weekend, but there was no shortage of high stakes and high drama. We’re now past the point of happenstance and coincidence in the feud between Austin Hill and Shane van Gisbergen, a pair of road-course rivals whose burgeoning bristling spilled over into a hearty serving of Chicago beef this past weekend.
That does not mean every bump and scrape between the two over the past three seasons has been intentional, but the file is thick enough now, and the war of words is only extending to where it can no longer be just chalked up to hard racing. What started as two aggressive road-course racers fighting for O’Reilly Auto Parts Series wins in 2024 has followed both drivers into the NASCAR Cup Series this season after Hill took over the No. 33 Chevrolet following Kyle Busch’s death, where the feud has been spotlighted, and every restart and on-track battle between them now comes with a full — and growing — set of receipts.
Sunday night at Chicagoland Speedway added the latest page.
On Lap 48, van Gisbergen’s No. 97 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet made contact with Hill’s No. 33 Richard Childress Racing entry as they raced through Turns 3 and 4 while battling in traffic. Hill’s car shot into the outside wall, ending his day early and prompting a pointed response from the RCR camp and the Georgia native afterward.
“I’m sure y’all have seen the replay,” he said. “So if I have to explain it, people probably need to get glasses.”
Van Gisbergen, who continued and finished 25th, denied that the contact was retaliation. He said he was trying to get to the bottom for clean air, was tight and that Hill “chopped (his) nose” before Hill got into the wall. Before heading to the garage, Hill showed his own displeasure by sideswiping van Gisbergen’s car under caution.
NASCAR reviewed the incident and issued no penalties to either driver in Tuesday’s penalty report. That closed the official infraction process. It did not, however, close the matter.
During this week’s “Hauler Talk” podcast, NASCAR vice president of racing communications Mike Forde said officials reviewed data, radio transmissions, camera angles and prior laps involving Hill and van Gisbergen before determining nothing proved the Chicagoland contact was “100% intentional and penalty-worthy.” Forde also said NASCAR still planned to meet with both drivers this weekend at EchoPark Speedway to make sure the situation does not “boil over” into something larger.
There is a reason for that — because Chicagoland was not a one-off.
The Hill-SVG history begins in earnest at Circuit of The Americas in March 2024, when both were still running in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series. Van Gisbergen, early in his first full-time NASCAR season and still somewhat introducing himself to the field, had control of an overtime restart, but Hill stayed attached to his bumper up the hill into Turn 1 as SVG ran wide and the No. 21 moved into the lead.
Van Gisbergen got back to Hill later on the final lap, using the front bumper into Turn 15 and pushing both cars wide. Kyle Larson slipped past both of them and drove away with the win. Hill finished second. Van Gisbergen crossed the line second but was later penalized 30 seconds for shortcutting the course, dropping him to 27th.
Neither driver left COTA content.
Van Gisbergen told FOX Sports that Hill “drove through me” in Turn 1 and said he “stood up for (himself).” Hill said from his perspective, van Gisbergen “just ran through us” into Turn 15.
At that point, it appeared to be just a heated finish. Two months later, we all realized it was actually the ember that sparked a thing.
Logan Riely | Getty Images
The next flashpoint came at Sonoma Raceway in June of that season. Hill led on a restart with 11 laps remaining and chose the left lane, with SVG alongside on the front row. Hill got the edge through Turn 1, but van Gisbergen had the inside line entering Turn 2. Contact followed, Hill slid wide, and van Gisbergen went on to win.
Hill kept his public comments restrained but pointed, saying he would “leave it to the keyboard warriors” and later, “I plead the fifth.”
The postrace cool-down lap was … a bit less civil. As van Gisbergen celebrated with a lap-long burnout, Hill drove by and gave him a one-finger salute. Van Gisbergen later said the gesture changed the intent of his celebration from fan service to something more pointed, saying on Corey LaJoie’s “Stacking Pennies” podcast: “This is for (Hill) now, not the fans.” From there, van Gisbergen followed Hill around the course, eventually passing him and waving as the moment became one of the rivalry’s signature visuals.
Van Gisbergen was more willing to connect the moment to COTA. Asked whether it was “fair game” after what had happened in Austin, van Gisbergen said, “One-hundred percent … ”
“ … I hate racing and thinking like that, but to me, we’ve both taken a race win off each other now,” van Gisbergen said after Sonoma.
From that moment, the rivalry became easier to label as such. COTA created the receipt, Sonoma cashed it, and this feud is still open for business.
The beef quieted down a bit last year, but the history resurfaced when their paths crossed in the Cup Series as things heated up again this summer.
Pocono Raceway added a tricky layer of frustration here as well, though not as straightforward as the incidents that came before and after it. During Stage 2 in last month’s race, SVG and Wood Brothers Racing’s Josh Berry made contact while racing off Turn 3 before Hill made it three-wide on the bottom. The stack-up sent Berry into the wall and triggered a chain reaction that collected several Chase hopefuls, including van Gisbergen, who finished 31st.
A week later at Naval Base Coronado, the connection was a bit harder to miss.
On a Lap 32 restart, Hill slid into Connor Zilisch entering the fast Turn 1, sending both cars into the fence. Van Gisbergen, who had little room to avoid the wreck, was collected in the pileup as both Trackhouse Racing entries were eliminated. Hill, Zilisch and van Gisbergen were credited with 36th through 38th.
For SVG, the damage extended beyond the race car. San Diego was a major opportunity for him specifically, needing to maximize there with a Chase spot still very much up in the air.
He left with one point, knowing exactly who to blame.
Van Gisbergen was even more direct, saying he had been taken out “two weeks in a row” by the same “spud,” grouping San Diego with the Pocono crash a week earlier.
The following week at Sonoma, van Gisbergen said it took him a couple of days to decompress and that he was “pretty pissed” about a strong opportunity gone. (Needless to say, he came out to Wine Country with a chip on his shoulder and stomped the field en route to victory.)
Still, that backdrop followed both drivers to Chicagoland.
From Hill’s side, the Lap 48 contact in the return to the 1.5-mile speedway looked obvious enough that he did not see much need to explain it. From SVG’s side, it was a racing incident caused by dirty air, a tight race car and Hill blocking his air. Over RCR’s radio, team owner Richard Childress viewed it as retribution.
The radio traffic made clear how hot the No. 33 team was. Childress called it “payback for California,” while spotter Derek Kneeland referred to van Gisbergen as “Van Guggenheimer,” adding a little mispronunciation-fueled venom to the moment in a work of linguistic art fit for museum placement.
Van Gisbergen had his own jab afterward — asked whether he would speak with Hill, he kept it short: “I’ll talk to him, but he just grunts.”
From NASCAR’s side, however, it was not clear enough to warrant a penalty.
That may be the most important piece entering EchoPark. NASCAR did not say nothing happened. Officials said they did not find enough to remove reasonable doubt and issue discipline. That leaves the feud in an uneasy middle lane: serious enough for a meeting between the sanctioning body and both drivers this weekend, not definitive enough for a deterrent penalty.
It also leaves the door open, in theory, for escalation.
And that is where Hill and van Gisbergen sit now. Two drivers with different racing backgrounds, different explanations of the same incident(s) and enough shared history that the next piece of contact cannot be judged on its own in a vacuum.
The penalty report closed Chicagoland’s official review.
It’s a split-squad type of weekend as the NASCAR Cup Series and NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series visit EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta for the second time in 2026. Meanwhile, the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series heads to the Northeast for a trip to Lime Rock Park for the second year in a row. See qualifying orders for all three series.
JOLIET, Ill. — Alex Bowman knows he didn’t put any extra effort into Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Chicagoland Speedway. His preparation was the same as it is every week, he said, as was the prep of the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team.
But for the first time since May, that work paid off with a top-five finish in Sunday’s eero 400, a much-needed boost for a driver and team that have heard all the noise in the midst of a season in which Bowman and Co. sit 29th in the points standings with just seven races remaining before The Chase.
“Everybody here sees all the bull-[expletive], just like I do,” Bowman said. “They all care a lot and work really hard, and how this car runs means a lot to a lot of people. So having those people have a good week — a good start to their week at least and not be starting the week mad about the weekend — is good. Hopefully, we can keep it up.”
The last time NASCAR raced at Chicagoland in 2019, Bowman was celebrating in Victory Lane. Sunday’s performance may not have been a literal win, but it checked several boxes, including a top-15 qualifying effort, stage points earned and a second straight top-10 finish.
“We unloaded happier with the car than we have lately and felt like sim was better than it has been for us lately, and just every little part and piece was a little bit better,” Bowman said. “And nothing went wrong throughout the course of the race, even though we fired off way too tight, not where we needed to be. But yeah, I feel like we put together a solid day and keep digging at it.”
He also continued his underdog run in the second edition of the In-Season Challenge, which pays $1 million to the tournament winner following the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Bowman advanced as the bottommost No. 32 seed into the quarterfinal Round of 8 after upsets against No. 1 Tyler Reddick at Sonoma Raceway and No. 16 seed Austin Cindric on Sunday at Chicagoland. He’ll face No. 25 Todd Gilliland next as the series shifts to EchoPark Speedway on Sunday (7 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Had a whole lot of personality with me versus Cindric on that one,” Bowman joked. “But yeah, it definitely pays a lot of money, so you’ve gotta pay attention to it. But at the same time — I feel like it’s my answer to every single question that I get asked — but we’re just super focused on trying to turn things around and get pointed back in the right direction on this team. That means a lot more than the in-season deal for us.”
Jonathan Bachman | Getty Images
To finally have positive momentum following the No. 48 team is a welcome change — not just for those directly working on that car — but also for the whole of Hendrick Motorsports. Bowman missed four races this spring after a bout with vertigo and has just seven top-20 finishes in 15 starts in what is a contract year for him.
Chad Knaus, Hendrick Motorsports’ vice president of competition and a seven-time Cup Series champion crew chief, has seen the work put into turning the No. 48 team’s results around, making Sunday’s finish more rewarding.
“That team has been rebuilding and growing and getting stronger and tougher all year long,” Knaus told NASCAR.com. “And it’s good to see Alex comfortable enough in the car that he can get out there and race and put the car in situations that are compromising (and) be able to pull it off. So I’m really proud of those guys. They’ve needed a little bit of momentum, and the last couple weeks they’ve been getting some, so it’s nice to see.”
At the core of the No. 48 team’s success is Bowman and crew chief Blake Harris. The duo has been paired together since 2023, and they’ve collected one win, claiming the 2024 Chicago Street Race victory. Their chemistry remains strong, bolstered through adversity rather than weakened by it, Harris told NASCAR.com.
“I think what people don’t see behind the scenes is we’re always building this team,” Harris said. “And I’m always good with this guy (Bowman). Like, guys talk about radio chatter or whatever, but like I hang out with this guy in my free time, right? So he and I, our team, we’ll go into next week with the same prep as if something bad happened to be finished 36th this week, right? It doesn’t change for us. That’s kind of what the Cup Series is, though, right? The day you think you’ve got it figured out, you come back the next week and get your teeth kicked in, and you just can’t afford to ever lay down.
“Everybody’s been working hard, been working no different than if we’d have been running top five every week. Just, it feels like once the metric flips and you get some good finishes and get those later qualifying spots, pit stalls come with that. The whole day just becomes a little bit easier. That’s kind of why I say momentum is not a fake thing in the Cup Series. It just helps your odds of pushing forward when you have things go right.”
