“Smoke” enters the Chase with a clear mind and nothing to lose, his final season ultimately being a success as long as he finishes it. The last time Stewart made the Chase with nothing to lose was 2011 when he said outright “We don’t deserve to be in the Chase.” Exactly three months after saying that, it was the Monday after winning his third Sprint Cup championship.
As we head to Chicagoland, you have to wonder if there are paybacks in the future. Will Newman wreck Stewart? Will Cole Custer get revenge on John Hunter Nemechek for the injustice he was victim to at Canadian Motorsports Park?
McMurray hasn’t had a lot of raw firepower- just one top five and nine top 10s are the worst in the Chase save for Chris Buescher. What he has had, however, has been consistency. Only five times has McMurray finished outside of the top 20, he has 19 lead lap finishes out of 26 starts, and his lone DNF was in a multi-car wreck at Daytona.
After qualifying 7th and not showing much speed in the weekend’s lone practice session, Kyle Busch was unstoppable after taking the lead during the first caution and won the 36th annual Virginia529 College Savings 250 at Richmond International Raceway.
Chris Buescher, the first full-time Sprint Cup driver for Texas since Bobby Labonte stopped racing full time in 2013, enters Richmond on the Chase bubble, with an 11 point cushion. Buescher’s surprise win at a rain-shortened Pocono event last month was the first win for a Texan since Bobby’s last win, the 2003 season finale at Homestead-Miami.
Denny Hamlin captured the pole for the 2016 Federated Auto Parts 400 after turning a lap of 122.344 mph. Hamlin, who was born in nearby Chesterfield, Virginia, took risks by going out first in the final two rounds and ended up beating the more conservative teams that waited until the last few minutes.
It's time to cycle through the transmission for another edition of Four Gears. This week, our resident NASCAR journalists were asked if other drivers should be as up front as Kevin Harvick was about his pit crew to affect change. They also considered whether John Hunter Nemechek deserves all the flak he's gotten for his last lap move at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park and if he could've handled his last turn differently.
Ty Dillon was the fastest in the only XFINITY Series practice of the weekend at Richmond International Raceway (RIR), after turning a lap at 122.144 mph.
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It's time to cycle through the transmission for another edition of Four Gears. This week, our resident NASCAR analysts rate the three races that used the lower downforce package and give their takeaways from it. We also consider what three first-time winners this past weekend says about the level of talent with the young guns in the Truck, XFINITY and Cup Series as well as rate the quality of racing in the XFINITY Series over the last five races given the mix of tracks in those five races
Hailie Deegan (No. 16 5.11 Tactical Chevrolet) stormed past race-long leader Trevor Huddleston (No. 50 High Point Racing / Racecar Factory Ford) on the last lap following an overtime restart to take her first win of the 2026 ARCA Menards Series West
Once the dust settled in 1926, Cyrus Avery wrote a polite thank-you letter to the federal highway official who had helped end a fight that dragged on for months.
The 24-year-old Riggs from Bahama, North Carolina, rallied from a slow pit service, only to scrub the wall, cut a right-front tire, plummet to 19th in the final running order and face a 37-point deficit following the second Chase event of the 2026 Truck season.
