MOORESVILLE, N.C. (June 23, 2026) – It was a street fight last Sunday. Despite being on an active United States military base with a significant law enforcement presence, the NASCAR Cup Series race at Qualcomm Circuit on Naval Base Coronado featured rooting, gouging and departures from the standards of polite society.

There were mangled fenders, bent walls and bruised feelings after the 75-lap race around the 3.4-mile, 16-turn temporary street circuit in San Diego. Spinning cars and seven caution periods consuming 11 laps in the 3-hour and 37-minute affair were the result of conduct more suited to the stables than the drawing room.

Certainly when the Cup Series heads a little more than 530 miles north to Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway for this Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350k, decorum and civility will return. After all, it’s Wine Country, where table settings come with fine linens, refined soil grows the finest grapes, sophistication fills wine glasses, and good taste is an HOA requirement. Cup Series drivers will surely read the room, right?

If history is any indication, no. Fendered fisticuffs will continue unabated, as volume again supersedes persuasion. They are the bull in the proverbial china shop.

“NASCAR is a contact sport on road courses,” said Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Super.com Chevrolet for Rick Ware Racing. “We go into it with a have-at-it mentality, to where if there’s a racing surface that you can plant four tires on, you do it. Beating and banging is expected.”

Since the debut of the NextGen car in 2022, there have been an average of 6.5 cautions per race at Sonoma. Most stemmed from spins, stalled cars and drivers getting knocked into barriers. The “Big One” of superspeedway-style crashes doesn’t typically happen. A driver’s own mistake, and other drivers’ lack of patience with their counterparts, are the typical contributing factors.

“Every touch of the gas pedal has consequences that unfold as the race goes on,” Ware said. “You’re managing every decision.”

Ware and his Cup Series brethren are at least in road-course mode after racing at San Diego. Sonoma marks the fourth and final road-course race on the 2026 schedule. The other 32 races on the Cup Series calendar are all on ovals.

“Road racing is where I did a lot of my growing up and learning how to race,” Ware said. “There was a lot of back and forth between stock cars and GT cars and sports cars over the years as I found my place in NASCAR. So I’m always, ‘The more the merrier,’ when it comes to road racing.”

Ware won the 2019-2020 LMP2 championship in the Asian Le Mans Series with co-driver Gustas Grinbergas, and in a prelude to that title, Ware was the 2014 Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America Rookie of the Year. In January 2024 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway, Ware piloted a Ligier JS P320 to a podium finish in the IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge LMP3 class. He has also competed in Whelen Mazda MX-5 Cup and the NTT IndyCar Series.

Even with a wealth of road-racing experience, Ware’s time on Sonoma’s 1.99-mile, 10-turn layout is limited. He has just five starts at the track, and his drive in last year’s Toyota/Save Mart 350k was his first since 2022.

“Sonoma has a lot of elevation changes and it presents some pretty good passing opportunities,” Ware said. “The layout makes for some really aggressive, tight racing. Anytime you put a stock car on a road course with that kind of elevation, it creates some really good racing. It’s one of the coolest road courses we go to, for sure.”

That Ware was turning left and right a few days prior in San Diego will help his cause in Sonoma.

“Having back-to-back road-course weekends – the steering feel, the braking feel, the power input – it’s all still relevant,” Ware said. “Track conditions between San Diego and Sonoma will obviously be very different, but when you only have a handful of road-course races a year, it’s hard to get into a rhythm. But at least with San Diego, we’re in a bit of a flow. It was a good refresher before tackling Sonoma.”

Ware starts tackling Sonoma at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT on Saturday during practice before qualifying at 12:10 p.m. PDT/3:10 p.m. EDT. TruTV and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide live coverage of both. The Toyota/Save Mart 350k goes live at 12:30 p.m. PDT/3:30 p.m. EDT with flag-to-flag coverage delivered by TNT and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

About Rick Ware Racing:

Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age 6 when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver’s seat and into full-time team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with his wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track, FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) and zMAX CARS Tour.

SONOMA

Sunday, June 28– NASCAR Cup Series, 3:30 p.m. ET (TNT)

After competing on an active military base for the first time, the NASCAR Cup Series will return to a more traditional road course this weekend as Sonoma Raceway hosts its annual event on Sunday. It also marks the start of the five-week In-Season Challenge, where drivers compete against each other in a bracket style format with the winner advancing.

BLANEY CONTINUES STREAK

Ryan Blaney ran his streak of Top 10 finishes to five after a ninth-place effort on Sunday in San Diego. Blaney, who led a race-high 12 laps and won the first stage, remains the highest Ford Racing driver in the point standings as he sits third overall. He will be making his 10th NASCAR Cup Series start at Sonoma Raceway this weekend and has finished 10th or better five times. His lone road course victory came in 2018 at the inaugural Bank of America Roval 400.

SMITH HAVING CAREER YEAR

Zane Smith is in the midst of having his best NASCAR Cup Series campaign and his effort in San Diego was further proof as he was Ford’s top finisher in fourth. That marked the California native’s sixth Top-10 run of the season, which is one more than his previous single-season high of five last year. Smith, who won the 2022 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship with Front Row Motorsports, has three Cup starts at Sonoma Raceway with his best finish being 16th in 2024.

HALL OF FAME TIES

Ford has won eight times at Sonoma and the one thing all of those winners have in common is that the owners are members of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Robert Yates (Class of 2018) won this event three times (Davey Allison, 1991; Ernie Irvan, 1994; and Ricky Rudd, 2002), while Jack Roush (Class of 2019) has two victories (Mark Martin, 1997 and Carl Edwards, 2014). Bud Moore (Class of 2011) took Geoffrey Bodine to Victory Lane in 1993 while Roger Penske (Class of 2019) did the same with Rusty Wallace in 1996 and Tony Stewart (Class of 2020) with Kevin Harvick in 2017.

SITTING ON 749

The next Ford win will be its 750th all-time in NASCAR’s top series. Ned Jarrett is Ford’s win leader with 43 while Bill Elliott is second with 40. Shirtless Jimmy Florian scored the Blue Oval’s first series victory when he upset the likes of Lee Petty, Curtis Turner and Joe Weatherly at Dayton Speedway on June 25, 1950. Florian earned his nickname after getting out of his 1950 flathead Ford without a shirt. Overall, 91 drivers have won at least one series race with Ford, including notable drivers Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney, Parnelli Jones, A.J. Foyt, Richard Petty, and Dale Earnhardt.

CHRIS BUESCHER: “To go from San Diego to a place like Sonoma that has more flow, more smoothness, and more elevation change without the jumps, it will be a big relief in a lot of ways. I like road racing and the team has put fast race cars under me. Something clicks when we get there and we’re able to take the flow of that racetrack and turn it into results.”

ZANE SMITH: “I enjoy the area of Sonoma and just spending time up in Napa, but from a racetrack standpoint the elevation is certainly fun there. I honestly have enjoyed the repave with how it’s aging. It’s aging dramatically, but I feel like it’s fun right now. The differences between what we raced on in San Diego and what we’ll see at Sonoma are dramatic just because of the bumps alone.”

HARVICK WINS FIRST RACE WITH FORD

Kevin Harvick stretched his fuel over the final 40 laps in 2017 to bring home his first win with Ford and first win at Sonoma, besting teammate Clint Bowyer and fellow Ford Brad Keselowski in a 1-2-3 showing for the Blue Oval. Harvick, who was part of the Stewart-Haas Racing organization that switched to Ford prior to the 2017 season, took the lead from Brad Keselowski with 22 laps to go and won for the 36th time in his career as the race ended under yellow. Harvick, who eventually went on to win 25 races with Ford, finished his career with 60 overall triumphs before retiring after the 2023 season. He will be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in January.

EDWARDS NETS FIRST ROAD COURSE WIN

Recent NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee Carl Edwards held off Jeff Gordon on the final lap to post the first road win of his NCS career in 2014 with car owner Jack Roush. He did it thanks to a two-stop strategy and a timely caution. Edwards had just pitted on lap 70 when NASCAR threw a caution for debris one lap later. While most of the field decided to pit for new tires, Edwards and fellow Ford driver Marcos Ambrose stayed out and gained the necessary track position that put both in position to win. Ambrose took the lead from Clint Bowyer on lap 81 and brought Edwards with him, but another restart with 25 to go saw Ambrose and Edwards sharing the front row. Edwards got the jump and took the lead, which he never surrendered, although a hard-charging Gordon made it interesting on the final lap.

FORD’S NASCAR CUP SERIES WINNERS AT SONOMA

1991 – Davey Allison

1993 – Geoffrey Bodine

1994 – Ernie Irvan

1996 – Rusty Wallace

1997 – Mark Martin

2002 – Ricky Rudd

2014 – Carl Edwards

2017 – Kevin Harvick

The Ford Mustang® coupe is America’s best-selling sports car and has a global racing presence. With Mustang-based race cars competing in international sports car competition (GT3 and GT4), NASCAR, NHRA, Formula Drift, in Supercars, at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and in its own bespoke regional one-make series – Mustang Cup and Mustang Challenge – the platform has an unprecedented global reach. This weekend, 44 Mustang race cars are scheduled to compete across all active disciplines. Learn more about Mustang at www.FordRacing.com.

Looking for accommodation red deer alberta, Where to stay in red deer for silver rush and brooks riders Days of 43 outlaws horses, at the happy trail? When you stay close to the action at the renowned Peavey Mart Centrium, you eliminate the hassle of travel, making it more fun and less stressful to get to your event on time and to make the most of every minute.

It’s a good tip to check what’s on in the city when planning your trip before arranging your accommodation. Find out which events in Red Deer are hottest this season and see what concerts, art shows, rodeos, and community events lineup with your next trip! That can help you choose the best dates to travel and book your stay before rates increase.

Accommodations near the theatre are diverse. Which hotels are best for business travel or family travel? If you are visiting with your friends for the weekend event, taking a hotel walkable or close driving distance from centrium will ease the transportation. Before you book, check out the hottest events in Red Deer this season. Be aware of busy weekends when hotels fill up quickly. When traveling to major festivals or sporting occasions, it is even more critical to book in advance, as accommodation in the vicinity can be snapped up for weeks. When you read guest reviews and compare amenities, you can better determine if a property meets your budget and expectations. A few hotels also offer complimentary parking, gyms, or pet-friendly stays, adding more value to your visit. As you finalize your itinerary, Check out the top events in Red Deer this season to stay informed about popular attractions and entertainment opportunities beyond your primary event.

In addition to the venue itself, Red Deer’s restaurants, shopping centres, parks, and cultural establishments are also a good draw that you can check out on your jaunt. Having a hotel in close proximity also allows you to take advantage of the city before or after your event, without the inconvenience of a long commute. Whether you’re going to see a single show or enjoying a staycation, having the right location can make a big difference in your overall experience.

The best hotel can make a simple trip feel like a vacation. Comfortable rooms, proximity to the Peavey Mart Centrium, and a bit of forethought go a long way toward helping you get through your visit with a little less fuss. By purchasing tickets in advance, researching amenities, and staying updated on local events, you can really maximize your time in Red Deer. Remember to browse top shows in Red Deer this year while you are making the arrangements to travel, and be sure to see all that the city offers you.