The site of Sunday's Camping World RV Sales 301 is the one-mile flat track in Loudon, New Hampshire. It is the eighth and final stop during the regular season at a track which also hosts a race in this year's Chase - the two tracks not in the regular season are the first and last races in this year's chase - Chicago and Homestead.
After celebrating the Fourth of July weekend on the high banks of Daytona International Speedway, the three national NASCAR series head to short, flat tracks in separate parts of the country this weekend. New Hampshire Motor Speedway will host the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and NASCAR Nationwide Series, while the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series heads to Iowa for a standalone weekend of their own.
At Daytona, I sat and watched Cup qualifying for a couple hours. I watched each car get up to speed, run their two laps and then pull to the apron while the next car exited pit road. It's a procedure repeated 43 times every weekend and it is, for lack of a better term, boring.
This argument has been in the back of our minds for a few years now and always seems to get reignited every time we show up to Daytona or Talladega and rightly so. Fans and media alike debate which style of plate racing is better and opinions vary greatly
Kenseth’s gamble to take no tires during pits stops on the final caution paid off handsomely, as he collected his fourth win of the year with a win at Kentucky. He is now fifth in the Sprint Cup point standings, 82 behind Jimmie Johnson.
This past weekend at Kentucky, crew chief Jason Ratcliff made the call to take two tires which put Matt Kenseth out front for a late race restart. Their call put Jimmie Johnson who had dominated the race up to that point in a vulnerable position starting on the inside which ended with him spinning out and losing all of his track position.
To the Bluegrass State we go this week for just the 3rd time in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series history. Kentucky was the race which took away one of the two races at Atlanta Motor Speedway back in 2011.
After a weekend of turning left and right at the road courses at Sonoma and Road America, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and NASCAR Nationwide Series, joined by their NASCAR Camping World Truck Series counterparts, head back east to the 1.5 mile Kentucky Speedway for the second tripleheader of the season. This time around all three races will be under the lights of this oval that is a relative newcomer to the schedule, having only hosted all three series for the past two years.
Sprint Cup Series - Quaker State 400
AJ Allmendinger's story is an amazing one; something Hollywood movies are made of and I firmly believe that there is so much more to this impressive resurgence that has yet to come to fruition.
