In the heart of the misty Appalachian Mountains is a short track like no other on the NASCAR circuit.
Martinsville Speedway is the only track in the sport to host a race in every single season of NASCAR Cup Series competition, dating back to the first event in 1949 won by eventual champion Red Byron.
The tight .522mi bullring sits in rural southwestern Virginia, and NASCAR’s oldest track becomes even more terrifying when you have to traverse the aging track surface perfectly for 500 laps to have a chance to win.
Two 800ft straightaways careen the field towards the sharp, unforgiving corners. There exists no room for error on the flat 11° turns that tend to only have room for one car on the bottom, making restarts even more nerve-racking than they already are.
Add on top of this the creeping feeling of a year’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears being tossed into the barriers off the nose of another car. Dreams dashed.
More than anything, Martinsville Speedway is the perfect host for a gritty, white-knuckle battle leading to the title fight in the desert next week. Contact might as well be a necessity when time is running short.
Two of the eight Playoff drivers locked themselves into the Championship Round with Kyle Larson holding off a hard-charging Christopher Bell in Las Vegas before Bell avenged the loss with a win of his own in Miami.
That leaves just two spots to be claimed by the remaining six drivers.
William Byron has owned 2023, winning a series-high six races en route to a share of the Number 1 seed in the Playoffs; the #24 team hasn’t laid over a bit in the postseason. A win at Texas and a number of top-5s put him 33 points above the cutline coming into Sunday, a track he won at in 2022.
Team Penske star Ryan Blaney made his fifth trip to the Round of 8 this season behind a solid regular season built off a career-defining victory at the World 600 in May. the #12 car notched another victory at Talladega just three weeks ago.
An overturned penalty after Vegas saved Blaney’s season, and a runner-up at Homestead sits him 10 points above 23XI phenom Tyler Reddick.
Reddick’s up-and-down year started to swing up going into the Playoffs, culminating in an Overtime win at Kansas Speedway. Another strong effort at the Roval secured his spot in the Round of 8 where the #45 bunch logged a 3rd-place result at Homestead. Reddick needs to have another Roval-type performance to advance.
The 2017 NASCAR Cup Series champion Martin Truex Jr. has had the weirdest postseason in recent memory.
A three-win campaign in the regular season gave Truex another regular season title and a ton of Playoff Points that have carried the #19 team through to the Round of 8. A 9th at Vegas earned him his first top-10 in two months, but it was a misnomer going into Homestead where his engine expired with 25 laps to go.
Sitting 17 points out of a championship berth, Truex and the Auto Owners crew need to execute flawlessly, and unfortunately, the same can be said for his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, Denny Hamlin.
After boldly proclaiming 2023 was to be his year, the Chesapeake native’s title hopes hit a wall last week. A broken part sent Hamlin into the SAFER barriers with nearly 30 to go, losing critical points in the process.
With two JGR Toyotas duking it out for a Playoff spot, the organization is in an unenviable decision, but the hope is that both manage to advance to Phoenix, as unlikely as that may be. An even bigger longshot is RFK’s pilot of the #17 Ford Mustang, Prosper, TX’s Chris Buescher.
Buescher is in the midst of a career year, snagging three victories in five races to end the regular season. Those wins have been immensely valuable through the changing tides of the Playoffs, landing him in the Round of 8 for the first time in his Cup career.
The 2015 Xfinity Series champ’s luck appears to have run out as he sits 43 points below the cutline, and Martinsville isn’t the greatest place to need a win. This old paperclip circuit has taken many prisoners in its storied past, and Buescher wants to make sure he’s free for another week.
This year’s Round of 8 holds little veteran talent with only Hamlin and Truex running every race at the track over the last 10 seasons; Hamlin leads the remaining contenders with an impressive 7.4 average finish in the fall Martinsville event as well as tying Truex for the most stage points earned.
Byron claimed victory in 2022 under the lights, but his fall finishes have left much to be desired. Byron boasts two finishes worse than 35th, and it’s not a stretch to think he could be bounced if he faces adversity today.
The driver in the best position to advance on points is none other than Ryan Blaney. The #12 car has earned a stellar 44 stage points in this event throughout his career, and Blaney’s lowest finish at the Virginia short track has been 20th in his first year in the Penske program.
Blaney knows how to get around the track in a hurry, which cannot be said about Reddick and Buescher. Neither driver has earned stage points at the track in the October race, and both guys sit with an average finish over 20th in their careers.
Lucky for them, Reddick and Buescher can lean on their car owners for data and setups, and there aren’t two better drivers in the garage at Martinsville than Hamlin and RFK owner-driver Brad Keselowski.
Drivers I Trust: Hamlin, Truex, Blaney, Logano
Drivers I Don’t Trust: Reddick, Buescher, Elliott, Chastain
Enough about the athletes, let’s talk about what’s going on in the sky.
The forecast for today’s race shows mostly sunny weather and a high of 82°F and a low of 56°F. The nice weather likely won’t be met with moisture as The Weather Channel predicts a miniscule 3% chance of rain.
Speaking historically, Martinsville sees very little rain this time of year, only seeing a downpour in 2015 and 2017, so an uninterrupted race could be in store. Luckily NASCAR has rain tires! I guess.
The average high this time of year is 69°F with a low of 63°F, so the warmer weather might make it even more challenging for the field to find grip on a slick surface.
Let’s resume our tour through the stat book by visiting the green flag passes over the years for this event.
Starting off with average green-flag passes per race, the Cup Series sees 1,642 passes during a late-season Martinsville trip, but this number is misleading.
Three of the last five events at the track featured less than 1300 passes with the nadir of the entire graph coming last season with a jaw-dropping 674 green-flag overtakes.
NASCAR’s NextGen car provides many challenges at short tracks, mostly related to dirty air, and as silly as it may sound, that does still affect these heavy stock cars at their smallest circuit.
Luckily, the downforce reductions levied at the beginning of the season by the sanctioning body have seemed to assuage the passing problem as the spring race featured the most green-flag passes there since 2014, though there is no guarantee of seeing a similar performance on Sunday.
This event tends to run for about 3.5hrs, which means the fans at home should buckle up and have preparations made for a very long, arduous journey with the Cup Series field this afternoon.
As is the nature of the tight confines of Martinsville Speedway, the yellow flag makes frequent guest appearances, being featured 12 times for 82 laps on average.
If yesterday’s Xfinity race was any indication of what we might see on Sunday, the audience will be in for some of the worst driving they’ve ever seen as the drivers approach crunch time.
The average time of the final caution is lap 460 with just two periods of NASCAR Overtime in the past decade, and since the stages and hard Goodyear tires exist, there’s simply no point in talking about fuel strategy.
Conclusion
Tomorrow’s race should be better than last year’s, at least in terms of quality racing. Obviously, last season’s race failed to produce, but it was bailed out by the craziest move in NASCAR history.
Now that the maneuver is outlawed, this race cannot rest on someone riding the wall to save it; the racing must produce for fans to have any encouragement to make it out to a short track next season.
The Fords look strong today, even if they didn’t lock out the front row like Truex and teammate Ty Gibbs did in their Toyotas on Saturday.
If I had to make a prediction, I believe a non-playoff driver will win tomorrow’s race, meaning it’ll come down to who makes up the most points in the stages. As long as Blaney keeps up with Hamlin and Truex, the 29-year-old should be competing for his first title alongside Larson, Bell, and (probably) William Byron.
Another driver to keep an eye on tomorrow is AJ Allmendinger. The veteran Kaulig driver has scored several great finishes at the Paperclip, and after his strong run at Miami last week, he’s primed to carry that momentum into today’s race.
As for this writer, my focus is on Kevin Harvick, making his penultimate start in the Cup Series. I will be attending his final race in Phoenix next weekend, and with a solid starting spot tomorrow at a track that has been the scene of a lot of controversy for him, it would be a poetic way for him to leave the driver’s seat.
(Top photo credit: Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
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