Speedway Motorsports Incorporated can change the name of the race track to EchoPark Speedway all they want, but it will always been known as Atlanta to the drivers, the teams, and the fans.
The 1.54-mile superspeedway situated right outside of Georgia’s capital isn’t easy to crack like a peanut. This high-speed, high-banked oval can be as sweet as a peach to you or nastier than the peach’s pit.
Just as quickly as it can make you a hero by shooting you into the lead, it can chew you up and spit your car back into the hungry pack.
The stars of the NASCAR Cup Series look ahead to a grueling 400-mile race where they’ll race inches apart from one another with their right foot mashed through the floorboard.
On top of it all, it’s the first race of the five-week In-Season Tournament, and there’s a million dollars on the line for the victor.
The best way to cash that check? Going to victory lane under the lights in Hotlanta, for starters.
Last Week in Pocono…
While his teammate Denny Hamlin returned from his brief sabbatical with the wind in his sails, Chase Briscoe took control of the Great American Getaway 400 at Pocono after a fortunate late caution for a Shane van Gisbergen spin.
In the end, the caution failed to save the 19 team enough fuel to make it to the end, so Briscoe walked a tightrope for the final 40 laps of saving fuel while maintaining his advantage over Hamlin to score his first victory for Joe Gibbs Racing.
This Week in NASCAR
In the ongoing courtroom drama developing between the France Family and the pair of 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports, the team’s motion to dismiss NASCAR’s countersuit against the teams got denied by Judge Kenneth Bell, meaning the countersuit will proceed alongside the main antitrust case.
Here is the teams’ attorney Jeffrey Kessler’s reaction to the countersuit being allowed to move forward:
NASCAR received more legal heat this week, this time from the NTT IndyCar Series. For the antitrust suit, NASCAR attempted to depose IndyCar CEO Doug Boles, and IndyCar filed a motion to block it on the grounds that the deposition would be “burdensome and unnecessary”.
The France Family lost their attempt to reap all the financials from the non-suing race teams that signed the charter agreement as the teams put up a successful challenge.
Former Spire Motorsports partner TJ Puchyr purchased Rick Ware Racing this week and came out swinging after the purchase, saying that the charters actually have a value of $75 million and asserting that Jimmie Johnson and Legacy Motor Club are mistaken in their charter lawsuit against RWR.
For now, it appears Puchyr will be keeping Rick Ware on as a partner and keeping Ware’s son Cody in the No. 51 car until further notice. Puchyr plans to field three full-time teams in the future.
Jey and I dropped the newest edition of our NASCAR Cup Series power rankings where we take the drivers that we think are the cream of the crop right now and rank them.
A number of road-course aces trickled into this weekend’s inaugural Truck Series stop at Lime Rock Park, the short road course located in Lakeland, Connecticut. Chief among those ringers are Australian Supercars superstar Cam Waters in a ThorSport truck and multi-time IMSA champion Jordan Taylor racing with Spire.
Corey Heim took the pole at Lime Rock and never really relinquished on his way to the 16th victory of his Craftsman Truck Series career, surviving a late-race restart where rival Layne Riggs joined him on the front row before driving off the track.
The win launches Heim past three-time Truck Series champion Matt Crafton on the all-time wins list, and it represents Heim’s fifth victory of 2025.
As for the Xfinity Series, their Friday night special kept getting stifled by lightning storms. In spite of that, Big Machine Racing rookie Nick Sanchez weathered the conditions on the track and in the skies to collect his first career Xfinity Series victory.
Defending Cup Series champion and last year’s fall Atlanta winner Joey Logano claimed the pole for today’s Quaker State 400. For the full lineup, here’s a link.
The Race
Today’s Quaker State 400 will be broadcast live by TNT with Adam Alexander, Steve Letarte, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the booth.
The 400 in the race billing stands for the amount of miles in the event, and to get 400 miles in, these drivers will have to endure through 260 laps of nonstop mayhem split into three stages beginning on the following laps: 60-160-260.
As for the typical Atlanta summer race, it looks something like this: 9 cautions for 54 caution laps, 33 lead changes, and an average duration of 3 hours and 15 minutes.
Of the seven races that have been run on this layout, the last two races remain the only examples of NASCAR overtime at this circuit while the final caution tends to fly somewhere around 12 laps to go, or lap 249.
Writer’s Pick
Last week’s writer’s pick was Denny Hamlin, a driver that piloted his dominant car to a second-place result. His Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota could not overcome teammate Chase Briscoe in the final stint, coming up short.
I will stick with Toyota this week, but instead of Hamlin, I’m hitching my wagon to the back of the No. 23 Leidos Camry piloted by none other than Bubba Wallace.
While his 24th-place starting spot and prior results don’t leave much room for optimism, Wallace displays traits of a special superspeedway racer every time he makes a start at these tracks, and I expect this evening to be no different.
One could look purely at Wallace’s results and conclude that he won’t be much of a threat, but if you’ve watched the races at this track, the 23 car ends up at the front at some point in the race more often than not.
With 23XI as a company needing a win to get the collective ship pointed in the right direction, I suspect the driver behind the wheel of their flagship machine will come through for a highly-anticipated victory to kick off a new chapter in NASCAR’s history in grand fashion: winning the first In-Season Tournament race.
(Top Photo Credit: David Yeazell/USA Today Sports)
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