NASCAR is on hiatus until the weekend of August 11.
It’s the Olympic break, something that obviously only comes around once every four years and happens as a result of NASCAR sharing the same broadcast partner (NBC Sports) as the global games, leaving nowhere for races to air.
But this is also a welcome break for an industry that hasn’t been off the road since the start of the season the first weekend of February. This is a sport that was already feeling severe burnout when the last season ended right before Thanksgiving.
It’s a grind.
For those who enjoy and otherwise observe the sport, this is a reset to evaluate the state of play. There are four races left until the start of the Cup Series playoffs and 10 races after that to crown the champion.
And 22 races through the 2024 season, it doesn’t look too much differently than 2023 …
Déjà vu?
When last season ended, Ryan Blaney emerged victorious in the championship race at Phoenix Raceway over Kyle Larson, William Byron and Christopher Bell. The week before, the first to miss the cut was Denny Hamlin as he still seeks a career defining first championship.
Entering the stretch run this summer, look at the top-five in the playoff points category. It’s the same cast of characters. NASCAR’s main characters, if you will.
What does this mean?
Maybe nothing, especially with this format, because 2023 regular season champion Martin Truex looked earmarked for the championship race until he suffered the worst 10-race stretch imaginable even with the benefit of advancing repeatedly on the merit of his regular season success.
Yet, it’s a safe bet that these Fast Five or whatever you want to call them will be well represented in the Round of Eight and Final Four.
William Byron is mimicking what he did last year, winning three races early and undergoing a summer slump, and this is where the No. 24 started to build momentum in both cases, what happened on Sunday at Indianapolis notwithstanding.
Blaney actually looks better than he did at this point last year, with Ford Performance finding speed on the whole much sooner than in 2023.
But Larson and Hamlin? This is where both of these teams are every year over the past three years of the NextGen era and they will once again be judged based on what happens in October and November.
Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman are wild cards of sort, having both missed the playoffs last year after missing races, but both have won a race and shown flashes of consistency, especially Elliott, who is second in the championship standings.
Those 15, 10 and 8 playoff points on down throughout the top-10 of the regular season standings could prove vital over the autumn months as well, given how many times a driver has been eliminated by no more than five championship points.
This is to say nothing of the race to make the playoffs.
Ty Gibbs +42
Chris Buescher +17
Ross Chastain +7
—
Bubba Wallace -7
That is four drivers racing for the final three provisional playoff spots … unless it’s not.
The first race back from the break, at Richmond, will utilize two different tire compounds for the first time in a points paying event, and it could produce a surprise winner. Then, there’s Daytona, which has a reputation that needs no explanation.
Any of the drivers currently outside of a punchers chance of pointing their way in could win their way into the Round of 16: Chase Briscoe, Josh Berry, Noah Gragson, Ryan Preece, Kyle Busch, Austin Dillon, Michael McDowell, Todd Gilliland, Carson Hocevar, Corey Lajoie, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Erik Jones, John Hunter Nemechek or Daniel Hemric
One race would overcompensate for every bad thing that happened and it would also overcompensate for every good thing that happened to the worst in points amongst two of Gibbs, Buescher, Chastain and Wallace because a surprise winner would move the cutline up by one.
That’s the very real drama that remains at stake once the sport returns from this hiatus.
Can Rowdy win?
Did you know that Kyle Busch is the all-time leader with consecutive Cup Series seasons with at least a single win?
It’s 19 and here’s the full rankings if you’re curious to see it.
There are a lot of reasons for Busch to want to win of these next four races, but even if he can’t and misses the playoffs, he is likely just as motivated at to at least one of the next 14.
Even if it doesn’t count towards a championship run. He said it himself during the weekend in Chicago.
“I would say getting to 20 and keeping that streak going is more important to me than winning and making the playoffs,” Busch said. “Yeah.”
Why?
“We would look like Tony Stewart from 2011, when he didn’t want to be there and didn’t deserve to be there, and then went on the streak and won five. I’d love to say we can get on that but time will tell.”
It’s been an especially two month plus stretch.
His crash on Sunday in the Brickyard 400 produced his seventh finish of 25th or worse in his last nine races he has five DNFs in his past seven races, narrowly avoiding a sixth by limping to the finish at the Brickyard.
Unchartered territory
Not that the actual racing product has been a distraction from the process but there is nothing to divert attention from NASCAR and the Cup Series owners for the next three weeks in their efforts to reach a new revenue sharing and charter agreement.
Simplified: The teams wants a larger slice of league broadcast and new revenue to become less reliant on sponsorship revenue and greater governance. They want their costs break even covered to show up to put on the show for NASCAR. The teams also want charters, its franchise model, to be made permanent.
The league has been reluctant to grant charter permanence, and while it is open to providing teams a greater percentage of revenue, the exact amount has been a sticking point, as is several other bullet points. It at one point was willing to provide charter holders a greater amount of revenue if NASCAR itself was also permitted to own a team.
If the two sides do not reach an agreement by the Daytona 500 in February, it would completely unravel the foundation of the sport. Teams would be free to race elsewhere, or even start its own racing league, with the Cup Series then being comprised of teams and drivers not usually affiliated with the Cup Series.
The teams have also hired the top sports antitrust lawyer in the country back in February, the one who brokered the historic NCAA NIL deal, to help navigate this process.
The expectation has always been that the two sides will come to an agreement. The team will be hard pressed to find financial viability away from the structure and branding established over the past near century by NASCAR. At the same time, NASCAR needs its most popular drivers and teams to deliver its best show and meet its broadcast rights expectations.
Again, a deal doesn’t have to be reached until February but every other deadline over the past two years has come and gone without resolution. NASCAR has attempted to negotiate individually with smaller teams in a divide and conquer approach but that hasn’t produced results either. The teams appear generally unified in what it is seeking from NASCAR.
Teams called the most recent offer from NASCAR last month ‘the worst offer yet’ and just sent a counterproposal last week.
Where things stand right now was best articulated by 23XI Racing co-owner Denny Hamlin over the weekend at Indianapolis.
“It’s been reported that we sent something back and that’s true,” Hamlin said. “I think now we just have to wait to see how far apart or how much closer we are.”
And if they never get back together on a deal, no matter how unlikely that outcome is, just understand that’s the end of the NASCAR Cup Series as it has looked for decades.
Silly season
Another reason a deal between the teams and NASCAR needs to get done, is because it’s also holding up the free agency and silly season market.
Stewart-Haas Racing is shutting down at the end of the year and selling three of its four charters, including one that is for sure going to Front Row Motorsports.
But the other two are being held up by the negotiation process because while Hamlin expects he and Michael Jordan to buy one, all understanding is that a deal is being held up contingent on a new deal with NASCAR.
It has to be really challenging to agree on the value of a charter when NASCAR and the teams have yet to agree on how revenue is allotted to those who hold one.
If a deal is reached, Riley Herbst is likely headed to a third 23XI car to pair with Wallace and Reddick.
Trackhouse Racing is expected to acquire a third charter from SHR as well but still has to chart a course of direction with either Zane Smith, currently leased out to Spire Motorsports, or Shane van Gisbergen, both under contract.
Smith will not have a home at Spire next year as it hired Michael McDowell earlier in the summer. With that said, Smith or SVG could be loaned out to Kaulig Racing not unlike the agreement the two teams have right now with Australian Supercars champion turned NASCAR winner.
Front Row Motorsports has also expressed an interest in talking to Smith, who won a Truck Series championship with the team in 2022, if the musical chairs send each other their respective direction.
Speaking of Kaulig, both of those cars remain open-ended questions for next season and it all comes down to sponsorship dollars for both incumbent driver Daniel Hemric and longtime driver AJ Allmendinger, plus the relationship with Trackhouse.
Recently cut from their current rides, Ryan Preece (SHR) and Harrison Burton (Wood Brothers) have a degree of funding but will need to evaluate if their best path forward is in winning Xfinity Series cars or a lesser-regarded Cup Series team.
But again, much of this is also dependent on NASCAR and the teams reaching a new deal.
International appeal
When NASCAR called a press conference earlier in the month for Daniel Suarez and Chad Seigler, NASCAR’s chief international officer, it made everyone in the media corps send a flurry of texts wondering if this meant the league finalized a deal to race in Mexico City.
No, it was just Suarez competing in NASCAR’s Brazil Sprint Race Series, in a one-off at Circuit Interlagos in Sao Paulo, Brazil later this month.
“We’re still working on the 2025 schedule,” Seigler said. “If you talk to anyone in the industry, there’s kind of what I feel like is a universal understanding that we need to start expanding outside of the U.S.”
But NASCAR is certainly still expected to race internationally, somewhere next season with an expectation that it’s either Montreal, Mexico City or maybe both.
“I don’t think they’re necessarily weighing one over the other (Mexico or Canada),” Seigler said. “The logical place for you to go initially is North America. Then that sets you up to start to explore opportunities outside of North America.
“Our (international) philosophy is that we want to go into a region or a market, we want to set up a series in that market where we can create local stars, local heroes, local talent, not just from the driver side, but we want to make sure when they think about that pathway, that there’s potential for a mechanic or a crew chief or an engineer,” Seigler said.
NASCAR hosted interested parties from seven different countries at the Daytona 500 this year.
NASCAR had hoped to have the 2025 schedule out by now, but just like this time last year, it was held up by the international component. A deal was not reached to bring Cup north of the border to
Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on the weekend that eventually went to NASCAR owned Iowa Speedway, which is expected back in 2025 too.
The 2025 schedule is expected to have an additional new wrinkle in the form of moving the preseason Clash to Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston Salem, North Carolina, a football stadium that hosted NASCAR’s first ever pavement race in 1958.
Fixing the short tracks
This remains a three-year work in progress, work that will continue in the first event back from the summer break at Richmond, as NASCAR’s latest experiment to improve its woeful short track product at the highest level will come in the form of a dual tire compound race.
NASCAR has made numerous aerodynamic changes, attempted to develop a unorthodox lift splitter to punish the leader in clean air, but will not budge on calls from racers to increase horsepower to improve driver input and create speed disparity.
But NASCAR unexpectedly backed into one of the most memorable short track races ever in March at Bristol when severe tire wear forced drivers to slow the pace, run a multitude of lines and do whatever it took to make their tires live, creating the most passes ever for a race that did not use a drafting rules package.
The league is attempting to replicate that race with multiple tire compounds, forcing teams to run different speeds to increase passing and strategic divergence. It didn’t work for the All-Star Race at freshly repaved North Wilkesboro but the hope is that this time will work because Richmond is the most abrasive short track on the schedule.
Some of NASCAR’s most important playoff races are on short tracks with the Bristol Night Race and the final two races of the season at Martinsville and Phoenix. The latter two have been especially dreadful with this car in the NextGen era so all eyes will be on Richmond to see if this creates a direction for NASCAR to further pursue on its historically best tracks.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
