The 2025 NASCAR Cup, Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series schedules are out and the highlights include the previously announced events at Bowman Gray Stadium and Mexico City but also the return of racing at Rockingham Speedway and more races for the Truck Series.
Here are the key takeaways with quotes from NASCAR EVP Ben Kennedy, the architect behind scheduling in recent seasons.
Mexico City
The only change to the 2024 schedule was Iowa Speedway, which was added when an agreement to race in Montreal at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve never materialized. For next year, the glitzy addition is a race south of the border at Autódromo Hermanos RodrÃguez, home of the Formula 1 Grand Prix.
The modern NASCAR has decided to aggressively pursue new markets and expanding fan demographics with races in Downtown Los Angeles and Chicago and now Mexico City. It aligns with a general major league sports philosophy too with the National Football League and Major League Baseball also taking events overseas.
In event co-promoter OCESA, NASCAR has a partner that is accustomed to bringing major sporting events like F1 to the city and will be able to deliver an event to a country that has a legitimate appetite for the sport around a countryman in Daniel Suárez.
Kennedy says he cannot speak to the length of the agreement but that he hopes NASCAR is there for a long time.
“This is new for us,” Kennedy said. “This is a big and bold step for our sport. We’ve made a lot of those kind of big bets over the past few years, whether it’s going to downtown L.A. or Chicago, now Mexico. We’ve done it a bit in the past with our Xfinity Series, but the Cup Series and Xfinity Series is going to be a whole new level for us.
“Certainly want to make sure that for the industry it makes a lot of sense, and importantly for the partners and OCESA that it makes sense. Excited about that.”
The race comes at the expense of Richmond Raceway, which loses one of its two races, a reflection of both the current short track racing product and attendance there in recent years.
“Unfortunately every time we add a new venue, I think we’d love to say there’s a 39th or 40th event (but) unfortunately we can’t,” Kennedy said. “Every time we go to a new venue, that unfortunately comes at the expense of another venue. Unfortunately this time it was Richmond.
“I would say that Richmond is an important market for us, important area for us as you think about where our fan base lives, being in close proximity to that. I think with that said, we also feel like it’s a good opportunity for them to live in the summer on August weekend and move to Saturday night. It’s something that our fans have been asking for for a long time.
“I can tell you as a kid growing up, I remember going to Richmond every single year and watching Saturday night racing. You always have different paint schemes, a lot of energy, always a packed house. We expect the same when we come back there next August. We feel like it’s a great opportunity to set Richmond up for success and really put on an amazing event for our fans.”
Bowman Gray Stadium
While NASCAR has continued to expand its horizons towards new markets and international races, it has also paid homage to its past with Cup Series events at North Wilkesboro and Bowman Gray Stadium. With 38 events, counting the two non-points races, and several tracks still having two dates, it provides flexibility for both NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports to get creative and serve several different masters moving forward.
In Bowman Gray, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, NASCAR has both the old-school track appeal to classic fans in the market where more people watch than any other while also being a short drive from teams from the Charlotte area after spending three years running The Busch Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
It’ll be a little chilly as the afternoon goes on but this is a made for television event with 17,000 of the most diehard NASCAR fans imaginable not caring what the temperature is.
“We acquired the lease at Bowman Gray earlier this year and felt like it was a good opportunity for us to get back to our roots again,” Kennedy said.
“We haven’t raced at Bowman Gray since 1971, decades since we competed there. I think it’s a huge opportunity to obviously kick off our season being on FOX a weekend before the Super Bowl, two weekends before our biggest event of the year, the Daytona 500, but then also put a big spotlight on weekly racing. A big focus of ours is to think about NASCAR weekly and NASCAR Modifieds. We want to give them a moment in the limelight, too.
“I was down there when we announced it a couple weeks ago. The energy in that place was incredible, it was palatable. We’ve seen some of the results, too. We’ve shut down some of the deposits from Bowman Gray. We fully expect that to be a packed house when we come there February 2nd.”
Rockingham Xfinity/Trucks
Speaking of paying tribute to the past, Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina is back for the Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series. This is one the legendary NASCAR speedways, having hosted the Cup Series from 1965 to 2004.
It’s now owned by Raleigh businessman Dan Lovenheim and this event is promoted by Spire Sports+Entertainment’s promotional arm, Track Enterprises, which had promoted a race at Milwaukee Mile the past two years.
Rockingham hosted the Truck Series in 2012 and 2013 but attendance dropped off so much that second year that it no longer became viable by 2014. As is always the case, every fan who lamented the loss of Rockingham, like they did North Wilkesboro, has a chance to validate those claims by supporting the revival of another NASCAR classic in Richmond, County, North Carolina.
“This one has been a little while coming,” Kennedy said. “We’ve had a number of conversations with the new owners there. It came under new ownership in 2018, a few years ago, and they’ve made a few improvements following COVID and we had the opportunity with Track Enterprises and Bob Sargent, who is going to be the promoter, to work out the arrangement to bring it back.
“I think it’s going to be really cool to go back there. I remember, growing up, going to Rockingham for a couple of years. I remember racing there in the K&N East Series and Truck Series, 2012 and 2013, and its been awhile since we’ve been to The Rock.
“We’ve been out there a number of times and the facility looks like it’s in really good condition. I think they’re going to do a really good job promoting it. Having it on Friday and Saturday of Easter weekend, I think adds a new variable to it. We’re not going to have Cup racing that weekend so maybe some of those drivers are going to want to go out there and jump in a Truck or Xfinity car that weekend, so that will be fun to watch too.” Â
Lime Rock Trucks
Lime Rock Motorsports Park in Connecticut, under a variety of owners over the years, has long clamored for a NASCAR event of some kind. Current owners Charles Mallory, Dicky Riegel, and Bill Rueckert, and also Parker Kligerman, has made it happen.
Expanded Truck Schedule
With the Truck Series adding races at Rockingham, Lime Rock, New Hampshire, Michigan and the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL, the third-tier division is now up to 25 races, the most since 2011 after years of running 22-23 races over the past decade-plus. The schedule also closes the long gaps between races for the series, with the longest off-time now coming from April 19 to May 1 early in the season. From there, it’s a grind.
The new races come at the expense of Gateway, a race at Kansas, Circuit of the Americas and Milwaukee.
Weather shuffling
There were several race weekends who received new dates just in the name of trying to avoid rain or having a more comfortable experience for fans in attendance. For example, Michigan in August has been plagued by rain three years in a row and run on Monday two years in a row. So now that race is in early June. Bristol in the spring moves from March to April. Nashville goes from late June to June 1. Dover moves to July 20. Iowa is in August (right before the Knoxville Nationals, no less) instead of July.
“A lot of this as we always talk is stakeholder feedback,” Kennedy said. “We’re hearing from a number of different voices, whether it be our track partners, our broadcast partners, our teams, our drivers. Being mindful of that as well as working with our weather partners also assess how do we minimize the amount of weather impact at events that we have.
“If you look at this year, unfortunately we’ve had weather impact a number of our events. If there are opportunities for us to make a date change and limit our risk of weather, that’s something we’ll certainly take a look at as well.”
New look Cup playoffs
The regular season finale is once again at Daytona and the Olympic break was the only reason it wasn’t this year. Gateway and New Hampshire are now playoff races at the expense of Watkins Glen and Atlanta, which are set to make their playoff debuts next month, with Talladega moving from its traditional Round of 12 date to the Round of 8.
Phoenix Raceway is again the championship race, a continued reflection of the $178 million renovation project completed in 2018.
Kennedy detailed the reasons for including Gateway and New Hampshire into the final 10 race gauntlet.
“I think as we’ve gone through the schedule evolution over the past few years, we had World Wide Technology Raceway come into our schedule a couple years ago,” Kennedy said. “Curtis Francois and the team at St. Louis have been fantastic partners with us from day one, whether it’s marketing and promoting the events, putting on big ancillary events around it, talk about the events on Saturday night, even Sunday leading into our Cup Series event, they are big promoters for us for sure. Felt like it was a good opportunity, as we think about this newness and freshness.
“You look to the Playoff schedule for the first years of kind of a schedule innovation project. We didn’t have a ton of variation through the Playoffs. I would say over the past couple years we’ve had a little bit more of that, adding Atlanta and Watkins Glen, World Wide Technology Raceway going in next year.
“I think between their partnership and the packed house that they’ve had over the past few years there, we felt like it was a good opportunity to put them in the Playoffs.”
Chicago is back
The street race will be back for its third season, as it was a one year agreement with two mutual options, but it’s no secret that NASCAR would eventually like to solicit an open bidding process for cities that would like to host a similar event.
NASCAR also still needs to fill a void in Southern California and rumors about San Diego have already started to present themselves on the heels of the schedule announcement on Thursday.
With all of that said, Kennedy said he was not surprised that this event made it to a third year.
“We came in there the first year, certainly a lot of questions around what the facility is going to look like, how our cars are going to compete on the racetrack, the racing product,” Kennedy said. “Unfortunately we had to deal with weather that first year. Still able to get in the event.
“This year in so many levels was spectacular. Thankfully we had better weather for a majority of the weekend until we were about to get the race started. If you look at the racing product, if you look at some of our fan feedback that we get from our surveys after the race, we hear from our fans throughout the industry, a lot of feedback has been really positive.
“I would say from the NASCAR front, it’s been a check plus plus for us. Then our partnership with the city really has been tremendous and continues to grow. (Event president) Julie Giese and her entire team do a fantastic job in Chicago, whether it’s building relationships with local community organizations, creating STEM and STEAM initiatives throughout the city.
“One of our goals when we initially had those conversations with Chicago was we want this to be a big sport for NASCAR and our sport, but we also want to leave a positive footprint in the city of Chicago. I think that’s what Julie and the team is doing.”
Just one off week but …
There’s just one off week in the NASCAR regular season, and its for Easter Sunday, and even then, NASCAR has scheduled the Xfinity Series and Truck Series races at Rockingham for that weekend. This comes one year after NASCAR enjoyed a two-plus week summer break for the Oympics and some teams asking for an imposed summer shutdown period like Formula 1 has. The industry suffers from burnout now that so many jobs have been cut and NASCAR cutting an off-week to avoid the peak NFL schedule so the sport will continue to be a grid.
Kennedy said they are not blind or deaf to those frustrations within the industry.
“It’s a fair point,” Kennedy said. “Again, another thing that we discussed quite a bit internally.
“I think if you look at the schedule and the way it’s laid out this year, two off weeks for the Olympic break, right? It was a good opportunity for everyone to kind of hit reset before they came back to Richmond, the last 14 races of the season.
“I think as we’ve gone through it over the past two years, some of the feedback we received in particular on the Cup side is trying to find a way to get that Easter weekend back off for them. We were able to achieve that.”
Kennedy conceded they are trying to avoid as much of the NFL schedule as possible.
“I think as you look at the domino effect of the entire schedule, you can add more of those off weeks,” Kennedy said. “That also has a trickle-down effect as to where Daytona lives, Darlington lives, opening up the Playoffs on Labor Day weekend, which has always been a traditional weekend for them. Then all the way down to Phoenix for our championship venue. That’s something we’ve always been mindful of.
“Obviously we’ve always been mindful of just natural competition from other sports leagues in that part of the year. If you rewind the clock a few years, sometime around the week or two before Thanksgiving, we’ve now moved up a few weeks earlier just to keep that momentum for our sport through the fall.”
2025 NASCAR CUP SERIES SCHEDULE
2025 NASCAR XFINITY SERIES SCHEDULE
| Date | Race / Track |
| Saturday, February 15 | Daytona |
| Saturday, February 22 | Atlanta |
| Saturday, March 1 | COTA |
| Saturday, March 8 | Phoenix |
| Saturday, March 15 | Las Vegas |
| Saturday, March 22 | Homestead-Miami |
| Saturday, March 29 | Martinsville |
| Saturday, April 5 | Darlington |
| Saturday, April 12 | Bristol |
| Saturday, April 19 | Rockingham |
| Saturday, April 26 | Talladega |
| Saturday, May 3 | Texas |
| Saturday, May 24 | Charlotte |
| Saturday, May 31 | Nashville Superspeedway |
| Saturday, June 14 | Mexico City |
| Saturday, June 21 | Pocono |
| Friday, June 27 | Atlanta |
| Saturday, July 5 | Chicago Street Race |
| Saturday, July 12 | Sonoma |
| Saturday, July 19 | Dover |
| Saturday, July 26 | Indianapolis |
| Saturday, August 2 | Iowa |
| Saturday, August 9 | Watkins Glen |
| Friday, August 22 | Daytona |
| Saturday, August 30 | Portland |
| Saturday, September 6 | World Wide Technology Raceway |
| Friday, September 12 | Bristol |
| Saturday, September 27 | Kansas |
| Saturday, October 4 | Charlotte Roval |
| Saturday, October 11 | Las Vegas |
| Saturday, October 18 | Talladega |
| Saturday, October 25 | Martinsville |
| Saturday, November 1 | Phoenix (Championship) |
2025 NASCAR CRAFTSMAN TRUCK SERIES SCHEDULE
| Date | Race / Track |
| Friday, February 14 | Daytona |
| Saturday, February 22 | Atlanta |
| Friday, March 14 | Las Vegas |
| Friday, March 21 | Homestead-Miami |
| Friday, March 28 | Martinsville |
| Friday, April 11 | Bristol |
| Friday, April 18 | Rockingham |
| Friday, May 2 | Texas |
| Saturday, May 10 | Kansas |
| Saturday, May 17 | North Wilkesboro |
| Friday, May 23 | Charlotte |
| Friday, May 30 | Nashville Superspeedway |
| Saturday, June 7 | Michigan |
| Friday, June 20 | Pocono |
| Saturday, June 28 | Lime Rock Park |
| Friday, July 25 | Lucas Oil IRP |
| Friday, August 8 | Watkins Glen |
| Friday, August 15 | Richmond |
| Saturday, August 30 | Darlington |
| Thursday, September 11 | Bristol |
| Saturday, September 20 | New Hampshire |
| Friday, October 3 | Charlotte Roval |
| Friday, October 17 | Talladega |
| Friday, October 24 | Martinsville |
| Friday, October 31 | Phoenix (Championship) |