The Joe Gibbs cars, led by Kyle Busch, stole the summer.
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Sunday will feature the grand event – the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 Sprint Cup Series race at 1 p.m. It will be televised live on FOX Sports.
Clark also hopes that a new lower-downforce package that is expected to stoke competition at other 1.5-mile tracks this season – as it did at Kentucky Speedway and Darlington Raceway previous year – can enliven the racing and the ticket-buying public. For two members of the 2006 class – Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. – just finished one-two at Daytona, separated by 1/100th of a second. (187.095 miles per hour, 29.362.-sec.) and rookie Chase Elliott (186.963 miles per hour, 29.653-sec), who ran 65 laps, the most of the 39 drivers.
Jamie McMurray, Trevor Bayne and Ryan Newman round out the top five starters.
Forget about seeing another driver such as Marcis, who famously competed in wing-tip shoes and managed to operate his own team over much of his 35-year-career, sometimes hopping out of the auto to work on it himself during races.
Record at Atlanta Motor Speedway: Three Xfinity races, three top 10 finishes (4th in 2015).
“We definitely have less downforce on the cars”, said Jimmie Johnson after one day of practice. “The paving company who can figure out how to mimic that with new pavement, that would be really cool”.
“I want to do well here just as much as I do anywhere else”, he said. Atlanta is like that. Multiple short tracks and local race tracks are being shutdown, sold or tore apart due to a lack of attendance.
Hamlin won at Atlanta in 2012 and Busch took the checkered flag there in 2013. With the market’s viability despite its historical and cultural significance in the heart of Southern stock auto culture ever-scrutinized, Clark said “it’s kind of nip and tuck” if sales improve from last season. Now let’s go out and enjoy yet another year of NASCAR!
Wallace finished sixth in last Saturday’s PowerShares QQQ 300 at the “Birthplace of Speed”, while Suarez placed eighth. But here we are today running the NASCAR truck series this season.
“We have to show everybody ‘He has a legitimate shot at winning this (championship),'” Wallace said. “There’ve been a lot of tests and I was part of them at MI, here in Atlanta and at Homestead-Miami Speedway after last season was over”. We had one or two races where it was back-to-back ok, but then we had a spurt of three races that were bad. “We are very excited to get to a 1.5-mile track”.
“Expectations are high”, he said. “That’s just where we are right now”.
Sprint Cup Series driver Chase Elliott talks to a crew member during practice for a NASCAR auto race at Atlanta Motor Speedway Friday, Feb. 26, 2016, in Hampton, Ga. When the trucks travel to an intermediate track, Matt Crafton regularly appears atop the leaderboard. Busch holds two wins in his career at Atlanta. During that stretch, Crafton has earned six wins and three runner-ups.
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The season-opening Daytona 500 drew only 44 cars – the lowest number of entries in the 58-year history of NASCAR’s most storied event. But couple that lower-downforce auto with an already slick Atlanta track, and Sunday’s race promises a lot more action – and crashes – than did the Daytona 500. If you don’t think he will pull off at least a top give it’s time to get your head checked. Elliott struggled last week at Daytona, wrecking on the 20th lap and finishing 37th.
