NASCAR’s former two-race road course schedule is all grown up and has reached six.
Sunday’s Cup Series race at the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) will be the first of a half-dozen twisting layouts, a demanding, complex track in the wonderfully weird Texas capital of Austin.
A new racing surface, Goodyear tires and course design — shorter without a long straightaway — await the drivers. Using the “National” course for the first time, NASCAR will run the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix on Sunday afternoon.
At 2.3 miles in length, the newer layout for the Cup drivers will have its race extended to 95 laps. Previously on the 3.41-mile design, the race went 68 circuits.
In the first four stops at the serpentine track, NASCAR has seen Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain, Tyler Reddick and William Byron be first to the checkers.
Another new driver, short on experience but not talent or confidence, may be at the front Sunday as Trackhouse Racing’s 18-year-old Connor Zilisch will make his Cup debut in the No. 87 Chevrolet.
A winner in Xfinity and ARCA plus the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring in the LMP2 class, the Charlotte, N.C., native has lofty expectations in the Lone Star State in his first time in the sport’s top series.
While Shane van Gisbergen (+550) and Tyler Reddick (+750) are 1-2 with oddsmakers, Zilisch checks in with the third-best odds (+800).
“I want to try and become the youngest Cup Series winner,” Zilisch said Tuesday. “I don’t feel like there’s anything that tells me that I’m not ready to race on a road course on Sunday.”
Before leaving the first two races completely in the dust, the consensus is that the racing last week at Atlanta Motor Speedway far exceeded that of the kind witnessed in the Daytona 500, a fuel-conservation-oriented Great American Race that got messy as the laps wound down.
On his podcast this week Dale Earnhardt Jr. said the glaring difference in the racing shows that improvements need to be made at sister superspeedways Daytona and Talladega before the series returns to either.
“Watching (the 500) from the drivers’ standpoint, I was thinking, ‘We can do better,'” he said. “We went to Atlanta, and I thought what it could be — what Daytona, what Talladega could be. I don’t love the term ‘drafting tracks,’ … but we don’t run restrictor-plates anymore.”
A four-time Daytona winner including the 2004 and 2014 Daytona 500s, Earnhardt said Adam Stevens, crew chief for Atlanta winner Christopher Bell, had a great idea for preventing a fuel-strategy race.
“He had a great idea on how to get us (to better Daytona racing), which was to get it where they don’t need fuel during the stages — shorten the stage to the length of how far you can go on a tank of gas,” Earnhardt said. “I was wondering if another route for specifically Daytona and Talladega might be to get rid of the cautions at the stage breaks.
“What we saw at Atlanta was as good as it gets. … From the moment they dropped the green flag on the truck race to the (final) caution, it was edge of your seat.”
With Talladega not appearing until late April, NASCAR has some time to get off its seat and figure it out.
–Field Level Media
