After two weeks of crazy super-speedway racing, the NASCAR world finally gets to relax a little with a trip to the first road course of the year, Circuit of The Americas.
COTA has shown to not be relaxing at all times nonetheless, as the debut race at the track was ran in pouring rain conditions and had to be shut down early. This has not been since, and won’t be the case this weekend.
There are some unknowns though, most notably the new short course that NASCAR will run compared to the full course we have become accustomed to over the years. This will make every corner matter even more than before, now having less of them.
Tyler Reddick has always been strong in Austin, and he continued that momentum with a pole award on Saturday. Best part about that for Toyota? 23XI teammate Bubba Wallace qualified second.
Those two Toyotas are followed by seven Chevrolet’s on the grid, with the first being Chase Elliott. Still labeled as a road course expert in a stock car, the 2020 champion still has yet to win a road course race in the Next Gen car.
Carson Hocevar starts fourth after his eventful weekend in Atlanta, with Trackhouse teammates Daniel Suárez and Shane van Gisbergen starting fifth and sixth, respectively.
On the note of Trackhouse, an 18-year-old top prospect makes his NASCAR Cup Series debut, and that’s Connor Zilisch.
The young phenom qualified in the 14th position, and already ran a clean sweep of the Xfinity race on Saturday afternoon.
Another driver to watch is Alex Bowman. Although starting 21st, the driver of the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 has the best average finish among active drivers in the Next Ten at COTA.
The NASCAR Cup Series gets underway from COTA at 3:30PM EST, live on FOX.
