The Cup Series will join the Xfinity Series at Road America this weekend. Could this be the last trip to Road America for the Cup Series? There is a rumor going around that NASCAR will replace the race at Road America next year with a race in through the streets in Chicago. I like the idea of trying to race down the streets in Chicago, but I do not want to lose the race at Road America. I wish NASCAR would replace one of the races at Talladega. NASCAR does not need to visit that Superspeedway twice each year. OK, enough of my ranting… It is now time to write about the Kwik Trip 250 at Road America…
DRIVER RANKINGS FOR ROAD AMERICA
Handicapping the road course races has been easy in the past. The same drivers always ran up front in these races, but that has not been the case this year. The top-five at Sonoma consisted of 1. Daniel Suarez, 2. Chris Buescher, 3. Michael McDowell, 4. Kevin Harvick and 5. Austin Cindric. All of these drivers are good road course racers, but not the names we expected to be up front. Alex Bowman, Erik Jones and Austin Dillon ran well at COTA and finished in the top-10. Once again… these are good drivers, but not the drivers expected to be in the top-10 on a road course.
So what do we do this week? The race at Road America was a battle between Chase Elliott and the drivers from Joe Gibbs Racing. Elliott won the race and Christopher Bell finished 2nd, Kyle Busch was 3rd, Denny Hamlin was 4th and Martin Truex Jr. was 9th. Joe Gibbs Racing looked like trash at Sonoma and only Christopher Bell looked good at COTA this year. Do we focus on what happened in this race last year or focus on what has happened in the two road course races this year?
I used a combination of what happened last year at Road America, what has happened this year on the road courses and the driver’s ratings on the road courses over the last two seasons for the Driver Rankings this week. This should give us an idea of which drivers will be fast this week, but I will be focusing more on practice speeds this week then I typically do at the road courses.
Here are my Driver Rankings for the Kwik Trip 250…
| Driver |
| 1. Chase Elliott |
| 2. Ross Chastain |
| 3. Christopher Bell |
| 4. AJ Allmendinger |
| 5. Ryan Blaney |
| 6. Kyle Larson |
| 7. Denny Hamlin |
| 8. Kyle Busch |
| 9. Austin Cindric |
| 10. Tyler Reddick |
| 11. Martin Truex Jr. |
| 12. Alex Bowman |
| 13. Chase Briscoe |
| 14. Daniel Suarez |
| 15. Michael McDowell |
| 16. Joey Logano |
| 17. Kurt Busch |
| 18. Kevin Harvick |
| 19. William Byron |
| 20. Chris Buescher |
| 21. Cole Custer |
| 22. Brad Keselowski |
| 23. Justin Haley |
| 24. Erik Jones |
| 25. Aric Almirola |
| 26. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. |
| 27. Bubba Wallace |
| 28. Harrison Burton |
| 29. Todd Gilliland |
| 30. Joey Hand |
| 31. Corey LaJoie |
| 32. Ty Dillon |
| 33. Josh Bilicki |
| 34. Cody Ware |
| 35. Loris Hezemans |
| 36. Kyle Tilley |
* These rankings will be updated Saturday after qualifying
Good Luck This Week!
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