Drivers and team members alike mentioned that Sunday’s race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway felt at times like it was a title-run Chase event – the urgency, the strategy, the mindset, and intensity that so typically defines the closing weeks of a season.
Although in reality it was the second to last regular season event before the 2026 10-race Chase begins, it was perhaps a peek at what lies ahead with so much championship intent on the line. And for Team Penske in particular, it proved there’s a whole lot of promise.
Ryan Blaney, the driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford, claimed his second consecutive win at the New Hampshire mile Sunday holding off 23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace in a thrilling final laps-run negotiating traffic in a field that had raised its racing game in the final push to the Chase.
The last crucial run – with positions changing throughout the field lap-by-lap, was truly indicative of the day which produced championship eligibility for another six drivers. This Saturday’s Coke Zero 400 (7:30 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Daytona International Speedway decides which final three drivers will advance to the 16-driver Chase field.
It marked the fourth win in in the last six races for a Team Penske car and second straight, including Blaney’s teammate Joey Logano’s victory last week at Richmond.
“The momentum that Team Penske has on their side is great and Ford, Team Penske in general has been on a pretty good tear the last couple of months and it’s been fun to work through it with everybody and try to get better-and-better,” said Blaney, who is second in the championship rankings and also the defending pole-sitter and race winner of next week’s regular season finale on the Daytona high banks.
“We’ll just keep going,” Blaney said. “I’m a big believer in momentum and things like that we just have to keep working at it and hopefully we make a run at it [title].”
With his seventh-place finish at New Hampshire, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin claimed the top seed in the Chase and the valuable 25-point bonus that goes with it when the points reset for the 10-race Chase run, that begins with the Southern 500 on Sept. 6 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway. He continued a steady season highlight reel that has included six top-10s in the last seven races in addition to his four wins earlier in the season.
And at the other end of the Chase eligibility competition, Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing driver Ryan Preece made a dramatic run toward earning one of the last championship berths – nearly cutting his deficit to 16th place, Trackhouse Racing’s Shane Van Gisbergen in half.
Preece was at a 50-point deficit to the two-race winner Van Gisbergen entering the New Hampshire race and how only trails him by 31 points. The third Penske driver, Austin Cindric is 15th in the standings, only 13 points ahead of Van Gisbergen – 44 up on Preece – as the series heads to Daytona, a speedway renowned for its own brand of high-action drama and thrills.
“We did a really good job,” Preece said of earning 10 stage points, running among the top-five for the majority of the race before settling for a ninth-place finish at New Hampshire.
“I felt like the race, the majority of it went our way. We had a really good car and before that last caution came out it looked, like we were gonna go around the 23 [Wallace]. We had just got by the 21 [Wood Brothers Josh Berry] so for whatever reason that last set of tires was just loose and that’s what killed us because I felt like on restarts, navigating through the traffic and doing all of those things, we did everything right.
“I’m on offense,” he added of the high-stakes Daytona regular season finale. “I’m not playing defense; we will go into Daytona swinging and we’ll keep digging.”
Wallace’s runner-up finish puts him only a formality away – two points – from securing the 14th place among the 16-driver Chase field, leaving the three – Cindric, Van Gisbergen and Preece – to decide who will earn the final two championship-eligible positions.
Of those three drivers, Cindric is the only former Daytona winner, claiming his first career NASCAR Cup Series victory in the 2022 DAYTONA 500. He finished 39th in the regular season finale there last year, however, caught up in a 12-car crash only 27 laps into the race. Preece was 14th and Van Gisbergen was 16th.
Teams will not have practice this week at Daytona, instead going straight into Busch Light Pole Qualifying on Friday at 5 p.m. ET.
— NASCAR News Wire —