Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Toyota says attempting to follow up its dominant second manufacturers’ title means that the 2018 NASCAR Cup series season will be its “biggest challenge”. The manufacturer introduced a brand new Camry for 2017, a year earlier than its rivals expected, and

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Jimmie Johnson says the Daytona 500’s two big crashes cannot be fully blamed on the NASCAR Cup series’ young drivers because the veterans push the limits more often. Seven-time champion Johnson crashed his third car of the Daytona week in Sunday’s

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Darrell Wallace Jr chewed gum and sung to himself in the final laps of his first NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 to keep calm enough for a career-best second place. Starting his first full Cup season with Richard Petty Motorsports, Wallace

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Daytona 500 victor Austin Dillon’s race-winning move that forced Aric Almirola to crash on the last lap was a fair move, according to the “devastated” Stewart-Haas Racing driver. Almirola had worked his way into the top 10 going into the final

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon took a surprise Daytona 500 win in an attrition-filled 2018 NASCAR Cup opener featuring two huge crashes and overtime. Dillon led just one lap en route to victory and overcame a three-car battle for the lead

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Daytona 500 pole winner Alex Bowman’s strategy in the NASCAR Cup series’ Duel races was a “complete waste of time”, says Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick. After securing pole position in last weekend’s qualifying sessions, Bowman opted to drop from pole to

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. One fifth of the NASCAR Cup series grid for the 2018 Daytona 500 will start the race from the rear in their back-up cars. Eight drivers lost their primary cars in Thursday night’s Duel races, which took place to determine full

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Former Red Bull NASCAR Cup series team BK Racing has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy ahead of the 2018 Daytona 500. The chartered team completed the full Cup season in 2017 but had a rotating door of seven drivers across the

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott took victories in the NASCAR Cup’s Daytona Duel races, securing second row starts for Sunday’s Daytona 500. In the first duel Team Penske replicated its dominant form from last Sunday’s Clash race, running 1-2-3 with Blaney

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. The NASCAR Cup series’ decision to make data from all teams more easily available to rival outfits is “absurd”, according to Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kurt Busch. NASCAR released key information such as throttle, steering and braking traces, as well as rpm data,

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick says he has been “tearing down the walls” to restructure his NASCAR Cup series team, but that the playoffs will show if it has worked. Having split his team into effectively two operations running two cars

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Brad Keselowski scored his first NASCAR Daytona Clash victory, moving from last to first place in the opening part of the race and staying in the lead until the finish. Team Penske dominated the majority of the 75-lap race, with Keselowski

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Alex Bowman scored a dominant pole position in qualifying for NASCAR’s Daytona 500, going fastest in both rounds of qualifying and beating nearest rival Denny Hamlin by 0.130 seconds. Picked as replacement for the now retired Dale Earnhardt Jr, Bowman posted

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. The Daytona 500 will be beamed into 18 million UK homes on free-to-air television for the first time this year thanks to the new FreeSports channel. The February 18 event is the traditional season opener of the NASCAR Cup Series, where

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Rookie William Byron posted the fastest lap across Saturday’s three NASCAR Cup practice sessions ahead of the Daytona 500, utilising a large pack of cars drafting to set his time. One of Hendrick Motorsports’ new recruits for 2018, reigning Xfinity Series

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Stewart-Haas Racing’s Aric Almirola says his Richard Petty Motorsports replacement Darrell ‘Bubba’ Wallace Jr cannot afford to “screw up” because there will be inevitable comparisons to NASCAR legend Richard Petty. Almirola drove for seven-time champion Petty’s team from 2012-17 and won

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. One-time NASCAR Cup champion Kyle Busch says he cannot make a worse start to the 2018 season than he did in ’17. Busch began his 2017 campaign slowly, and his streak without a win reached a year before he finally took

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Martin Truex Jr’s NASCAR title with Furniture Row Racing gives small teams “a shot in the arm” towards overhauling the leading outfits in the next decade, says Front Row Motorsports. Martin Truex Jr dominated the 2017 NASCAR Cup season to take

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Jimmie Johnson says he “never worked so hard in my life to get such little return” as he did in the failed defence of his seventh NASCAR Cup series title. Johnson is the only Cup driver to have made the playoffs

Leading NASCAR Cup drivers say the new ‘Hawkeye’ technical inspection will level the playing field in 2018. The new system, which scans the car with lasers and compares information to computer-aided drawings provided by each of NASCAR’s manufacturers, was trialled at four races last year. Now designed to find illegalities in 90 seconds using 16

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Kurt Busch says young talents in the NASCAR Cup series are getting a “free pass” to become superstars because their lack of success does not warrant such promotion. NASCAR’s increasing push to promote the personalities of young drivers in the face

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. New NASCAR Cup series team StarCom Racing has signed Jeffrey Earnhardt for its first full season in 2018. StarCom recently leased a charter from Richard Childress Racing after Paul Menard moved to Wood Brothers at the end of the 2017 season.

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Joey Logano says he never wants to experience a repeat of his 2017 “horror film” season, in which he missed out on the playoffs despite winning a race at Richmond. The Penske driver started last season with eight top-six finishes in

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Richard Childress Racing has leased one of its charters to new outfit StarCom Racing, which plans to enter the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series beginning with the Daytona 500 next month. StarCom has spent the 2017 off-season building its team with experienced

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick says Kyle Busch criticising the NASCAR Cup Series for promoting the profiles of its young drivers is like “the child that’s whining for attention”. In recent years NASCAR has made an effort to encourage rising stars like

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. Two-time Formula 1 world champion Fernando Alonso is interested in a NASCAR test, but admits there is little chance he would make a full-time switch to the American series. Speaking at the media tour in Charlotte, ahead of his Daytona 24

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. NASCAR needs to change its “stale” season finale and rotate between circuits, according to 2014 Cup champion Kevin Harvick. The Cup schedule has been shaken up for 2018, including Las Vegas becoming the first race of the playoffs and Charlotte’s ‘roval’

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. NASCAR Cup champion Kyle Busch believes NASCAR’s push to boost younger drivers’ popularity is “stupid”. With the likes of Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr retiring in recent years, plus Danica Patrick only contesting this season’s Daytona 500 before

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. NASCAR Cup champion Kyle Busch believes NASCAR’s push to boost younger drivers’ popularity is “stupid”. With the likes of Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr retiring in recent years, plus Danica Patrick only contesting this season’s Daytona 500 before

Upgrade for free today You have only 5 articles remaining to view this month. The new NASCAR ‘roval’ layout at Charlotte Motor Speedway has been altered with changes expected to make lap times 10-15 seconds quicker. The infield course will become the third non-oval on the NASCAR Cup schedule this year, and the first to