Should NASCAR’s Cup Series return to Bowman Gray Stadium next year or look for change?
By so many metrics, the NASCAR Cup Series’ season-opening event was a hit.
The Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium was a sellout, fit with intense race fans standing shoulder-to-shoulder in collective vigor. They yelled together. Flashed birds together. Forty percent of all the fans were from the local Triad region in North Carolina, NASCAR said; the rest were from 44 states and five countries and three continents. Screams for the local legends — all-time winningest drivers Tim Brown and Burt Myers — were louder than the rest, and those two guys didn’t even make it past the Last Chance Qualifier, the undercard to Sunday’s main event.
There were bumper bumps and spin-outs. Tempers flared. Ty Gibbs went airborne when he tried to retaliate under caution once. There were no confrontations like last year’s All-Star race — North Wilkesboro Speedway presents the same bullring sorta deal that breeds contempt and racing moments — but there was plenty of action on the racetrack nonetheless, a day that ended with the sport’s most popular driver, Chase Elliott, earning the first Clash victory of his career.
Still, come a mere 30 minutes after the checkered flag, drivers were asked to weigh in on 2026:
Should NASCAR return to the same venue, for the same event, at the same time a year from now?
Some, like second-place finisher Ryan Blaney, were swift with a “yes,” adding that there will be “just as many people here next year as there was tonight.” Others, like his Team Penske teammate and 2024 champion Joey Logano, had mixed feelings.
“From what I hear, they pack this place out every weekend without the star power of Cup guys. Just race fans, they like racing,” Logano said. “The other thing, too, to remember is it’s not a huge stadium, right? You pack it out, it looks good, the energy is real. It’s not like you have this ginormous stadium and you get half or three quarters of it full. Standing room only, it’s a special feel. It’s hard to get the ticket, and people want what they can’t have, right?”
He added: “On the same breath I would say it’s very important for us to move things around. We’ve seen the success of our sport moving to new racetracks. ... We’ve done that over the last five, six years. We’ve added new racetracks quite often. I think that’s successful.
“Doing the same thing eventually gets stale, but I don’t think that’s going to happen here anytime soon.”
Denny Hamlin, who finished third, made it clear that he didn’t want to minimize what will be a memorable night for NASCAR. Bowman Gray Stadium, after all, is the quarter-mile track home to the 100th Cup win of Richard Petty; the football field-turned-racing heaven that hosted so many Cup moments before the series left in 1971 and didn’t return until Sunday; the racetrack that hosts weekly races that regularly draws tens of thousands of attendees.
But he also realizes that thinking ahead is important.
“Certainly I don’t want to say this wasn’t good enough,” Hamlin said. “They took a facility here that’s been around for a long time and made it feel like a brand-new one. The fans obviously were very, very excited to see us. They were enthusiastic. We feed into that. It felt like a big event. Even though it’s not a points paying event or anything like that, it still feels big.
“You want to go wherever can give you that feel and atmosphere. There’s surely bigger venues and bigger cities to go to, but will you have this type of feel or not? That’s really what matters.”
Elliott, the winner, naturally had a lot of positive things to say. Winning enhances experiences, surely. But he also thought that the racing was good — much better than what happened at the Coliseum in Los Angeles in the latter two of the three years NASCAR hosted the Clash there. Tire wear was a factor, he said. Passing wasn’t abundant but was feasible. The race’s seven cautions didn’t clutter the race — but possibility still lurked on every lap, around every corner, as it should at a place like this.
“(The track) seemed bigger to me,” Elliott said. “I don’t know what the technical distance would be, how different it is or not, but the straightaways seemed a little longer. The corners weren’t so sharp. It didn’t feel like such a sharp apex. And that combined with the track surface having some age to it — I think all three of those things had a pretty large impact on the race being better and putting it a little more in your hands as far as tire management and all that stuff. “
Elliott, if nothing else, loved the fact that NASCAR is exploring “coming back” to important racetracks — including North Carolina venues Rockingham Speedway and North Wilkesboro.
“You hate to see those cornerstone racetracks, of what paved NASCAR to be what it is today, shut down or go away,” Elliott said. “So if us having a race, or if it’s the Rockingham case where Xfinity and Trucks are over there, if that’s gonna keep that place alive and keep it from shutting down or getting bulldozed, then I think that’s a victory for motorsports.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Should NASCAR’s Cup Series return to Bowman Gray Stadium next year or look for change?."
