The NASCAR Cup Series will race on Sunday afternoon at Sonoma Raceway in California’s wine country, with much of the interest and in some cases, outright quarreling over the effects of the first repave in more than two decades.
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Joey Logano will on the pole for Sunday’s race with Tyler Reddick qualifying in second.
Kyle Larson suffered damage during qualifying but made a run in the final round and will start fifth. All four Hendrick Motorsports cars advanced to the final round and will start in the top 10 on Sunday.
One driver who thrived on the old surface is defending race winner Martin Truex Jr. The Joe Gibbs Racing star leads all active drivers with four Cup Series wins at Sonoma and has won three of the last five races on the northern California road course.
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The repave took place over two months at the beginning of the year, as the track was ground down, cracks were repaired and a new, long-lasting asphalt was placed down on the circuit.
But the repave hasn’t been perfect and patches of the track appeared to break apart during an April sports car test on the road course. The breakage required immediate repairs and plenty of patches that had NASCAR drivers expressing some apprehension about the track surface ahead of the race on Sunday.
“I definitely had a lot of concerns coming in, I have some friends who do some of the road racing stuff and they come out here and run and just said how bad it was coming apart,” Chase Elliott told The Associated Press on Friday after a 50-minute practice session.
“That was concerning, right, because our cars are way heavier than most of these other series. But I didn’t see anything visually on the track and I’m sure they will inspect it later. But I was super concerned coming here and honestly now feel a lot better.”
Truex, not surprisingly, was against the repave.
“I wish they didn’t,” Truex said. “We had something really good here working, and certainly, last year, we did really well with it. There is more of a chance for an upset or for a guy surprising the field, I think, this time around.”
Hamlin offered a surprising endorsem*nt after an initial tense exchange with track owner Marcus Smith over the asphalt breaking up during the sports car test. Hamlin and Smith engaged in a back-and-forth over social media regarding the repave that started when Hamlin posted on social media, “when paving on a budget goes wrong.”
Smith, chairman of the Speedway Motorsports conglomerate that owns 10 of the tracks on NASCAR’s Cup Series schedule, fired back with “this is a great post from somebody who doesn’t know all the information. Ignorance on display for the world to see.”
Smith later deleted the post but it escalated the debate to the point where Smith mocked the lack of a Cup championship on Hamlin’s record and Hamlin accused Smith of squandering the racing empire Smith’s late father had built.
Goodyear held a tire test for NASCAR that had no problems but that was done before the sports car track day in which parts of the asphalt cracked.
The repave of the 10-turn, 1.99-mile road course isn’t the only significant change: the infamous hairpin at turn 11 was altered with the rubber tire barriers on the inside of the turn replaced by concrete K-rails, according to the AP.
In matters unrelated to the surface, Austin Cindric comes in off a win last Sunday at World Wide Technology Raceway when Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney ran out of gas while leading on the final lap. Cindric’s only other win in the Cup Series came in the 2022 Dayton 500. The victory was the first of the year in the series for Penske.
Hamlin finished second for his sixth consecutive top-five finish. He leads Kyle Larson by 21 points and Chase Elliott by 27.
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