Who’s ready for the longest race (in mileage and time) on the NASCAR schedule? Who’s ready for a full day of racing starting with Monaco going to Indy and winding up in Charlotte? The Coca-Cola 600 is one of the crown jewels of the Cup series and is always a great way to cap off Memorial Day weekend. It also happens to be the biggest showcase event for the home track of NASCAR.
Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles. That’s right it’s that long. A whopping 400 laps around the 1.5-mile quad-oval layout that is Charlotte Motor Speedway. If you look at an aerial view of Charlotte there are two turns in the front stretch that makes a sort of D-shaped track and it makes it fairly tricky to navigate it smoothly. Banking on the track is a even 24 degrees in all four corners from the apron to the wall. Because of this, it reduces the grooves of the track down to one or 1.5 around the bottom in the corners until they put traction compound around the top two grooves at the two ends of the track and in practice that compound has allowed for multiple groove racing.
As I mentioned in the track breakdown piece, there are eight drivers in the field with +6 position differential in the last four races. However there are only five drivers with over 100 laps led in the last four races, two of who are over 200 in that span. Dating back to the May 2010 Coca-Cola 600, all but one race has had 20+ lead changes and half of them have over 30. I expect the same to hold true once more especially since no one really pulling away in the first practice or qualifying session. Also as I mentioned in the same piece, the package this week is completely different from last week’s setup. Last week for the All-Star race NASCAR stipulated a restrictor plate and a really big rear spoiler, along with a bigger front splitter and brake ducts in the front. It slowed the cars down to about 165 mph for the race as compared to the 190+ mph expected this week in the regular 1.5-mile engine setup and aero package being run this year.
The second practice (first session on Saturday morning) was cancelled due to rain in the area and a wet track. The first practice (Thursday’s practice) was run mostly in qualifying trim so the only practice run in race trim was the happy hour session on Saturday, so keep that in mind when looking at speeds and practice notes.
There are four stages in this race instead of the normal three and the stages are 100 laps each.
Stacks
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