Key Takeaways
- Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on FS1 and HBO Max, the NASCAR All-Star Race runs at Dover Motor Speedway for the first time — the 42nd running of the showcase and the first ever held north of the Mason-Dixon line.
- The format: three segments, 75/75/200 laps, no Open. Top 26 from Segment 1 inverted at the start of Segment 2. All laps count. Saturday's Pit Crew Challenge IS qualifying — pole position AND pit-box selection order both decided by the timed pit stop.
- 17 drivers are already locked into the final segment, including Shane van Gisbergen (last Sunday's Watkins Glen winner), Tyler Reddick (Cup points leader by 129 over Hamlin), Kyle Larson (active All-Star wins leader with three), and Joey Logano (the 2024 winner and the all-time laps-led leader at this race).
- Memorial Day weekend pre-race ceremony — three Bronze Star recipients from Dover Air Force Base as Sunday grand marshals, NASCAR Hall of Famer Donnie Allison among the dignitaries, Mike Joy of NASCAR on FOX waving the green flag.
- The Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway runs next Sunday, May 24 — Dover Sunday is the on-ramp to the longest race of the year, right here at home.
Let me tell you something, folks.
The NASCAR All-Star Race goes to Dover Motor Speedway on Sunday and that's a piece of news in itself — the first time this showcase has been held at the Monster Mile in 41 years of the event. The 42nd running. The first ever north of the Mason-Dixon line. One million dollars on the line, no points on the line, 26 cars on a 1-mile concrete oval with 24 degrees of banking in the corners. (The full Dover Motor Speedway track guide is here if you want the technical detail.)
Three segments. Seventy-five laps. Then seventy-five more. Then a two-hundred-lap finale with a competition break around Lap 225. The top 26 from Segment 1 get inverted at the start of Segment 2 (because of course they do), and the final segment's 26-car field is set by a combination of points-paying race winners from 2025 and 2026, past All-Star Race winners running full-time, past Cup champions running full-time, the combined Segment 1 + Segment 2 finishing results filling in to 25 spots, and the NASCAR All-Star Fan Vote landing the 26th. (The full GNT format walk-through is here.)
And Saturday is its own piece of theater. The Cup qualifying session IS the Pit Crew Challenge. Green flag, one full lap at speed, then on the second lap the car peels into a designated pit stall for a four-tire stop with no fuel, then back out and race to the checkered flag. Total elapsed time wins pole. Fastest stop wins the Pit Crew Challenge prize. And — listen — the order finished in that Pit Crew Challenge is the order teams get to pick their pit boxes for the actual race. That is a big-time mechanic.
So who's hot?
Shane van Gisbergen. SVG won Watkins Glen last Sunday by 7.288 seconds over Michael McDowell. Seventh career Cup win. All seven on road or street courses. He drove from twenty-seven-plus seconds back after a green-flag stop on Lap 76 and took Ty Gibbs on Lap 93 and never looked back. The Trackhouse No. 97 walks into Sunday locked into the All-Star Race on the points-paying winners rule — and a million dollars and a trophy at the end of a 1-mile concrete oval is exactly the kind of weekend SVG is built for, even if the venue is the opposite of a road course.
Tyler Reddick. Reddick is leading the Cup championship by 129 points over Denny Hamlin and he finished fifth at Watkins Glen. The cleanest combination of speed and consistency in the sport right now. The All-Star Race doesn't pay points but the win counts on the résumé, and Reddick has been driving like a man building one of those for half a year.
Kyle Larson. Three All-Star Race wins — 2019, 2021, 2023 — makes Larson the active leader in this event. Hendrick has 11 All-Star wins as an organization, more than anyone in the sport. Chevrolet has 21 manufacturer wins, more than anyone in the sport. Larson is the front of that operation, and he is exactly the driver you'd pick to manage 75-lap segments and an invert.
Joey Logano. Logano has led 369 laps in 15 All-Star starts — the most laps led in this event by anyone, ever — and Logano won this race in 2024 at North Wilkesboro. He's locked in on past-winner rules. He's a past Cup champion. The Penske car has the All-Star pedigree, and Memorial Day weekend with a million dollars on the table is the kind of weekend that organization builds toward.
Kaden Honeycutt and Justin Allgaier are running the lower series this weekend. Honeycutt is the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series points leader — 29 ahead of Chandler Smith — coming off his first career Truck win at Watkins Glen on the 8th. Allgaier brings the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series form leadership to the BetRivers 200 on Saturday — three wins, five runner-ups, nine top-fives, and 179 stage points through 12 races. The kids who win down here define the next decade up there.
The track is the wild card. Cup teams have one weekend of Bristol data with the same Goodyear left-side tire (the D-5276), and one Dover weekend of right-side data from July of last year (the D-5260 — dedicated Dover concrete rubber returning). The teams that figured out Bristol in April are ahead on the left side. The teams that worked the Dover concrete in July are ahead on the right. Greg Heinrich, Goodyear's NASCAR product manager, summed up the technical brief: "We are bringing a tire setup specifically designed to withstand the track's high speeds and heavy loads, while also helping lay rubber on its concrete surface, particularly given how smooth it is."
Translation: the team with both notebooks open Sunday morning is ahead of everybody.
So who's cold?
Look. William Byron finished 36th at Watkins Glen and Joey Logano finished 38th after a left-front issue that caused a Lap 61 caution. Two locked-in All-Star contenders arriving at Dover off rough Sundays. A 350-lap race on concrete is the kind of place a championship-tier car can re-find its footing and remind everybody who they are.
And here's the thing about this event: the All-Star Race rewards experience at the format more than it rewards pure speed. The drivers who have lived through inverts and segment breaks and money on the line know how to manage 75-lap windows. The drivers who haven't, find out Sunday.
The pre-race ceremony leans into Memorial Day weekend. Three Bronze Star Medal recipients from the 436th Airlift Wing at Dover Air Force Base — Col. Bryan Ellis, Lt. Col. Robert Shuler, and Maj. Brandon Gremillion — serve as grand marshals, recently decorated for service during a 12-day war deployment at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The U.S. Army Fife and Drum Corps from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — The Old Guard — handles both the Presentation of Colors and the National Anthem. Donnie Allison, Alabama Gang, 2024 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee and a NASCAR ambassador for more than fifty years, is among the dignitaries. And Mike Joy, the NASCAR on FOX lead commentator, waves the green flag.
The All-Star Race is the showcase. Dover is the new stage. Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on FS1.
And then next Sunday, the Coca-Cola 600 runs at Charlotte Motor Speedway — six hundred miles, 6 p.m. ET green flag, the longest race of the year on the longest weekend of the year. The build-up starts at Dover.
I'll see you at the 600.