Ty Majeski has won twice at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park and finished an average of 3.75 across four starts there, the best record of any driver in the field. He has not won a race anywhere since November 2024.
That is 20 months, and it is not only his. Majeski's win at Phoenix that month was the last for ThorSport Racing, the team he still drives for, which has now gone 40 races without one.
He gets his best chance of the year tonight, in the TSport 200 presented by Warn Industries, 200 laps around a 0.686-mile asphalt oval in Brownsburg, Indiana, 8 p.m. ET on FS1. By average finish, the next three races on the schedule are the three best oval tracks of Majeski's career: IRP at 3.75, Richmond at 2.0 and New Hampshire at 5.0. After that the regular season is over.
IRP is also the strangest track on the schedule. It has hosted 21 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races, spread across two runs, from 1995 to 2011 and again since 2022. Not one of the 21 was won by a driver getting his first career victory. Among active tracks with at least three races, it is the only one that has never made a first-time winner.
The rest of the field arrives with its own arithmetic. Layne Riggs won here last year and leads the standings by 59 points over Kaden Honeycutt. Both have already clinched a place in the Chase, the series' 10-driver playoff. Riggs has four wins and the best short-track average finish of any full-time driver since the start of 2025, 6.13.
Chandler Smith won last Saturday at North Wilkesboro by 8.479 seconds. On a short track that is a rout, and it is the largest margin of victory in the history of the series on one. He can clinch a Chase spot tonight by scoring four points, which is roughly a 35th-place finish.
Below him the field is stacked on top of itself. Christian Eckes needs 36 points to lock in a spot and Gio Ruggiero 51. Positions 10 through 16 are separated by 41 points, and Stewart Friesen and Tyler Ankrum are tied on the cut line at 336 apiece.
Ford has won the last three races here, Majeski in 2023 and 2024 and Riggs in 2025. Only Chevrolet has ever won four straight at IRP, from 1995 through 1998.
The most recognizable name in the field is running one race. Kaulig Racing fields five Ram trucks this season, and the No. 25 is a rotating seat the team fills with a different guest driver at nearly every race, part of Ram's promotional program for its return to NASCAR. Tony Stewart has driven it. So have Travis Pastrana, Clint Bowyer, Ryan Newman and Jamie McMurray. Tonight it goes to Conor Daly, a Noblesville, Indiana, native who finished 12th in this year's Indianapolis 500 after leading four laps.
"I'm pumped to get this opportunity at IRP," Daly said. "Racing in front of the hometown crowd is always electric, and climbing into a Ram truck with Kaulig Racing for this race is going to be a blast."
Five of this season's 15 races have been decided by a pass on the last lap, one short of the record six set in 2018. Whether tonight becomes the sixth is the sort of thing IRP tends to answer late. What it has never done, across 21 races and 30 years, is hand the answer to someone who had never won before.