MOORESVILLE, N.C. — This weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway is the first of seven intermediate-style tracks on the Cup Series schedule.
Intermediates serve as the bread-and-butter of the calendar, where ovals from 1.3 miles to 2 miles comprise 25 percent of the races.
The 1.5-mile Las Vegas oval and it similarly-sized sister track, Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, host two races apiece, with each of their second races coming in the 10-race playoffs.
Last year, Rick Ware Racing displayed quiet confidence at intermediates. Its collective driver roster of Justin Haley, Corey LaJoie and Cody Ware scored nine top-25 finishes, a number headlined by Haley’s 13th-place run June 30 at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway.
When LaJoie took over for Haley for the final seven races of 2024, he also showed strength in RWR machinery, finishing 15th Sept. 29 at Kansas and 14th Oct. 20 at Las Vegas.
Ware was a contributor too, even with a limited, nine-race schedule. He finished 21st Aug. 19 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn and then repeated that result two months later at Las Vegas. Those efforts, augmented by a career-best fourth-place finish Aug. 24 at Daytona (Fla.) ‘l Speedway, earned Ware the second-best average finish among drivers who ran a limited Cup Series schedule.
Ware’s average result of 21.0 was second only to A.J. Allmendinger, who competed in 16 races and earned an average finish of 20.5.
“Looking back at 2024, our intermediate-track program was a strong suit,” said Ware, driver of the No. 51 Evel Knievel/Parts Plus Ford Mustang Dark Horse for RWR. “Justin, Corey, me – we all had some good, respectable runs. We worked hard to create a good baseline for this year.”
Las Vegas will be the first true test to see where that baseline stands in regard to the competition.
The first four races of the 2025 season were anomalies. The Cup Series has raced on back-to-back superspeedways at Daytona and Atlanta, a road course at Circuit of the Americas in Austin Texas, and a flat, mile-long oval in Phoenix. The ovals that make up the majority of the NASCAR calendar haven’t been represented. Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube changes that.
“We started the year with three straight wild-card races, where seemingly anything can happen,” Ware said. “It just felt like there were a lot of variables out of our control. Last week at Phoenix was probably the first race where I felt like we controlled our destiny a little more, and we came out of there with a respectable finish. Vegas will give us a gauge of where our performance is relative to the rest of the field.
“We’ve been pretty decent at Las Vegas, and that gives me the confidence to fire off in practice and qualifying to extract the most speed out of the car so we can see where we really are. Once we get this Vegas race underneath us, we’re going to have a better idea, directionally, of the places where we can work to make our cars better.”
Las Vegas is a fast, sweeping race track. Drivers lap the 1.5-mile oval in under 30 seconds with an average speed that approaches 185 mph. With its corners banked at 20 degrees, two- and three-wide racing is common, and its aged asphalt provides enough grip for drivers to search different lines in an effort to find more speed.
“Vegas is one of my favorite tracks to go to on the schedule. It’s one of the few 1.5-mile tracks that we go to that I feel has remained mostly unchanged in the last 10 years,” Ware said.
“It’s got a lot of character. Being out in the desert, it can be a little bit dusty, and you have some pretty significant bumps, especially over in the corners. You have to be very cognizant of your corner entry and the line you’re taking, because if you hit those bumps in turns one and two just the wrong way, it could end your day pretty quickly.
“And with the different lines you can run, you can find ways to make the car work for you even if your car isn’t exactly where you want it. If you don’t have a good handle on your car, there’s about a lane-and-a-half you can use in turns one and two. But if your car is handling well, you can take those bumps aggressively. That opens up a lot of racing opportunities from the bottom of the race track all the way to the wall.
“I’m interested to see if it’s going to be a race of raw speed, or if we’re going to have long green-flag runs where we’ll see a lot of strategy come into play.”
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