NASCAR ready to start engines

Real Heroes 400 marks first race since March 13

The NASCAR Cup Series returns to racing Sunday at Darlington Raceway, marking the first race back since the pause in live sports due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 13.

The return will honour front line health care workers in partnership with The Real Heroes Project, an initiative by 14 sports leagues to show appreciation toward medical professionals in the fight against the coronavirus.

Each driver’s name above the window will be replaced with the name of an individual health care worker currently battling the pandemic as a thank you for their dedication. The health care workers will also appear in an onair mosaic to simultaneously give the command for drivers to start their engines.

The series was four races in when the shutdown took place, but the industry jumped into action introducing a whole new virtual world of racing competition. The ENASCAR iracing Pro Invitational Series was set up to give drivers and fans a sense of normalcy and their racing fix. The series took the sports world by storm and was a competitive and fun way to spend the downtime. But now that racing is back, the drivers are more than ready to get back in their cars.

“That’s the random factor where you never know what can happen, but I feel like at the same time all of us are going to be very courteous to one another, especially getting going, and making sure we don’t do anything foolish early on to make it look really bad,” said Ryan Blaney, driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford. “But I have confidence in the whole field. They’re all really good drivers and I think we’ll be ready to put on a good show.”

Pit selection and the starting lineup will be different and based on random draw and owner points. Pit stalls will be picked in advance and the pit boxes will be in the stalls already when the teams arrive.

As far as the starting lineup, positions 1-12 will be chosen by random draw from charter teams in those positions in owners points followed by 13-24 and 25-36 chosen the same way. Position 37- 40 will be for open teams in order of owner points.

The stage lengths were announced last week. The first stage will end on Lap 90, second stage on Lap 185 and the race is targeted for 293 laps total making the final stage 108 laps.

Team Penske’s Joey Logano won two of the first four NASCAR Cup Series races ( Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Phoenix Raceway) this season, while Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin dominated the Daytona 500 and Hendrick Motorsport’s Alex Bowman won the third race of the year at Auto Club Speedway. All three drivers are locked into the playoffs. Stewart-haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick, however, is currently leading the points standings just one point ahead of second place Logano.