USA Network has announced that “Race For The Championship,” a new unscripted series about the drivers and teams of the NASCAR Cup Series, will premiere Thursday, Sept. 1 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
You can check out a trailer for the series above.
Below is the full press release on the series from USA:
Start your engines! USA Network’s new unscripted series “Race For The Championship,” premiering Thursday, Sept. 1 at 10 p.m. ET/PT, will give a behind-the-scenes look at the elite drivers and teams competing in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Documenting the lives of the sport’s best on and off the track, viewers will get a rare glimpse of what it takes to balance personal relationships with the pressure to perform. Packed with action, heart and drama, this exhilarating series will offer up a taste of what it’s really like to partake in the world’s top level of stock car racing. Watch as the drivers are pushed mentally and physically to their limits, navigating a NASCAR season unlike any other – with a new car, new tracks and new challenges – for their chance to make history.
Over 10 episodes, “Race for the Championship” will tell the story of the 2022 NASCAR Cup season and playoffs. The series will feature past champions such as Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski, along with other drivers eager to write their own NASCAR legacies, including Ryan Blaney, Daniel Suárez, Ross Chastain, Corey LaJoie and others.
The 10-week NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs begin at Darlington Raceway on Sept. 4 at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT on USA. For playoffs results and schedule, click HERE.
The official home of the NASCAR championship and playoffs, NBC Sports will once again present the final 20 NASCAR Cup Series races and 19 NASCAR Xfinity Series races in 2022 across NBC, USA Network and Peacock, culminating with the championship at Phoenix Raceway on Nov. 5-6. Click here for more information on NBC Sports’ 2022 NASCAR coverage.
“Race for the Championship” is produced by NASCAR Studios with NASCAR’s Tim Clark, Matt Summers, Tally Hair and Amy Anderson, and Chaz Gray serving as executive producers.
“Race For The Championship” is the second unscripted series featuring NASCAR that’s debuted on USA this season.
“Austin Dillon’s Life In The Fast Lane,” which debuted in June, stars the past Daytona 500 winner and his wife Whitney and son Ace, plus one of Dillon’s pit crew members, Paul Swan, and his wife, Mariel.
Drivers expressed some strong opinions about the Next Gen car’s passing ability after Bristol. Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin, among others, felt the car made it too hard to pass.
Brad Keselowski agreed that it was hard to pass, but opined that it’s supposed to be hard.
The passing complaints surprised me. NASCAR’s loop data reported 2,690 green-flag passes for the 2022 fall Bristol race. That’s 980 passes more than the 1,710 green-flag passes recorded for last year’s fall Bristol race.
So are the drivers wrong? Perhaps their comments reflect the accumulated frustration of a long night plagued by so many equipment problems?
Numbers don’t lie. But they also don’t give up their truths easily.
Each car carries a transponder that emits a signal unique to that car. Wire loops embedded in the track (and on pit road) record each of these signals. The loops capture a car’s precise position on track — and its position relative to other cars.
The graph below shows green-flag passes by race for the 2022 season. Because races are different lengths (and tracks different sizes), it’s hard to compare data.
But superspeedway races stand out for having thousands more green-flag passes than other types of races.
I’ve always been skeptical of passing metrics at superspeedways. Those extraordinarily large numbers just tell us that two or three lanes of cars traded positions a lot. That doesn’t measure passing in a way that illuminates the racing.
What I hadn’t appreciated until I dove into these numbers is that they’re not exactly what you think they are at other types of tracks, either.
According to loop data, Chase Elliott made more green-flag passes than any other driver at Bristol. But did it really take him 154 passes to go from 23rd to second?
Although Elliott’s transponder switched positions with other cars’ transponders 154 times, not all of those events are what I think of as “passing.”
I view passing as capturing a position and holding it for more than a straightaway. But that’s not what loop data is designed to measure.
NASCAR doesn’t make detailed loop data publicly available. What I can access is each driver’s running position each lap. Using that data, I developed a different kind of passing metric.
I’ll use Kyle Larson as an example. Bristol is a good race for this type of analysis because there were no green-flag pit cycles. Counting accurately is confusing enough as it is.
The next graph shows Larson’s running position as a function of lap number. Caution laps are shaded yellow, although you can probably infer cautions from the position changes.
I examined each green-flag segment, noting Larson’s positions at the start and end of each segment, and how many times he changed position in-between. The table below shows the results.
Larson started fifth at Bristol and finished fifth. Over the course of 420 green-flag laps, he made 31 passes and was passed 15 times. That produces a pass differential of +16, meaning that he gained 16 more positions than he lost.
If he gained so many positions, how did he end up fifth? He lost 16 positions during pit-stop cycles. That’s not the number of positions he lost on pit road. That’s positions lost including factors like other drivers staying out.
Loop data attributes 109 green-flag passes to Larson. It’s not that one number is wrong and one is right: They’re measuring different things.
At this stage of the metric, I only feel confident in my results for drivers who finished on the lead lap. Five drivers accomplished that feat at both the 2021 and 2022 fall Bristol races. I compare their passing data in the table below.
My metric shows passing up by 11.9%, while passing loop data on the same set of drivers shows it up by 55%. If you think of my metric as defining successful passes and loop data as measuring attempts, it shows that drivers had to make more attempts to pass for each successful pass this year than they did last year.
By that measure, the drivers are right that it is harder to pass.
But they are passing.
At this point, it’s impossible to tell whether the limitation is the Next Gen car itself or a level of competition that’s produced 19 different winners this season already.
Welcome to the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, Round of 12.
Next up is Texas Motor Speedway, which will be hosting the first event in the second round of the playoffs. Ryan Blaney won the All-Star Race in May there.
A dozen drivers will continue pursuit of the 2022 championship in Sunday’s 334-lap race. The second round will continue Oct. 2 at Talladega Superspeedway and conclude Oct. 9 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval.
Chase Elliott has the point lead entering the weekend. Below the cutline are Chase Briscoe (-4 points), Alex Bowman (-6), Daniel Suarez (-6) and Austin Cindric (-7). After the Roval race, the bottom four drivers will be eliminated.
This weekend also marks the start of the Xfinity playoffs.
Here’s a look at the TMS weekend schedule:
Friday: Sunny and hot. High of 97.
Saturday: Sunny and hot. High of 97.
Sunday: Mostly sunny. Stray shower or thunderstorm possible. High of 96. 15% chance of rain.
Garage open
Garage open
Track activity
Garage open
Track activity
The NASCAR Cup Series playoff list is much lighter entering Sunday’s race at Texas Motor Speedway.
The playoffs’ first round eliminated Tyler Reddick, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon.
Entering the Round of 12 Sunday are six Chevrolet drivers, four Ford drivers and two Toyota drivers — a group that includes three former champions (Chase Elliott, Joey Logano and Kyle Larson) and one rookie (Austin Cindric).
It’s quite a mix, as is the round itself. After Texas, the playoffs move on to Talladega Superspeedway and then to the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval for the next cutoff race.
Sunday’s 500-mile race (3:30 p.m., ET) will be televised by the USA Network.
A look at drivers to watch at TMS:
Chase Elliott
Elliott is back at the top of the points after a second-place run Saturday at Bristol. Texas isn’t one of his better tracks, but he finished seventh in this race a year ago despite starting in the rear because of multiple inspection failures.
Joey Logano
Logano will be a favorite to reach the Round of 8, but he hasn’t won a race since early June. At Texas, he has nine top 10s in the past 11 races.
Ross Chastain
Chastain sits third in the playoff standings but faces a tall task at Texas, a track where he has never led a lap. He finished 28th at TMS a year ago after being involved in a crash on Lap 31.
Austin Cindric
The playoffs’ lone rookie hasn’t won since visiting victory lane in the season-opening Daytona 500. He squeezed into the Round of 12 in the final position and is seven points below the cutline.
Ryan Blaney
Can Blaney continue the magic act that involves not winning races but staying in the championship hunt? He’s never won a points Cup race at Texas but has seven finishes of eighth or better in the past eight races.
Denny Hamlin
Top 10s in all three races in the first round of the playoffs keep Hamlin in contention for another shot at what would be his first Cup championship. He has a good record at TMS.
Over the past two years, Charles “Red” Farmer has had COVID-19. Twice.
He has had a heart procedure. Twice.
He has had pneumonia. Double pneumonia.
Yet the biggest news concerning Farmer occurred just last week.
He won a race.
Yes, Farmer, who will be 90 years old October 15, won a 10-lap heat race at the Talladega Short Track, a 1/3-mile dirt track located near Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.
Farmer is a regular at the track. That is, he was until health problems limited his racing over the past two years. Some thought heart and breathing issues might finally sideline Farmer, who has won more than 700 short-track races and whose long resume in the sport earned him induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2021.
Those who thought that didn’t know Farmer well.
“He’s got a gene that nobody else has,” Donnie Allison, Farmer’s long-time friend and fellow member of the Alabama Gang, told NBC Sports. “Whatever keeps driving him, I’m glad he’s got it. I believe if he stops doing what he’s doing, he might die.”
Farmer was hard at work in his shop Wednesday but stopped — somewhat reluctantly — to talk about his latest success.
“I started on the pole and went into Turn 1 and came off Turn 2 in the lead,” he told NBC Sports. “Then I pulled away from the field. The car was real good, hooked up all the way.”
Farmer talks about his racing as if he’s 29, not 89. There is little mention of his age, except when he runs into the reality that health problems sometimes ride along with him.
“I talked to him the week before he won the race,” Allison said. “We were in his shop, and all he could talk about was his brand new car. He expected to do well in it.”
Farmer plans to be back in competition at the Talladega dirt track for three races over the next month.
“I was sick for two years, and now I’ve got shortness of breath real bad,” he said. “I’ve been able to run some hot laps but hadn’t been able to race until recently. I tried a heat race a couple of months ago, and I almost died before I got out of the car. I was so short of breath. But my doctors changed my medicine around a little bit trying to strengthen my heart.
“After I won the heat race and went across the scales, I was breathing a little bit hard, but nothing like I had been.”
Farmer, who has raced with a NASCAR license since 1953, said he realized after winning the heat race that his breathing issues would prevent him from completing the feature. He started on the outside of the front row and dropped out of the field on the pace lap.
“I let the field go by,” he said. “I ran a few laps so I could get my ‘gas’ money, then got out and watched my two grandsons race.”
The short track plans to celebrate Farmer’s 90th birthday with the Red Farmer 90th Birthday Bash race October 15.
“I’m hoping to run the feature race on one of the weekends coming up,” Farmer said. “I’ll just have to play it by ear.”
He already has circled the January Ice Bowl, which starts the season at the Talladega Short Track, on his schedule.
Allison, 82, said he remains impressed by Farmer’s determination to run the next lap.
“He’s trying to get his strength back,” Allison said. “It’s amazing even as long as I’ve known him to see him do what he’s doing. I’m a lot younger and a lot stronger, and I’d have a hard time doing it.”
