NASCAR at Richmond Raceway
Richmond Raceway ran it back from 2025, selling out the grandstands yet again to more than 50,000 fans on Aug. 15 for the NASCAR Cup Series’ Cook Out 400.
Austin Dillon did not win his third straight event at the track. Instead, Joey Logano scored his second win of 2026 for Team Penske, leading 95 laps and holding off Chase Briscoe (who led 171 laps) for the victory.
After a subpar start to the year, Logano has risen up the standings; Richmond alone helped him vault four spots to ninth in points. The 36-year-old and three-time champion hadn’t won at Richmond since 2017, but he consistently runs well at the Virginia track.
“Richmond doesn’t change much,” Logano said during his post-race press conference. “It’s very consistent; it’s also [that] you usually see the same cars run good here every time. Once a driver, team, kind of get a hold of this place, you’re locked in to being good here.”
Briscoe, Austin Cindric, Chesterfield native Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott rounded out the top five, while Josh Berry, driving Virginia’s own Wood Brothers’ No. 21 car, landed a top-10 finish.
Hamlin’s fourth-place finish continued his strong season as he continues to pursue an elusive NASCAR championship. The 45-year-old leads the standings by 115 points, in good position to secure the top seed in the Chase for the Cup come end of August.
Chesterfield native Denny Hamlin drives the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing car in the NASCAR Cup Series.
“I love going to Richmond,” Hamlin told Richmond magazine in an extended interview prior to the race weekend. “It’s one of the tracks where I feel like I’ve got a million laps around there because I sat in the stands for so many years. … I just have an immense amount of pressure when I go there.”
Hamlin has an impressive four wins and 8.2 average finish (meaning he frequently places in the top 10 finishers) to his name two-thirds of the way into the 2026 NASCAR season.
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series racers were lined up for the green flag on Aug. 14, before a storm delay pushed the event to the following day.
Storms Push Trucks to Saturday Afternoon
The Craftsman Truck Series’ Black’s Tire 250 was scheduled for Friday, Aug. 14, but a lightning delay followed by a roaring deluge and storms forced NASCAR to postpone the race to noon the next day.
There wasn’t much competition when things did get going: Kaden Honeycutt led 225 of the race’s 250 laps, claiming the No.11 truck TRICON Garage team’s second win of the year.
The field was brimming with drivers from the commonwealth: Seven qualified for the starting lineup. Williamsburg’s Tristan McKee, making his series debut at age 16 for Spire Motorsports, finished the highest with an eighth-place effort.
Chesapeake’s Nick Leitz and Brenden “Butterbean” Queen finished 12th and 20th, respectively. Queen’s Kaulig Racing teammate and Manassas native Timothy “Mini” Tyrrell finished 29th. Kaulig also brought Emporia’s Elliott Sadler into the fold for a one-off return race; Sadler spent 25 years as a NASCAR driver and, at age 51, finished 32nd.
Hampton’s Connor Hall came home in 28th place with sponsorship from HG Meat Packing in Goochland, and Richmond’s own Dystany Spurlock finished 35th in Team Reaume’s No. 2 machine. Spurlock, a Highland Springs High School graduate, has raced motorcycles in NHRA and became the first Black woman to run in NASCAR competition earlier this year.
“I love that I am the example that other little boys and girls can look up to,” Spurlock said in an interview on Aug. 14. “I never sought out to say, ‘Hey, I want to be this role model,’ but I just so happen to be, and I love that because I’m all for people.”
Richmond Raceway Celebrates 80 Years of Racing
Raceway President Lori Waran and company had a daunting task in preparing the venue for its anniversary celebration.
“It was huge for us to pull that off and the team to do it, and they did a great job,” Waran says. “We prepared starting the day after the race last year, [which] was the first time that we’d sold out in 18 years, and that was great news, but you want to plus it up for the next year — how do you get back there, and then make sure that the experience is even better for those that come back?”
Fans had plenty to do over the course of the weekend; they visited the fan zone outside the track to buy merchandise featuring their favorite drivers (the new die-cast model of Ryan Blaney’s BodyArmor Flash I.V. Caffeine Ford sold out), visited sponsor tables, took part in interactive experiences, and more.
At the Old Dominion Building, the “NASC’Art” exhibition featured motorsports artwork, cars on display and a Virginia Museum of History & Culture display documenting the track’s 80th anniversary. Inside the FanGrounds, racegoers could wander the car and truck garages, see crews working on the vehicles, and potentially run into their favorite drivers.
Dignitaries included Major League Baseball veteran and Norfolk native B.J. Upton, who waved the green flag for the truck race, and the newly crowned Miss Virginia, Maddie Marchant.
“Through [the Miss Virginia] experience, I’ve been able to share my community service initiative, Invisibility, which is all about helping those with invisible disabilities and diseases feel seen,” Marchant said on Aug. 15. “I also am a huge advocate for those with celiac disease because I myself live with the disease, and I am putting gluten-free foods and cross-contamination safety trainings in all public schools across Virginia with the help from senators and congressmen in our state.”
RVA Races Forward Into 2027
Next year, NASCAR’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series (formerly the Xfinity Series), returns to the track after a two-year absence in place of the trucks. While Richmond will still have just one race weekend, it moves into early September, where it had long stood as the cutoff to NASCAR’s Chase and playoffs until the date was changed in 2021.
In 2027, the raceway will kick off the postseason for both the Cup Series and O’Reilly Series. The O’Reilly cars — including Sam Hunt Racing, owned by Virginia Commonwealth University alum and Midlothian native Sam Hunt — take the green flag on Sept. 10. The Cup Series begins its own Chase the following day, Sept. 11. Plan on catching all the action at “America’s Premier Short Track” when NASCAR is back next year.
