One solid month of races — four events in what will likely be a sauna-like August — is all that remains to set the first Chase field of 16 drivers to race for 10 weeks and determine the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series championship.
The first of the final four happens Sunday at Iowa Speedway with the Iowa Corn 350 (3:30 p.m. ET, USA Network) in Newton, Iowa, where William Byron is the defending champion at the short track.
Ryan Blaney put his No. 12 Team Penske Ford on the pole for Sunday’s race at the 0.875-mile track by holding off Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet in pole qualifying.
The 2024 inaugural Iowa race winner, Blaney turned a lap of 23.474 seconds to top Larson’s time of 23.492, awarding the 2023 Cup champion his third pole this season.
Placing third through fifth in the field were Blaney’s teammate Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski and Tyler Reddick.
Like at North Wilkesboro, drivers again will deal with a unique number of laps. It was 450 at the refurbished iconic short track last month, and drivers will go a scheduled 350 circuits this week.
That sounds like a compromise, like one faction wanting 300 and the other replying, “That’s too short. Let’s make it 400 instead,” then meeting in the middle.
Blaney won at Iowa in 2024 by leading 201 laps and beating Byron by 0.716 seconds, but the Hendrick Motorsports pilot found Victory Lane a year later by outrunning Chase Briscoe with Blaney running fourth.
Blaney’s No. 12 and Byron’s No. 24 are certainly ones to keep an eye on, but the bigger picture Sunday will continue to be the standings.
The group trying to hold or get into a top-16 spot — say, from 13th-place Logano to his former Team Penske teammate Keselowski in 19th — deserves more attention as the series creeps closer to the regular-season finale at Daytona.
Denny Hamlin, Reddick, Blaney and Ty Gibbs have all qualified for the Chase, but fifth-place Carson Hocevar — the highest Chevrolet driver — holds just a 29-point lead over Christopher Bell back in 10th.
In between Hocevar and Bell are four drivers who have combined for only three wins: sixth-place Chase Elliott (two wins, minus-3 to Hocevar), Briscoe (one win, minus-15), Larson (minus-21) and Chris Buescher (minus-25).
Stat of the week: Rising star Corey Heim has the same number of wins in eight starts in 2026 as the Hendrick Motorsports drivers do in 88 combined, with Byron, Larson and Alex Bowman all winless while Elliott has two wins.
Times are tough at legendary HMS, which has 15 Cup titles and 322 victories since its 1984 inception, but it has gone three straight races without one of its four drivers inside the top 10 — an almost unheard-of multi-race slump last experienced in the Hendrick’s stable in 2020.
HMS drivers slot in sixth, eighth, 12th and 29th, with the lowest position belonging to the 33-year-old Bowman, who missed four races during a battle with vertigo and is set to retire from Cup racing after 2027.
Hamlin said the organization needs to seriously regroup.
“They need to have a Snickers,” kidded the points leader on his podcast. “They’ve not been (themselves) in a while. It’s not really indicative of their speed … (but) when I see William Byron in 12th, that’s mind-boggling to me.”
Will a Hendrick driver hit on something and be interviewed on the frontstretch in the heart of America’s farmland as darkness falls Sunday in Iowa, brandishing a checkered flag in one hand and taking a bite of a Snickers in the other to needle Hamlin on Sunday?
That would warm up August even more.
–Field Level Media
