You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.
It was Wayne Gretzky — aka the hockey guy on the hood of Tyler Reddick’s Toyota at Darlington Last Year — who made that quote famous. And he would know. The Great One took 5,088 shots in his NHL career, resulting in a record 1,072 goals. We remember so, so many of those times he lit the lamp. We don’t remember the so, so many 4,016 shots he missed.
That brings us to the NASCAR garage, a world where memories of swings and misses seem to linger longer than most, especially when it comes to the hallowed ground that is the Cup Series. You want to start an hours-long impromptu therapy session? Just bring up the early-to-mid-2000s, when NASCAR underwent more simultaneous extreme makeovers than a Beverly Hill bridge club. From the initial iteration of the Chase postseason format and moving the Southern 500 off Labor Day weekend to abandoning Rockingham and the rollout of the winged shoebox-shaped machine that was the Car of Tomorrow, stock car racing self-inflicted too many overhauls at once.
In its search for younger eyeballs and wallets, it became something older eyes no longer recognized and saw longtime fans put their wallets away. Back then, we collectively ripped NASCAR leadership for it all, and we should have.
Now, we should applaud them. Or at least appreciate them. Because, like Gretzky back in the day, NASCAR is taking a lot of shots, but unlike their predecessors two decades ago, now there appears to be more thought behind the timing and impact of those shots. What’s more, if they miss — and they do miss — they don’t keep taking the same shot over and over again even while the rest of us are screaming, “That’s never going to work!” Instead, they take their lumps and move on to the next idea.
Kind of like building a temporary Major League Baseball stadium inside of a racetrack to play one game, as the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds will do this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway. Hardball purists can question the idea all they want. Or they can, heaven forbid, have fun for a few hours on a Saturday evening. And if it isn’t fun? Good news: There’s nothing that says it has to be done again. But if it is fun, perhaps they’ll try it again.
“The question is always, what’s your motivation? Why are you doing this? Do you have a larger vision or are you just saying, ‘What the hell’ and throwing stuff against the wall?” reigning Cup champ Joey Logano explained earlier this summer, in the midst of his 17th season in the series. “I don’t necessarily agree with it all, but I do agree with the willingness to try new things, as long we also stick with what made us who we are.”
It’s adding road and street races, of which there were six this season versus so many decades of only two. But it’s also returning to North Wilkesboro and The Rock, even if it is initially the All-Star Race or a Trucks/Xfinity doubleheader. It’s rotating Championship Weekend in coming years to different racetracks, but kicking that off at Homestead-Miami Speedway, the seemingly perfect home of the season finale for nearly two decades, but not since 2019. That move to Phoenix was done because fans had been demanding more short track racing. When people started asking, “Why did we leave Homestead?” it was moved back as the kickoff for the new finale model.
One foot always stepping forward, but with the other foot still planted in the past. It’s hard to do that and maintain one’s balance. So, stop worrying about falling down. Expect it. Instead of fearing a scraped knee or elbow, get back up and try again.
“I think there is a spirit that needs to exist behind decision making, of breaking new ground but also have that ground feel familiar, if that makes sense,” Ben Kennedy said in a conversation with Marty & McGee earlier this year. Kennedy, 33, is NASCAR EVP, chief venue & racing innovation officer, the great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France, and himself a former racer in Trucks and Xfinity. He is also the nephew of the man whom most blame for those ripped-out roots of the 2000s, former NASCAR chairman Brian France. “No one wants to forget where we came from. Especially not me, because that’s where I came from.”
See: Moving the Busch Clash from Daytona, where no one had cared about it or attended it for years, to the LA Coliseum. That was very much the brainchild of Kennedy. When all the juice had been squeezed from that event after three years, it was moved back home to North Carolina and Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, where there is never a lack of juice, especially the kind made from fermented corn. How deeply connected is Kennedy to NASCAR’s history? That’s also the racetrack where grandfather Bill France Jr. and grandmother Betty Jane France met, when he was being trained as the heir to the NASCAR throne and she was Miss Bowman Gray Stadium.
Still, one day, the Clash at the Madhouse will also run its course and the event will move to somewhere else, likely another location with a historic stock car backstory.
“That’s the difference, I think, between now and not so long ago,” says Chase Elliott, winner of this year’s inaugural Bowman Gray Clash. “Try it, and if it doesn’t work, fine. Next year, do something else. It seems like before decisions were made before, either they never made a decision at all, or if they did, everyone acted like, ‘Well, we’re stuck with this now forever.’ But you’re not. Other sports try stuff and if it doesn’t work, they move on. We do that now, too.”
When did that mentality change? Well, no one is ever going to put the words “pandemic” and “positive” in the same sentence, but in spring 2020, as NASCAR raced to become the first major sport to return to action, the only path back to the track was to employ a Mr. Fantastic-like flexibility when it came to scheduling. Back-to-back weekends and doubleheaders at the same racetracks. Midweek night races. Letting go of constant worry about what a not-full grandstand might look like on television and giving the audience at home the best show available.
By 2021 and a somewhat return to normalcy, NASCAR found itself freed from old habits. It also helped that old school yearslong contracts with racetracks had expired and a new, shorter-term race date business model had become the norm. Back in the day, the same tracks had the same two weekends for decades at a time, not because anyone in the garage wanted them, but because the contracts demanded it. As those lapsed, so did the “Well, we have to go there because we always have” mentality.
As August arrives and the release of the 2026 Cup Series schedule grows closer, we are putting into the rearview mirror NASCAR’s summer of experimentation. The remaining 14 Cup Series events are races we know on racetracks we know for the most part on weekends where we expect them to be, but only after this weekend’s second-ever Cup visit to the Iowa Speedway. It’s the period at the end of a summer sentence that has raced in Mexico City, swerved through the streets of Chicago, experienced a pair of still-new oval revivals in Nashville and Indianapolis, and in the middle of it all announced a 2026 Father’s Day street event that will be run at a San Diego Naval base.
Oh, and it spent a five-week chunk of that as part of the In-Season Challenge that most rolled their eyes at — Elliott didn’t even realize it existed until he was asked about it in a news conference — but ended up becoming a fun social media-fueled showcase for wunderkind winner Ty Gibbs and oft-forgotten third-generation racer Ty Dillon.
What’s next? No one is entirely sure. And that’s not scary. It’s exciting. As long as whatever new is still framed by the classic standbys. The Daytona 500 in February. The Southern 500 over Labor Day weekend. Martinsville Speedway as the fall chill begins to roll through the Appalachian foothills.
The ideas that worked — moving the Clash, reviving North Wilkesboro, occasional street racing — will stick around. The ideas that seemed to work but curiously went away — midsummer midweek night races and one dirt race per year — will hopefully return. The ideas that were groundbreaking at the time — the Charlotte Roval — will hopefully receive a revival through reimagining.
All of the above while an exploratory Playoff committee continues to discuss a possible points system reboot and the sanctioning body openly covets the addition of another manufacturer to join Chevy, Ford and Toyota. It feels like a lot because it is. However, it is not 2004 all over again. It is instead a thought-out series of ideas, leaning on lessons learned.
Shots taken. A lot of shots missed. But also, a lot of shots made.