LONG POND, Pa. – Ten races remain before the playoffs as the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Pocono Raceway this weekend.

Justin Haley drives the No. 7 Chevrolet for Spire Motorsports in the NASCAR Cup Series. The 26-year-old Haley earned his lone Cup Series win in 2019 driving the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet at Daytona International Speedway.

Haley has gone 157 races since winning a Cup race, the longest streak among active drivers who have won in the series.

“I think we all like Pocono,” Haley said. “I think its a fun racetrack for us and we just kind of drive it. The three corners, the engineers and crew chief can worry about, on how to make it drive good. It’s tough, but when you have good cars there, its a pretty good place.”

The main event for the four days of racing at the Tricky Triangle is scheduled for Sunday when the 160-lap Great American Getaway 400 NASCAR Cup Series Race gets underway at 2 p.m.

CONCORD, N.C. — Margins in NASCAR have never been smaller.

Whether it’s the leveling effect of the Next Gen car or the evolving technological arms race among teams, the Cup Series has never been tighter. And as parity grows, so does the need to uncover even the slightest competitive advantage.

That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

From performance analysis to data visualizations, AI is playing an increasingly pivotal role in how race teams operate across the NASCAR garage. Teams are using AI not just to crunch numbers, but also to make quicker decisions, generate strategic insights — and even rewrite the way they approach race weekends.

“It just builds a little bit more each year,” said Josh Sell, RFK Racing’s competition director. “We’re doing more now than we were a year ago. And we’ll probably be doing more a year from now than we are sitting here right now. It just continues to evolve.”

ASK BETTER QUESTIONS

The rise of AI in NASCAR mirrors the broader tech world.

Early large language models — or LLMs — were trained to answer basic questions. But now, they can cite sources, detect tone and reason through complex decisions. That opens up a new world for how teams evaluate everything from strategy calls to post-race feedback.

For example, a full race’s worth of driver and crew radio chatter can be fed into an AI model that not only identifies which calls worked and which didn’t, but also interprets tone and urgency in real time.

“Information is speed in this game nowadays,” said Tom Gray, technical director at Hendrick Motorsports. “He who can distill the information quicker and get to the decision quicker, ultimately, is going to have the race win. “

FINDING THE TIME

AI is also helping teams develop talent and streamline operations.

Even if someone on the team isn’t an expert in a particular field, AI can help them learn new skills faster. That’s especially important in the highly specialized Cup Series garage — and it could help smaller teams close the gap with bigger operations.

RFK Racing, now a three-car Cup Series team, is already seeing those benefits.

AI helps reduce the hours team members spend manually analyzing photos or videos. Instead of having a crew chief sort through everything, the software flags the most relevant material and delivers it quickly. On the technical side, the team is also using tools like ChatGPT to assist with software development, solving coding problems in various languages and freeing up engineers to focus on execution.

“It’s trying to figure out ways where, instead of having a crew chief spending three hours studying whatever it might be — photos, videos — if we can shorten that to an hour of really impactful time,” Sell said. “Looking at things that are important to them, not searching to find those things. That’s the biggest gain we see, and certainly whether it’s through the week or on race weekends, time is our limiting factor.

“You have a finite amount of time from the time practice ends to when the race starts. What you’re able to do to maximize the efficiency of that time is kind of a race in and of itself.”

VISUAL DATA

At Hendrick Motorsports, the winningest team in Cup Series history, AI is being used both to look ahead and to look back.

The team now works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) — a relationship that began after Prime Video sponsored one of its cars. The partnership has accelerated Hendrick’s use of AI across several key areas.

One of those is visual communication. Engineers are now generating images to help share ideas, whether they’re pitching a new part or breaking down a technical strategy. That ability to visualize complex concepts instantly helps everyone stay aligned and efficient.

Hendrick is also leveraging its four decades of data. The team can now go back and test old strategies, setups and decisions using AI to predict how past insights might inform future success.

“We’ve had a long history in the sport,” Gray said. “Not only can we look forward, but we can also look backward, back-test all the information we have, and see how that predicts the future.”

He has worked his way up from multiple jobs in the race shop, including being part of Larson’s Cup Series championship-winning No.5 team in 2021.

“It’s a huge opportunity for me,” Wall said earlier this season. “I’ve been a lot of places in this organization, kind of worked my way up through it, so to get to this point, it’s the whole goal of my journey through this place was to get here. It’s a cool spot to be in.”

All eyes will now be on how Elliott works with Wall in the No.17 car this weekend as he performs double duty before Sunday’s Cup race at the ‘Tricky Triangle’.

BUCHANAN (WLUK) — A NASCAR Hall of Famer stopped by the Wisconsin International Raceway for a special ceremony Thursday.

Mark Martin, who raced numerous times at WIR early on in his career, was officially inducted into the track’s “Circle of Fame.”

His name will forever be engraved at the raceway’s honor wall. Racing fans coming from near and far said this induction is well deserved.

“Always a clean driver and he’s just a gentleman,” fan Timothy Mikelson said.

“Just to tell him thank you for how he raced. To me, he was always a champion,” said Matthew Latus, a fan from Fort Collins, Colorado.

It’s not everyday you see a legend. Dozens of race fans waiting in line couldn’t believe their eyes when “The Kid” walked up to sign autographs and take pictures with them. It brought out the inner-child in many of the fans.

“I’ve always wanted to meet racers like him, Matt Kenseth, and to get to actually meet him. It was nerve racking because again, he’s such a household name. He’s such a big racer,” fan Joseph Mikelson said.

Martin was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2017. He spent his early days racing at WIR from the late 1970s into the 80s, even earning Red, White and Blue State Champion in ’85 and ’86.

He said it’s great to be back in America’s Dairyland.

“It’s so cool to see the track. It almost looks the same. It made me feel like I could just get out there and make laps again, and I haven’t been in a racecar in 10 years,” Martin said.

In his NASCAR career, he’s considered the one of the greatest drivers to never win a championship, but he did win 40 Cup Series races. Martin said it’s a great honor to be put into WIR’s Circle of Fame, saying it was one of his favorite tracks.

He said he owes a lot to the Badger State for jumpstarting his career.

“I can’t stress enough my feelings toward Wisconsin fans and the Wisconsin racers, because those racers are the ones that taught me how to race,” Martin said.

Fans said it’s fitting Martin came back to the racetrack where he cut his teeth at early on.

“It means a lot, because the fact is, you know, Mark Martin and how successful he was on one of the biggest stages in America of racing,” fan Mike Van Domelen said.

When she left last year’s NHRA Virginia Nationals after a second-round loss to Tony Stewart, two-time Top Fuel world champion Brittany Force wasn’t sure if or when she would race again in the wake of the 300-mile-per-hour crash that sent her dad to VCU Medical Center with a Traumatic Brain Injury.

Nevertheless, 12 months later, the 38-year-old is back at Virginia Motorsports Park at the wheel of her Chevrolet Accessories dragster and John Force is back, too, as the manager of the team he founded more than half a century ago.

“After a devastating departure from Richmond last season, I’m eager to leave something good behind this time around,” Brittany said of her return to a venue at which three years ago she set track records for both time (3.654 seconds) and speed (335.82 mph) enroute to the winners’ circle.

“Although emotions were running high, our team had a solid outing last year,” she recounted, “winning our first (Mission Foods) 2Fast2Tasty challenge on Saturday and making a second-round appearance on Sunday.”

Despite a forecast of horsepower-sapping heat, the 18-time tour winner expects to contend for the championship Sunday in a 340-mile-an-hour race car prepared by David Grubnic and John Collins.

“We’re still adjusting our hot weather tune-up and the forecast is (for) high 80s to low 90s,” she said, “so that will give us the perfect opportunity to make some good runs in the heat.”

The 2013 Rookie of the Year has gleaned more positivity from the fact that her national record-holding dragster is wearing Chevy Accessories livery for the first time this year.

“The last time Chevy Accessories was our major sponsor was at Las Vegas in the fall (of 2024) – and we won the race,” she said, “so we’re looking to do well for all our sponsors this weekend and get back in the winner’s circle like we did a few weeks back in Epping (N.H.).”

The only woman to have won as many as 300 racing rounds in the sport’s signature category, Brittany is also excited about supporting a new philanthropic initiative launched by brother-in-law Graham Rahal and sister Courtney through the Graham and Courtney Rahal Foundation (GCRF) and Graham Rahal Performance (GRP).  

Funds from the campaign, which will span the remainder of the season, will support the expansion of the Optimal BrainHealth for Warfighters program at the University of Texas-Dallas, which, in partnership with Virginia High Performance, addresses specific brain health issues of members of the military.

This story was originally published on June 19, 2025.