• Ricky Stenhouse Jr. confronted Carson Hocevar after a race in Mexico City.
• Hocevar spun Stenhouse on Lap 90, leading to a post-race confrontation.
• This incident follows a previous on-track clash between the two drivers at Nashville Superspeedway.

Carson Hocevar better watch his, uh, rear.

This weekend, the NASCAR Cup, Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series will race at Pocono Raceway for their lone stop at The Tricky Triangle in 2025.

NASCAR Cup Series’ The Great American Getaway 400

• Sunday, June 22
  • 2 p.m. (All times Eastern)
• 160 laps
  • Stages end on laps 30, 95, 160
• Prime Video, Motor Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
• Last year’s winner: Ryan Blaney

In total, 37 drivers are on the entry list. Brennan Poole makes his return to the Cup Series behind the wheel of the No. 44 NY Racing Chevrolet, the only open entry.

Odds for NASCAR Cup Series at Pocono 2025

From favorites to long shots, here are the opening odds for the race weekend, per Caesar’s Sportsbook.

• Denny Hamlin +400
• Ryan Blaney, Kyle Larson +600
• William Byron +700
• Christopher Bell +850
• Tyler Reddick +1000
• Chase Elliott +1400
• Chris Buescher +1400
• Daniel Suarez +1600
• Chris Buescher, Brad Keselowski, Ty Gibbs +1800
• Carson Hocevar +2000
• Joey Logano +2200
• Alex Bowman, Ross Chastain +2500
• Chase Briscoe +2800
• Bubba Wallace +3500
• Kyle Busch +4000
• Josh Berry +4500
• Erik Jones, Ryan Preece +5000
• Ricky Stenhouse Jr. +6000
• Austin Cindric +6500
• A.J. Allmendinger, Daniel Suarez +7500
• Michael McDowell +10000
• Austin Dillon, Noah Gragson, John Hunter Nemechek, Zane Smith, Shane Van Gisbergen +25000
• Cole Custer, Justin Haley +30000
• Todd Gilliland +35000
• Riley Herbst +50000
• Ty Dillon +75000
• Cody Ware +200000
• Brennan Poole +250000

NASCAR Xfinity Series’ Explore the Pocono Mountains 250

• Saturday, June 21
  • 3:30 p.m. (All times Eastern)
• 100 laps
  • Stages end on laps 25, 50, 100
• CW, NASCAR Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
• Last year’s winner: Cole Custer

All drivers will make the race with 38 total entries.

Notable entries include Chase Elliott (No. 17), Jason Bonsignore (No. 19), and Carson Ware (No. 35).

NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series’ Millertech Battery 200

• Friday, June 20
  • 5 p.m. (All times Eastern)
• 80 laps
  • Stages end on laps 20, 40, 80
• FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
• Last year’s winner: Corey Heim

The truck race will featured 34 drivers.

Notable entries include Brandon Jones (No. 1), Norm Benning (No. 6), Carson Hocevar (No. 7), Conner Jones (No. 44), and Luke Baldwin (No. 66).

Dominic Aragon is currently the editor-in-chief for The Racing Experts.

From Grants, New Mexico, USA, Aragon started watching NASCAR in 2004 and has been covering the sport since 2009. Aragon is a 2012 graduate of Grants High School and a May 2016 graduate of the University of New Mexico with a B.A. in Mass Communications & Journalism. Aragon has worked in local and national media, as a musician, and an educator. He is co-author of the 2024 book “All of It: Daytona 500 Champion Tells the Rest of the Story” with racer Geoff Bodine.

Aragon, his wife Feliz, and son Christopher currently reside in Grants, New Mexico, USA.

You can reach Dominic at daragon@theracingexperts.net.

Pennsylvania state police say they will roll out adjusted traffic patterns to help drivers heading to the Pocono NASCAR race on Sunday, June 22, at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond.

The following traffic patterns will be in effect:

• Prior to the race when needed, Route 115 from Interstate 80 to the raceway will be converted to two lanes and will be one way southbound.
  • This conversion will be put into effect at approximately 11 a.m. and continue until all traffic has entered the track grounds or traffic has been alleviated.
• Following the race, Route 115 from the raceway to Interstate 80 will be converted to two lanes and will be one way northbound, until the raceway parking lots are cleared. Traffic will not be allowed to travel south on Route 115 south of Interstate 80.
  • This conversion will take place with 25 laps remaining in the race.
• Stoney Hollow Road has been designated a no parking and tow away zone from Long Pond Road to the Interstate 80 overpass. It will be properly posted and enforced. Any vehicle in violation will be removed at the owner’s expense.
• Following the race, the Interstate 80 eastbound off-ramp at the Blakeslee exit (Exit 284) will be closed to traffic.

Police say motorists should take note of signs posted along Route 115 and travel in the appropriate traffic lanes for their desired parking area.

Outbound traffic traveling north will have similar signs with lane restrictions for Interstate 80 and Route 115 access, police say.

Race weekend is expected to draw big crowds to the Poconos starting June 21, so drivers should be ready for heavier traffic and possible delays, not just on Route 115 and I-80, but also along Routes 209, 940, and 903, police say.

Police say if you usually take Route 115, consider using I-80, Route 33, Route 209, or the Northeast Extension of the Turnpike instead.

Two NASCAR insiders had a lot to say about Shane van Gisbergen winning the NASCAR Cup Series Mexico City race and Ty Gibbs falling short. On The Teardown podcast, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic weighed in on van Gisbergen winning his first race of the season.

“This is exactly what we would have thought all along,” Gluck said about van Gisbergen winning the road course race. “This is exactly what we thought coming into the season, this is why we both picked him to make the playoffs. Yeah, it’s taken him a while to get up to speed on oval racing. I think he might have been more off than we thought, but he’s had some good oval runs recently.”

Gluck also said that the track at Mexico City matched Shane van Gisbergen’s skillset. He then talked about Ty Gibbs being the only driver to compete with van Gisbergen.

More on Shane van Gisbergen and Ty Gibbs at Mexico City

“Ty Gibbs was going to be competitive with him. Unfortunately, Ty Gibbs was screwed by the timing of the [Carson] Hocevar caution,” Gluck stated. “I talked to Ty Gibbs on pit road afterwards, and he was trying to keep a positive attitude. I said, ‘Do you think you had something for SVG or were you just going to run top two or top three anyway?’ He said, ‘No, I think we could have beat him.’ He could have.”

Bianchi said he spoke to van Gisbergen after the race, and he told him that when he was running second before the caution, he tried to make a move but was having issues with the car. “It would have been interesting to watch how SVG would have managed that,” Bianchi said. “Honestly, it would have been really interesting to see how Ty Gibbs would have managed that. We know how aggressive Ty Gibbs can be at times. Coming down the stretch, if they’re going head-to-head, I would presume that Ty is going to be going all out for it. I think we would have saw a hellacious battle.”

Van Gisbergen has clinched a playoff spot with the victory at Mexico City. And with the playoffs having five road-course tracks, it’s possible the New Zealand native could make a serious run at the Cup Series title in his first year as a full-time driver.

Once upon a time, NASCAR was more than just a spec series that relied primarily on decals to differentiate one manufacturer’s body shape from another. Maybe that’s a bit unfair as a description of the current vibe of America’s most popular oval racing series, but it’s certainly true that in previous decades there was far more variance from one competitor’s entry to the next, which made them easily identifiable to fans in the stands.

In fact, NASCAR rules used to feature a fair amount of leeway when it came to what a stock car could look like, as long as it bore a close-enough resemblance to models that were sold in showrooms the Monday morning following the race. This was a different type of permissiveness than today’s standard, where Toyota can get away with sculpting a two-door coupe out of fiberglass with a four-door Camry sedan’s name slapped on the front bumper. Instead of the track cars winking their way into accommodating the marketing needs of the mothership, it was product planners on the hot seat who were forced to come up with a business case for building race-friendly autos that customers might actually want to buy.

Perhaps the most famous example of this cross-pollination is the winged car phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Dodge and Plymouth sent Charger Daytonas and Superbirds onto dealer lots (where their super-tall trunk spoilers languished under the withering stare of conservative shoppers). Less well known, however, was the 1980s revival of this same concept, when automakers battled it out to build slippery shapes that could pull double duty on the starting grid and (hopefully) in the garages of performance-obsessed enthusiasts.

Known as “aerocoupes,” they represented the last time American car companies took the chance on leveraging their production design resources to gain an advantage on the starting grid. Although their time was brief—canceled out by overall improvements in aerodynamics that saw a sea change in the looks of nearly every passenger car on the market—rare survivors have become a welcome oddity for collectors eager to embrace their motorsports history.

Don’t Be a Square

By the middle of the 1980s, it was clear there was a revolution underway when it came to automotive design. Little by little, engineering advances and regulatory changes were making it possible to abandon the blocky shapes that had defined much of the previous decade in favor of sheet metal that curved and swooped itself into forms that generated far less drag.

Unfortunately for General Motors, cross-town rival Ford was at the forefront of these changes, being among the first OEMs to take advantage of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s loosening of its sealed-beam headlight requirement, a straightjacket that dictated upright front end design for far too long. The 1986 Ford Taurus implemented a composite headlight that was flush with the vehicle’s body work, which gave it an important advantage in the wind tunnel. While the Taurus intended to use its enhanced slipperiness to improve fuel economy, the Blue Oval planned to gift the same illumination to its NASCAR competitor, the Thunderbird—a model whose sleek shape (which had first debuted in 1983) was already head and shoulders above the 90-degree countenance of the G-body models fielded by Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, and Oldsmobile, especially when measuring top speeds on the back straight.

With an even more aero-friendly refresh of the Thunderbird in the pipeline for the 1987 model year, and the G-body’s lifecycle extending at least a year or two after that, GM was forced to get creative. The end result was a crash-course engineering program aimed at somehow massaging the block-like Chevy Monte Carlo and Pontiac Grand Prix into silhouettes that had more in common with a bird than a brick.

Stretch ’Em Out

Neither Chevrolet nor Pontiac—GM’s prime movers in NASCAR competition—were prepared to completely retool G-body production simply to win on Sunday. That meant any changes had to work around the existing square framework of the coupes.

A tried and true strategy when improving an automobile’s aerodynamics is to extend its trailing edge, tapering it so as to reduce the amount of pressure-caused drag. “Kammback” racers from the 1960s and ’70s took advantage of the benefits of stretched bodywork in sports car competition, as did GM’s pioneering EV1. Even today’s semitruck setups sometimes offer tack-on panels designed to do the same at the back of a cargo trailer.

Although new sheet metal was out of the question, the rear glass of both the Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS and the Pontiac Grand Prix offered a tantalizing opportunity to ape the shape of the Ford Thunderbird’s deck. By stretching out the glass to nearly mid-way (Chevrolet) or the three-quarter mark (Pontiac) down the trunk lid, both cars could effectively extend their profiles and reduce wake turbulence and back pressure drag at the same time—all relatively cheaply, given that the only major update was a new “notchback” trunk to accommodate the modified glass. Up front, a similar extension was in place, pushing the nose of each car downward with a new front clip.

This one simple change paid immediate dividends on the race track. Gone was the edginess that the G-body had displayed when driving in tightly packed superspeedway traffic, and in its place was a 3% drag improvement that added more than a few miles per hour when entering corner four at tracks like Talladega (where Ford flaunted its aerodynamic dominance). With drag coefficients in the 0.36 range, GM’s special G-bodies were finally within spitting distance of the Thunderbird’s 0.35 rating on the street, and in NASCAR that translated directly into wins: Dale Earnhardt won the Winston Cup in both 1986 and 1987 behind the wheel of the freshly minted Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe.

Two Paths Diverged on an Assembly Line

Despite ostensibly playing for the same team, implementations of the Kammback strategy made by Chevy and Pontiac were actually unique, and they were assembled by different Michigan-based third-party shops after being plucked from the production line. The Monte Carlo’s triangular, 25-degree rear window bubble looked a lot like someone plopping a greenhouse down on the existing trunk and calling it a day. Pontiac, on the other hand, actually made the effort to sculpt its new glass into revised body work along the rear deck, integrating it into a larger, curved-edge spoiler that sat at the very tip of the trunk lid (versus a simple flip-up spoiler for the Chevrolet).

Over the years there have been reports that the more polished look of the Grand Prix package was tied to Pontiac tagging in its NASCAR team chiefs for advice, while also doing extensive wind tunnel testing. In contrast, Chevrolet reportedly asked its engineers to come up with something quick and cheap, without much concern for how it looked or the details of its ultimate performance at speed (with the assumption that NASCAR teams could handle tunnel tweaking on their own time).

In addition to their unusual rear quarters and bespoke noses, the Monte Carlo—officially labeled the “Aerocoupe”—also gained a few other features: a 3.78 rear gear ratio, dual exhaust, F41 suspension package, 15-inch alloy wheels, and a tachometer. The Grand Prix—simply branded the “2+2”—was given a bespoke red-striped, silver-paint appearance package, complete with a fiberglass trunk lid.

The Pontiac also came with a 3.08 gear set, which didn’t do its standard 165-horsepower, 305-cubic-inch V-8 any favors (nor did its four-speed automatic gearbox). The Chevy was marginally quicker, what with 180 horses from a same-displacement V-8 and a more aggressive rear axle, but neither model was especially impressive in a straight line.

Ultimately, they didn’t have to be. General Motors wasn’t marketing either model to gain credibility with real-world customers, but rather simply to homologate the body changes with NASCAR. In order to make things officially official, 200 examples of the Monte Carlo were made available during their first year of production in 1986, with Chevrolet obliterating that figure by selling more than 6000 in 1987. Pontiac made the 2+2 a single-model-year vehicle and managed to move about 1100 examples.

Racing History on the Cheap

Both aero-express G-bodies are relatively rare when contrasted against the hundreds of thousands of standard editions—or even the heaping helping of SS Monte Carlos—that were built over the course of the 1980s. That being said, pricing for each remains well within the realm of the affordable: Aerocoupes in #3 (good) condition can be had for just under $24,000, which is about $5K more than you’d pay for the standard two-door. The Pontiac 2+2, despite being thinner on the ground, doesn’t typically outpace its Bowtie-wearing rival.

As conversation pieces, these bubble-glass weirdos are an interesting addition to any gathering of ’80s performance metal. As historical documents, both the Aerocoupe and the 2+2 stand out as underappreciated chapters in NASCAR’s history, from a time when thinking outside the G-body box was encouraged in way that is simply no longer encouraged on the modern racing circuit.