It’s been an exciting year in NASCAR thus far, and the Xfinity race at Circuit of the Americas today at 5:00 PM EST may be the best race so far this year thanks to a bunch of road course ringers, a V8 Supercar Champion, and the mere existence of old school-style stock cars on a new era F1 track. It’s going to rule, and we’re going to have none other than Landon Cassill here in our Discord to talk us through the race.
If you’ve watched NASCAR the last few years or paid attention to motorsports you definitely know who Landon is, but for those who are new to joining us this year in watching the NASCAR Xfinity Series, I’ll provide a little background. After getting his start in karts, midgets, and late-model cars Landon worked his way up into stock cars and raced for years as a full-time professional driver in the various NASCAR series. He’s also co-host of The Money Lap motorsports newsletter/podcast with Autopian pal and contributor Parker Kligerman, who will be racing today. When he’s not doing all that he’s also the General Manager of Cassill Motors in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
He’s smart and hilarious and I’m looking forward to both his insights about today’s race and for the occasional zinger at Parker’s expense.
The race today should be pretty great, as qualifying yesterday was already super exciting:
Rookie (to NASCAR at least) Shane Van Gisbergen almost bested Cup Series Champion Kyle Larson in qualifying and managed to squeeze ahead of well-known road course driver AJ Allmendinger. Larson is a way more experienced stock car racer and knows the car better than SVG, but SVG is learning like a velociraptor in a Jurassic Park film.
It’s going to be fun, so come back here (and by here, I mean the Discord) at 5:00 PM ET today to chat about the race.
