The 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season is in full swing after Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won the Daytona 500 last week. The drivers are currently in Fontana, California for the Pala Casino 400 at Auto Club Speedway. The race will start on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET and air on Fox and the Fox Sports App.
With Stenhouse winning NASCAR’s biggest race of the year, he and his team look to do bigger things this season, such as winning the Cup Series title. Stenhouse is currently in third place in the cup standings and has never finished in the top 10 in his career. When it comes to competing at Auto Club Speedway, Stenhouse finished 10th in last year’s Cup Series race, his best finish since 2016 when he placed fifth.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“I think that everybody in the team believes in each other and we are just trying to make sure that we use everybody’s strengths and to backfill their weaknesses with somebody else’s strengths,” Stenhouse said in an interview with Racer in December. “I don’t think we’ve done a good job with that the last couple of years. I think now we have a better structure and everybody is going to kind of share some of that workload. What do they say, two heads are better than one, right? That’s kind of what we are restructuring right now to make sure we use everybody that is in our race shop.”
Sunday’s race will be the final race on Auto Club Speedway’s two-mile oval. The plan is to convert it to a new short track located on the current site, but further details on that will be announced at a later date. Auto Club Speedway’s two-mile oval opened as California Speedway in 1997. NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson has the most wins on the track with six.
“This is going to be a can’t-miss event,” Auto Club Speedway President Dave Allen said in a statement back in September. “This 2-mile oval has produced so many incredible memories during the past 25 years, and we know the final race on this surface will produce more memories that will last a lifetime. Moreover, the continued redevelopment of this property will inject more fuel into the local economy, and we’re excited what the future holds for our racetrack and the Inland Empire as a whole.”
