NASCAR Sets New Date for Postponed YellaWood 500
NASCAR will be competing on a new date due to the YellaWood was postponed on Sunday due to inclement weather. It was announced that the NASCAR Cup Series Round of 12 playoff race at Talladega Superspeedway will now take place Monday at 1 p.m. ET and will air on the NBCSN as well as the NBC Sports App. Rain hit the track Sunday morning and continued throughout the day. The race was set to start at 3:45 p.m., but another wave of rain hit the area again, leading NASCAR to postpone the race.
"I always hate these days. I just want to get in and go," Martin Truex Jr. said. "Still thinking about the same things as we were this morning and last night. … Hopefully stay at the front and get some stage points and hopefully be running at the end. That's always the first goal."
Truex is scheduled to start sixth at the YeallaWood 500 and is looking to have more success in Talladega than he had had in the past. In his last 33 starts, Truex only had two top-five finishes at the track. "It's not been very good lately," he said. "We've kind of been in bad relationship these last couple of years. I don't know. I enjoy going there. I enjoy racing there. It just been a real challenge to get to the finish, so hopefully, this time around we will have a little bit better luck. Just been caught up in a lot of accidents. Nowhere to hide there. It's just not been that good to us. We haven't finished a speedway race this year, so I guess the odds are in our favor to finish this one, hopefully."
The race couldn't be held on Sunday night since Talladega doesn't have lights. As mentioned by ESPN, the Xfinity race that was held on Saturday had to end six laps early because of the impending darkness. Additionally, pushing back would be a problem for NBC since the network is airing Tom Brady's return to the New Egland Patriots.
"I'm going into a superspeedway race below the cutoff line, so it's definitely a stressful weekend," Alex Bowman, a driver who is also in the playoffs, said on Sunday. "We're going to race to win, right? That's our game plan."