Oct. 4, 2020 By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service For the second time in as many seasons, Denny Hamlin broke Matt DiBenedetto’s heart, before NASCAR removed the pathos from the situation with a post-race ruling. At the end of a third overtime at Talladega Superspeedway, Hamlin beat DiBenedetto to the finish line to win by .023 seconds—roughly two feet—in Sunday’s YellaWood 500 NASCAR Cup Series Playoff race at the 2.66-mile track. But NASCAR erased the close call by penalizing DiBenedetto for forcing William Byron below the yellow line separating the racing surface from the apron in Turn 4 on the final lap.…

Oct. 3, 2020 By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service Justin Haley led two laps in Saturday’s Ag-Pro 300, but one of them was the one that counted. Grabbing the lead on Lap 112 of 113, Haley earned a spot in the Round of 8 in the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs with the victory in the second Round of 12 race, his third of the season, the third of his career and his third straight in an Xfinity superspeedway event, a streak matched only by the late Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Haley won the race under caution, thanks to a multicar…

Oct. 3, 2020 By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service In a wild two-lap shootout that ended prematurely with a multicar wreck near the entrance to Turn 3, 19-year-old Canadian Raphael Lessard earned his first NASCAR Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series victory in Saturday’s Chevrolet Silverado 250 at Talladega Superspeedway. Lessard had nosed ahead of runner-up Trevor Bayne while Stewart Friesen’s Chevrolet spun into the outside backstretch wall on the final lap, causing the caution that froze the field. The yellow made a winner of Lessard, but what was euphoria for one Kyle Busch Motorsports driver was heartbreak for another. With Playoff…

  Sept. 30, 2020 By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service New tracks, road courses and a dirt race—NASCAR fulfilled its mission of expanding its sphere of influence with the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series schedule, announced Wednesday afternoon. With the addition of road course races at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course, Circuit of The Americas (COTA) in Austin, Tex., and Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., NASCAR has doubled the number of road-course events on the schedule—retaining the races at Sonoma Raceway, Watkins Glen International and the Charlotte Roval. For the first time since Sept. 30, 1970, when NASCAR’s top series raced…