By Jared Turner On the heels of the first short-track race of 2016 comes the season’s first Saturday night race: The Duck Commander 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. While Jimmie Johnson has won five of the past seven races – including three in a row – at the fast, 1.5-mile track, Saturday night’s showdown should be an entertaining affair. At least if NASCAR’s history at TMS means anything. It was at Texas, after all, that normally tempered veterans Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton literally came to blows in the fall of 2010. It was also at Texas – in that same race,…

Kyle Busch cleaned everyone’s clock at Martinsville Pardon the pun. But at Martinsville Speedway – a track known for its famous grandfather clock trophy – Kyle Busch cleaned everyone’s clock. And he didn’t just do it once. He did it twice. A day after leading 123 of 255 laps for his first NASCAR Camping World Truck Series triumph at the fabled paperclip-shaped oval, Busch stomped the field into submission by leading 352 of 500 laps en route to his first Sprint Cup Series triumph at Martinsville. Pretty impressive for a guy who prior to this past weekend had been shut out of…

By Jerry Bonkowski Now that’s more like it. NASCAR promised us when it introduced its low downforce package (LDF) that it would make smaller teams and normally less successful drivers more competitive with the sport’s big boys. That’s exactly what we saw Sunday at Martinsville Speedway, and it only serves to reinforce my excitement and belief in the LDF going forward. Six of the top 10 finishers were drivers who, to put it diplomatically, haven’t exactly enjoyed a great deal of success in recent years, if not their overall Cup careers. Consider: Runner-up A.J. Allmendinger had his best finish since his one…