Drivers Expect Sunday's Race At Darlington To Be A 'Wild Card'

Darlington, S.C. -- This weekend, the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Darligton Raceway to contest the sixth race of the 2026 season. While the 1.366-mile egg-shaped racetrack is already one of the most, if not the most, challenging tracks on the schedule, things are expected to be ramped up a notch in Sunday's Goodyear 400.

In the offseason, NASCAR instituted rule changes for road courses and any track under 1.5-miles in length. Among the changes are an increase to 750 horsepower, and the addition of the short track package, which means a removal of the dreaded diffuser, which typically runs out the rear of each NASCAR Cup Series car on larger tracks.

The collective changes have drivers, including veteran superstars like Denny Hamlin, a five-time Darlington Raceway winner, expecting a chaotic race on Sunday. Hamlin expects massive levels of lap time fall off over the long run as the cars are expected to slip and slide a lot more with the increased power and short track aero package installed.

“These cars, with essentially little to no underbody because we’re now going to the short track aerodynamic package for Darlington, these cars are out of control. I’m predicting four seconds of fall off, it might be more," Hamlin explained. "It’s just the cars with the underbody taken off and that simple diffuser, just even on new tires, just absolutely out of control. So, it’s going to be a wild card race.”

Hamlin, who won last weekend's event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, is seeking his second consecutive win in the Spring race at Darlington.

Chase Briscoe, Hamlin's teammate, who has scored the win in the last two editions of the Southern 500 at Darlington, said on Jeff Gluck's Gluckcast Podcast that if the simulator prep work he has done heading into this weekend's race is any indication, it's going to be hard for drivers to hang onto their cars.

‘“It’s gonna be absolutely out of control. It’s gonna be I think the hardest track we run on all year long. The added power is one thing, but the biggest thing is taking the diffuser and everything off. I mean, I’ve ran the sim for probably a week-and-a-half, and you are crashing every corner on every lap, even on new tires. It is out of control," Briscoe noted. "It’ll be very interesting in practice, qualifying, like, literally the whole weekend, I think, is gonna be must-see."

Briscoe did caution, "One team is gonna hit it right, and they are gonna murder the field, I feel like, just because of how drastically different this thing drives.”

Brad Keselowski, the 2012 NASCAR Cup Series champion, is anxious about how to manage the expected tire wear over the course of the run.

“My eyes are wide open," Keselowski said. "The biggest thing I’m thinking about at Darlington is to go 50 laps on a set of tires was almost impossible with the Next Gen car in the last two or three seasons, and now that we have more horsepower and less aero, I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to go 35 laps."

While many are antsy about how things will play out on Sunday, Daniel Suarez, who has impressed through his opening five races with Spire Motorsports, says he is actually excited about the challenge of the unknown.

“It’s going to be crazy there, honestly," Suarez said in an interview on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. "I’m actually looking forward to it. I’m super excited for the challenge, but Darlington is a very difficult race track with less power and more downforce. Now we have less downforce and more power, so it’s going to be tricky."

Like Briscoe, Suarez noted an increased difficulty in handling the car around Darlington in the simulator practice heading into the race weekend.

"Yesterday I was in the simulator doing some post-Las Vegas work, and we did only for one hour, we did Darlington, and it was very difficult to drive," Suarez admitted. "I spent more time backward than going in the right direction. So, you never know what it’s going to be, right? We have never done it, so even the simulation, the simulators, we don’t really know how accurate they’re going to be until we’re there on Saturday."

Will the information from the simulators be accurate? That remains to be seen. But until cars hit the track this weekend, drivers and crew chiefs will be on pins and needles, wondering how they're going to handle what is expected to be one of the wildest NASCAR Cup Series races in recent memory.

And unlike in the simulator, if you go spinning on the real-world track, there's no reset button. So, hopefully, if the information does translate to the actual track, drivers were able to learn from the mistakes made within the confines of the sim-rig.

The Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway is scheduled for Sunday, March 22, and will be televised on FS1 with coverage set to kick off at 3:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will serve as the radio broadcast partners for the event.