Ryan Preece Seeking First Three-Race Top-10 Streak of Career

John K Harrelson, NKP for Ford Peformance

Ryan Preece's tenure with RFK Racing started on a precarious note with a flip in the season-opening Daytona 500. However, as the NASCAR Cup Series season has rolled along, Preece and his No. 60 RFK Racing team have started to hit their stride.

The 34-year-old driver heads into this weekend's Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway on a two-race top-10 finishing streak, only the third time he's ever had such a streak in his 193-race NASCAR Cup Series career. Now, he heads into the first short track race of the season looking to reach unchartered waters with a third-straight top-10 finish.

With Martinsville Speedway being the site of this weekend's race, Preece feels quite confident in his chances of another solid finish on Sunday afternoon.

“I feel like our chances are good," Preece said in a media teleconference on Wednesday. "I feel like over the past few years we’ve qualified really well at Martinsville, especially with this tire. I think it’s something that I’m looking forward to things that I could definitely do better and hopefully do those things on Sunday. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to it, just being my background of short track racing and I’ve had success at Martinsville – not in the Cup Series, but in modifieds and obviously this form of racing suits my style.”

After three finishes outside of the top-15 to start the 2025 season, Preece has now reeled off three consecutive top-15s at Phoenix Raceway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and Homestead-Miami Speedway. Preece says his favorite thing about the turnaround for his No. 60 RFK Racing team is that no matter how rough things looked after the opening three races, crew chief Derrick Finley and the entire team kept swinging for the fences.

“For me, what I’ve liked about it is we’ve been aggressive – aggressive on pit calls, aggressive on the track, aggressive everything and that’s what I want to keep going for our group," Preece explained.

With high aggression has come results, with the results will come a better qualifying draw for Preece, and heading into a track like Martinsville, where track position is so important, Preece feels a good qualifying run ahead of Sunday's Cook Out 400 could be the key to another solid run.

"As far as the momentum side, momentum is great to have. It’s great to have because when you look at the metric for qualifying, and I think of Martinsville, I think of a track that the later you go, the better off it’s gonna be historically," Preece said. "So the fact that we’re one of the last 10 cars gives us a great opportunity to have a great start to the race, so that makes me feel pretty good."

Preece knows firsthand how important qualifying is at Martinsville, as he scored the pole position for the 2023 Spring event at Martinsville Speedway, and had one of his best runs as a NASCAR Cup Series driver.

Preece would lead 135 laps, and would only be bounced from the lead due to a pit road speeding penalty in the event. Due to the speeding penalty, Preece finished 15th that day.

The Connecticut native hopes that his RFK Racing team can unload a good enough short track car this weekend at Martinsville to allow him to avenge that missed opportunity in 2023. But if he doesn't have race-winning speed, Preece and the No. 60 team will be hell-bent on maximizing their day.

"This is a grind of continuing that momentum, so we’re still a new team. We’re still a group that it’s a brand new group and we are still finding our way," Preece said. "As far as short tracks go, we ran Bowman Gray and we made the race and finished 11th, but I feel really comfortable with it and we’re gonna hopefully unload with some really good speed and be able to keep building the short track notebook that we all want to have, so I think that’s where, for myself, I want to keep it all in perspective. I do feel like if we unload with a bunch of speed, yeah, we can go win that race. But at the very least, you’ve got to manage expectations. My goal for the first third of this season is if you have the opportunity to win the race, you need to go win that race. If you don’t, we need to consistently be doing what we’re doing, which is being there in the top 12 and executing our days to have better days."

After three straight top-15 runs, including a season-best third-place effort a couple of weeks ago at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Preece sits 16th in the NASCAR Cup Series championship standings, and while there are still 20 races until the Playoffs begin, if the Playoffs were to start today, he'd be on the inside of the Playoff cutline.

If they can continue building momentum, there's a very real chance that Preece can finally notch his first career Playoff berth this season.